Hey everyone, welcome to my blog for this summer's GSoC@PSF!
An introduction first, I am Sounak Pradhan working with PSF-GSoC team of this year intending to build this very platform 😃. This is my first weekly check-in which should have been published some time back but better late than never.
What did I do this week
We had started building this platform back in February as a part of the the application process. Thanks to all the other applicants who made contributions to the project to bring it to a usable state and here we are blogging in this platform instead of a WordPress site which would have been a pain to set up and manage. So even before the program started our portal was ready. So what now? Well, I believe no piece of software is free of bugs and ours is no exception. As students started using it, a few bugs came up. We also had to implement small but necessary features like setting up auto-reminders for students who hadn't registered themselves on the site, displaying registration stats to the admin. We scan proposal pdfs for potential contact details so that we can inform the students and advise them to upload proposals without these personal details. This was broken as the scanner was taking way too much time to scan the pdfs. Had to fix this too.
What's coming up next
Next week, I'm going to set up the builders which will conditionally build schedulers. Schedulers are tasks which can be scheduled long before and will be executed at some later time. For example, I can schedule an email which needs to be sent after 3 days and after the said number of days the email will be sent automatically. We need builders to build these schedulers conditionally, like if a student user hasn't published a blog on time, only then send a reminder mail. We will need this to setup reminders for blogs to all students and also reminders to mentors, suborg admins when the student doesn't post the blog on time.
Did I get stuck anywhere
The way I thought I would handle the reminders for the blogs wasn't working out, botanic (my mentor) helped me out in that. Nothing else that was major, thanks to StackOverflow 😛.
That's it for this week. See you again in the next week folks!