Got accepted in GSOC!

[jportela]

Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

Not only I'm happy because I got accepted as a GSOC student, but because I'm doing the internship here in Dreamwidth, and most of all because my mentor is denise, who introduced me to Dreamwidth (other mentors don't take this personal, I would have loved to work with everyone of them, and I know I'll still have your help).

I also want to congratulate the other students and most of all cheer up everyone who didn't got selected. 3 friends of mine didn't get selected for GSOC this year :(. You can also work on your spare time as a volunteer, the experience you gain will certainly give you an edge for next year!

So, what's next?

Here's my plan for the community bonding period (until May 24):

- Discuss project goals with my mentor 
- Learn Perl and the intricacies of Dreamwidth
- Getting to know the polling system on Dreamwidth
   - Solving Bug 28 - that should give me enough knowledge about the database tables and relationships concerning polls
- Do a report (with the help of my mentor) clearly stating the project goals, deliverables and schedule, that should serve as an evaluating guide and a progress tracker. 

I can't even wait to start (for now, lots of studying and working for faculty projects...)

Comments

[yvi]

Congratulations! I can't tell you how excited the prospect of improvements to the pol system makes me!

[jportela]

I think you just did! :)

[denise]

(PS: if you reply to the comment itself, yvi gets an email notifying her that you replied! In some layouts it's hard to see the difference between 'reply to the post' and 'reply to the comment', but if you add ?style=site to the URL you'll see what I mean.)

[john]

Congratulations on GSOC! I'm excited about your project and can't wait to see what you come up with!

[denise]

I AM SO HAPPY. I mean, not only have you been super awesome working on the site so far, I'm really excited about the poll system improvements -- it was one of the projects I was most hoping someone would pick. (That and the business stats. And both of them made it, since annares is doing business stats!)

I will try to grab you in irc later on in the week so we can plan things out a little, pull the list of all the poll-related bugs you want to work on this summer, and see what order you should tackle them in, which ones depend on each other, etc. (And of course see whether you have ideas that aren't mentioned!) From there, I think you've got the right idea -- we can build a timeline for your summer, since this project is likely to be a lot of patches in bits and pieces instead of one giant project. That way, we can evaluate your progress based against the schedule we set.

So, first of all, don't let this distract from your exams. :) Second, start thinking about what order you want to approach things in, logically speaking -- I suggest starting with the smaller, easier ones so you get familiar with the system and can ramp up your perl knowledge as you go.

I'm going to go through Bugzilla and assign all the poll-related bugs to you. Even if you don't wind up doing them all as part of your summer, I want to make sure that nobody winds up taking them, since the poll code is going to be in such flux this summer!

[foxfirefey]

Sidenote for those bug assignments: don't work on the [Bug 1264] RTE poll creator does not recognize paid communities until chiming has the new RTE revamp mostly done!

[denise]

ooh yeah good point, i should set that back to unassigned :)

(Hm. I wonder if we need a bug status for "defer this until later"?)

[afuna]

Hmm, there's a RESOLVED LATER. What I did for the update page, though was to create a meta-bug assigned to myself, and then make it block a couple of other bugs. Either way!

[stepps]

I look forward to seeing your progress! I'm not a dev myself, but I admire you all so much for getting tangled up in codes :)

[afuna]

So very excited that you're picking and doing a comprehensive overhaul of the polling system \o/

[sally_maria]

Congratulations! I hope you have a lot of fun with it.

[lanterne_rouee]

congratulations! :)

[jeshyr]

Hey, a belated congratulations on your acceptance!

I have a poll suggestion/request/thought and I wanted to let you know about it because you're doing the polls this summer - I know you won't have started yet and you're probably still doing finals and stuff, but I just wanted to toss this into your brain!

(Also, fu is staying at my place this week and told me who was doing polls so I knew where to look :))

Anyway I have low vision so I read web pages at about 400-500% zoom. That means all the text, graphics, etc are 4-5 times larger than normal, or possibly even bigger if I'm having a "bad eye day". The way my browser (Firefox) works is to re-wrap text mostly so it fits into the screen's width and I can read it without scrolling sideways, but when I'm viewing poll results the red bars showing the relative size of each result don't get shrunk to fit the screen so I end up seeing just the questions and a long red bar disappearing off to the right... not very useful!

My request is that there be an option to view poll results in a text-only way so I could see the numbers and percentages beside the question (perhaps with some sensible additions of text indicating most/least checked results?). At the moment the actual text part of the result generally ends up off the right of my screen at the end of the red line so I have to sideways scroll to see it at all.

I'd be happy to provide screen shots if they'd be helpful to you - I'm not sure how much sense this will make to somebody who's not me.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope your summer is fantastic!

[jportela]

A text-only representation of data sounds like a great idea to me! This should go first through dw_suggestions, so the community can give their thoughts on it, you can make a suggestion here: http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/suggest

I'll be happy to help fulfilling this feature, and any more questions, just ask :)