A meeting with my GSoC'18 mentors

May 13, 2018

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. This blog post is a public memoir of an online meeting I had with my GSoC mentors. Kudos to me for having such awesome mentors! :P

So, a few days back I see some sudden activity in vulture with a lot of questions and ideas from the legendary @AbdealiJK. I had already known him because of his contributions to coala. But to my surprise, a week down, I come to know that he is mentoring me for my GSoC project: “Automatic Whitelist generation for vulture” along with @jendrikseipp and @The-Compiler.

Now, since we wanted everyone to be on the same page and catch up with the developments in the project, we planned to have a kick off call. All of us quickly marked our free time on a doodle calendar and thereby decided to have the call on May 4 (08:00 PM). In the meanwhile, a protest caught up momentum in my college and seeking to it, government shut down Internet services in my town, Aligarh on May 4 (The nuances of it’s repercussions are yet to be lamented by). While, I was somehow still being able to surf the Internet, I quickly notified Abdeali and asked for his number so that if I couldn’t access Internet, I would notify him through SMS. But, it must have been a bad day for humanity for not only did I lose Internet, I had such an abrupt network connection in my mobile phone, that sending an SMS took a couple hours.

It was bound to happen, but I was lucky that exams were postponed from May 7 to May 12, and that we could reschedule the meeting to happen on May 7 now. Yay! :-)

May 7, 7:30 PM: I’m all set with audio/video equipment and make a hangout call to my friend to ensure that everything was indeed working. (Thanks @proishan11)

May 7, 7:35 PM: I’ve already joined the call. Eagerly waiting for everyone!

May 7, 7:48 PM: I e-mail the hangout link to everyone and create a Google doc for notes and share it with everyone.

May 7, 7:55 PM: Florian joins the call, tells me that he is sitting a StarBucks cafe right now and that he was on mobile and that he would be joining the call right back with his computer.

May 7, 8:00 PM: Abdeali and Jendrik join the call, and that point marked the point where we embark on our journey of GSoC 2018. Let me walk you through it.

GSoC Kick-off

As soon as they join the call, we have a casual conversation about t-shirts, protests and politics all the while we were waiting for Florian to join the call.

We start with have a round of introduction:

After the introductions, we discuss about what common communication medium should we use and finally arrive on a consensus that we should be using mailing lists for elaborate discourse and IRC (#vulture on irc.freenode.org) for more real time dialogue.

We then have a brief discussion about examinations, vacation plans, etc. to mark our availability. I also became a subject of pity when I told them the truth of my monotonous life: No Vacation, No pilgrimage! :-( (I really should plan a vacation!)

In the meanwhile, Jendrik notices that someone has had been taking notes in the Google Doc - We find out that it’s Florian. I am totally taken aback by his ability to listen, process, speak and type at the same time. Hats off! - It is one of the reason that I’ve started learning touch typing.

After a few more rounds of discussions, following verdicts are pronounced:

After all of this crazy fun for 40 mins, it was time that we bid each other good bye. But all in all, it was a great experience (and productive) to be finally able to meet with mentors and to see some faces behind the names. :-) Thank You everyone for making this possible.

A meeting with my GSoC'18 mentors - May 13, 2018 - Rahul Jha