GSOC 2014/Student Application Lionaneesh

• Your name: Aneesh Dogra
• FAS Account: lionaneesh
• Fedora userpage: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Lionaneesh

Contact Information

• Email Address: lionaneesh@gmail.com
• Blog URL: http://anee.me
• Freenode IRC Nick: lionaneesh

NOTE: We require all students to blog about the progress of their project. You are strongly encouraged to register on the Freenode network and participate in our IRC channels. For more information and other instructions contact Org Admins.

please answer following questions

Why do you want to work with the Fedora Project?

I feel Fedora's pretty open. They have very diverse projects (not just OS/Existing Apps specific) and they are not egotistical about it: the features/projects they work on they try to make it available to non-fedora users as well, this is the coolest thing about this organisation. I love working on projects that are freely available to anyone, regardless of them using fedora or any other linux. Besides this, the ideas were pretty interesting, the mentors were responsive and I could find an idea I am passionate about.

Do you have any past involvement with the Fedora project or any other open source project as a contributor?

Not with fedora but I have worked on a couple of open source projects previously majorly Sugarlabs and Libav. I started out in libav as a GCI 2011 participant and later was selected as one of the grand prize winners. I continued development with Libav for over a year and I worked on the Bytestream2 API, wrote a simple sunrast decoder and fixed a few bugs in some decoders/encoders. I started out in Sugarlabs as a GCI 2012 participant and later was again selected by the organisation as one of the grand prize winners. Majority of my work includes working on the activities. I have worked over 20 Sugar Activities, fixed over a 100 bugs and am maintaining around 6-7 major sugar activities. I later mentored a student for Sugarlabs in GSoC 2013 (A translation server backend - with Restful APIs) and some more students in GCI 2013. I am still a part of sugarlabs, I maintain some of their activities and still contribute towards some sections of the project. Besides these two. I wrote some patches for KStars (KDE), some for KhanAcademy and have minor contributions in some other projects as well. I have a pretty active github profile. I contribute to projects, I find interesting and also put up my own projects there.

Did you participate with the past GSoC programs, if so which years, which organizations?

I didn't participate as a student before, but I did participate as a mentor in GSoC 2013 in Sugarlabs.

Will you continue contributing/ supporting the Fedora project after the GSoC 2012 program, if yes, which team(s), you are interested with?

Yeah I would love to. I wasn't really aware of much of the work Fedora was into till I really started reading about Fedora's projects. I am really interested in the automation and the web development team and would love to contribute and help in anyway possible.

Why should we choose you over other applicants?

I have a fair amount of experience in open source, have experience building and maintaining significant amounts of FOSS code. If you check projects on my github profile you'll notice my interest for automation. I have experience in python, shell, flask and C/C++. Besides my skills, I am not new to deadlines, have no problems in communicating with my mentors and can solve problems quickly.

Afterthought

Proposal Description

The goal of this proposal is to build a new tool called Afterthough. Afterthough is an automation tool that makes installing/setting up tools on your linux system easier. There is a remote source that specifies the steps to be takes in a structured format. This source is read by the client script on a linux system and appropriate changes/actions are taken. The source is a structured piece of data that specifies the actions in steps/phases. The client is a python script that parses the source and runs appropriate commands. The goal of the project is that if the procedure can be figured out properly by one person - it shouldn't be taking others work-hour anymore.

Proposal

Afterthought besides the core script consists of 2 major parts: "recipes" and "plugins". Recipes are structured pieces of data that consists of the steps to setup a tool. Each recipe would be a JSON file consisting of steps for each hook/phase. There will separate hooks for each phase, 1 for configuration, 1 for dependencies, 1 for download, 1 for building and 1 for cleaning. The plugins are a bit different they are scripts that extends Afterthought's functionality. They use data mining/data scraping to automate some mundane tasks, example: installing gems, installing python packages, applying a github pull request etc.

Objective

The 5 major tasks are:

1. Creating the initial Afterthought script.
2. Creating the test recipe and wrapper keyword functions.
3. Creating the remote source that will serve the JSON recipe files.
4. Creating the plugin API.
5. Creating sample plugins.

Bibliography

My name is Aneesh Dogra. I am studying computer science in IIIT Delhi. I have been involved in a few open source projects (primarly libav and sugarlabs) since 2-3 years. I have won GCI twice [1] [2] and mentored in GSoC for Sugarlabs last year. I have a fairly active/updated github [3] and linkedin [4] profile. If you check projects on my github profile you'll notice my interest for automation. I have experience in python, shell, flask and C/C++. I also have experience creating web scrapers in python, I made one for scraping Sheldon's Quotes (The big bang theory) and integrated the db into a shell script, was fun [7]. I created one shell script to make deploying sugar activities on XO a one command job [6]. I also do some web scraping work as freelancing work on Odesk [5]. I also have some more hacks/projects on my github profile. I also have interest in computer vision and I did an internship in IIIT Delhi - Biometrics lab last winter.

[1] : http://google-opensource.blogspot.in/2012/02/google-code-in-2011-grand-prize-winners.html [2] : http://google-opensource.blogspot.in/2013/02/google-code-in-2012-grand-prize-winners.html [3] : https://github.com/lionaneesh [4] : linkedin.com/in/aneeshdogra [5] : https://www.odesk.com/users/~010cdb9d4ddfddab46 [6] : https://github.com/lionaneesh/sugar-deploy-activities [7]: https://github.com/lionaneesh/sheldon-in-shell

Timeline

21st April – 19th May

19th May – 2nd June

3rd June – 18th June

19th June to 9th August"'

23rd June

'9th August – 20th August

22nd August

Contact

• Email: lionaneesh@gmail.com
• Telephone: +918285151175
• IRC nick: lionaneesh
• Github: github.com/lionaneesh
• Facebook: facebook.com/lionaneesh