The final Week. Had to make the final run, and finish across the dash line, which is exactly what I had in mind as I approached this week.

This week I began working on Log-activity. The activity is tremendously useful, to debug and find errors. It organises all the log files that are generated into a nice Hierarchial-tree like view that increases visibility as well as makes it easier to keep track of log files.

In the second week, I focused on the other Countries-activity issue, namely the feature to introduce partial checks. If a user came close to guessing a country’s name, but was off but a letter or two, there would be a prompt suggesting whether the user meant the particular country. If the user clicks yes, the activity would go on to show the correct country and the flag and clicking no would show a prompt saying that no country of that name exists.

“Here goes nothing”, I said to myself as I began the coding phase of GSoC 2019, unsure of what lay in store for me for the next 3 months. That’s not entirely true as I had already submitted my proposal ,so I was sure what I would be working on. The only question that remained was when I where to begin. I decided to start off with a simple issue, one that did not require coding as such, but rather a good understanding of Git and its features, namely merge and cherry pick.

The final evaluation period is here. Week 3 was also when my college commenced, which is situated in a far-away village, 220 kilometers from the nearest city/civilization. Calling it a village would be too modest, wheras a city/town might give a wrong image. The journey from my hometown to college takes me 12 hours of continuous travel; bus, flight and train as well. I was extremely tired in the first week, running around and setting up my room, clothes, registration, takes up quite an effort. Not to mention the temperatures here can go beyond 35°C.

We are heading towards the last stages of the program and I can feel myself wish I could move ahead fast with my work. I often contemplate in solidarity about the work I have done so far. I’ve had my ups and down in the last two months. Managaing several things at once was indeed a challenge. Learning new things everyday was an exhilarating challenge. Persistence at a problem for hours together was something I got adapted to recently.

I picked up where I left off with Chat-activity, implementing the Search feature. Since I got collaboration environment setup, I could go ahead with testing the feature as well. As expected there were bugs in the feature.

It has been two months since the program began. I’ve had various ups and downs when it came to fixing issues. The most trouble I seem to have so far, is with the understanding of the GTK widgets, signals, and their corresponsing handlers. While the documentation is comprehensive and the source code is accessible, it is the lack of examples, that sometimes leave me at a loss.

Week 6 saw me go ahead with the PR’s I had opened previously as well opening new PR’s. Continuing on Maze-activity, I decided to break the entire task into smaller tasks and tick them off one at a time in each commit, so that it becomes easier to keep track of changes. These smaller tasks included flake8 fixes, save hole placements in journal instances, update the rate at which a player falls into a hole (basic animation technique) and so on. Having smaller goals in mind helped me focus better and also led me to make minimal changes against master. That was a one of things I picked up while working on this activity, that breaking a task into smaller goals is a very effective way to write good code.

Week 5 marked the start of my second evaluation. The activities in Phase 1 proved more formidable than I thought. Partly because of the fact that I was unable to spend long hours at an issue at hand, thereby reducing my efficiency.

The final week of Phase 1. I knew I had to speed up my work, because I was taking a lot of time in issues and fixing them. This week I worked primarily on Calculate and a few of its features.