Hi all,
This is the first year in which I was eligible for GSoC program and was
selected by the highly esteemed open source community BRL-CAD. Before
joining the project, I had just the glimpse of how large code bases are
maintained, but had never got hands on experience with them. I used git
version control, but that just limited to handling my college project.
I would like to rewind and fast-forward the 4 beautiful months of my life,
the best in terms of experience and knowledge gaining and learning summer
quickly below-
Initially, before the project submission deadline, I submitted few small
and pretty code refactoring patches to BRL-CAD to get myself famaliar with
svn version control system and other basics for working with gsoc project.
Upto the student selection date, I worked on an issue of github to get
famaliar with github version control system, on which STEPcode is managed.
In this period, I got to know abt diff tools, working with git version
control in a better way, gdb debugger, doxygen and how to write comments
and observed some good tactics related to coding followed in industry, like
taking minute care from declaring variable names to introducing magic
numbers and to see that in future there will be no false positives and bugs
introduced that would create problem in long run.
In between the selection period and the actual program period, it was the
community bonding period as well as time for release process of BRL-CAD
7.24.0. I helped in formatting the release notes for this major release and
got some experience with release procedure.
After the actual beginning of the program I worked with open issues of
github and got it merged on the mainstream. One was removing all cppcheck
warnings from stepcode. There were mainly 6 types of warnings reported in
STEPcode by cppcheck which included unused variables, preference for
preincrement/decrement, sscanf() to prevent overflow, strncpy not '\0'
terminated, C style pointer casting and reducing the scope. After clearing
those, I ran cppcheck on brlcad trunk and uploaded the output to
refactoring page of brlcad. Also, I made a patch for preference for
preincrement/decrement from that output and cleared those warnings from
cppcheck on BRL-CAD sources.
The next issue I worked on was installing the headers from the central
files used in the minimal example. This included installing headers from 10
directories of stepcode. Now, anyone can just do sudo make install and
start using the API's like any other library.
After that, I worked on checking the step-g importer on brlcad and wrote
regression tests checking the step-g importer with 3 small and simple step
models. I also read and knew about how to use anything from net with a
copyright and use the license. I had never dealt with those kind of scenes
before.This test will confirm the working of step-g importer and check for
the geometry by checking volume > 0. I also looked upon the todo task on
brlcad wiki and deleted those which were already done and added a prototype
and Todo comments in the trunk to make it easily visible and more
organized. These patches are still awaiting review by mentors.
I forgot to mention about my experience with STEPbot, my experiment with a
bot for channel #stepcode on IRC. And one fine evening, when I logged on to
IRC, I was surprised to see an infobot similar to that on #brlcad already
implemented and hence the logs of that channel could be archived very
easily.
A huge thanks to Mark, my mentor who has been the best mentor I could ever
have. He had been by my side at every 'step' of my project guiding me and
providing quick response and feedback of my work and effective guidelines
throughout the project. Thank you Sean. You are the best project manager I
ever saw. Along-with the help in technical aspects, I loved how you used to
motivate and inspire me. Also, I liked your way of getting answers from me
instead of giving solution directly,no matter if it took an hour for a
simple thing. :) Thanks Cliff, Erik and all other GSoC students who had
been as a support anytime in the last 4 months. I could not imagine my
project being complete without you guys. Awesome, cool community, i must
say. :) Thanks all once again.
Future plans - In past a week or so, I observed that a lot of people were
posting queries related to STEPcode. They were asking for good tutorials or
easy-to-understand links. So, I think, I would first make tutorial for
beginners on STEPcode. And next, after that I am willing to get my hands on
step exporter. My plans till next summer is to work and get familiar with
the step-exporter and dedicate my next summer to it.
You just walked with me on my journey of past 4 months. I know, this has
been too long and thanks for your precious time reading this. Hope you
enjoyed the walk. These are my daily logs and
reports<http://brlcad.org/w/index.php?title=User:KeshaSShah/GSoC13/Reports>
.
Any comments and suggestions are welcomed. :)
Three Cheers for this awesome summer !
Regards,
--
Kesha Shah.
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