> PS: attached, a copy of my answers to Google's student report > from. They're more complete and will surely give you more information.
Shame on me, I forgot the file. Sorry for the noise. -- Maxime Petazzoni (http://www.bulix.org) -- gone crazy, back soon. leave message.
Summer of Code report answers ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Student Information +++++++++++++++++++ First name: Maxime Last name : Petazzoni Email : maxime DOT petazzoni AT bulix DOT org Project : httpd-mbox-if Graduation: 11-2009 Mentor relations ++++++++++++++++ 1. How would you describe your relationship with your mentor? ------------------------------------------------------------- (b) It was workable. Although I'm aware that my mentor (Ian Holsman) is, as every grown up with a job, very busy, I would have liked to see more feedback and comments from his side. Just regular pings like "I like this piece of code" or "This function is not clear or performant enough", etc. I also liked to see more review of my code by my mentor and the HTTPd dev team *during* the summer. Now we are talking about merging my work with the trunk/ (I developped into a separate branch), and soon use it in production on mail-archives.apache.org. But for that, my code will be reviewed, all it's probable that a lot of things will need to get fixed, tweaked, changed, etc, and this will be more painful than if it has been done during the development process. Anyway, Ian and the whole ASF community has always been here to answer my questions and give me some advices, places to look for documentation, etc. I'm very thanksful to them in helping me join their community and the HTTPd dev team. 2. Was your mentor able to answer your queries? ----------------------------------------------- (b) Yes, but I could have used feedback sooner. 3. What communication mediums have you used to communicate with your mentor/mentoring organization? ------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- (a) Email/Mailing Lists (b) IRC/Chat/Instant Messaging Ian lives in Australia so it was a bit difficult to meet in face to face (I'm french), but I went to the Hackathon (during the ApacheCon EU 2005 in Stuttgart) and I met there a lot of ASF members, and even another SoC student ! We talked about my project and they gave me some precious and valuable advices. It was also a real pleasure to meet people such as Rich Bowen, Greg Stein, Paul Querna or Roy Fielding. 4. Which of the above communication mediums did you use most-frequently to communicate with your mentor/mentoring organization? ------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------- (a) Email/Mailing lists Mailing lists was the main vector of communication with the ASF, but we also used IRC a lot to talk more quickly about small things or problems. The project +++++++++++ 1. Where is your code located? ------------------------------ http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/mod_mbox/branches/httpd-mbox-if 2. What license(s) are you applying to your source? Check all that apply. ----------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------ (a) I am using a project-specific license. 3. How much time per week have you been putting toward your project, on average? -------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- (d) 20-30 hours per week 20-30 hours per week is an average. I went into offline vacations during a dozen of days and travelled a lot during the summer. I used to work with "coding sessions" of 3-4 days, 15-20 hours per day. 4. Are you happy with the resulting code you produced? ------------------------------------------------------ (b) I'm content with the outcome. I'm happy with the result, because I didn't know I was capable of that. It was a real challenge and I learnt a lot of things during the summer. Unfortunately, the AJAX browsing interface is only working with Firefox for the moment (I'll continue working on it afterwards), but I would have loved to see it working everywhere. It seem I still have a lot to learn in a field of experience you, at Google, seem to master :) 5. What is the coolest thing you learned during the Summer of Code? ------------------------------------------------------------------- Apache module programming. Definitely. Well, I also learnt Javascript, but that's just another programming language. Now that I got in touch with Apache programming, I'm willing to get even further and maybe fix some bug in the HTTPd code, or help the Infrastructure team. I really want to take part of this project. 6. What was the biggest technical challenge in your Summer of Code project? --------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------ I hesitate between understanding and AJAX. Understanding the mod_mbox source code was a real pain, and I hope my work helped making it clearer, simpler and maybe more effective. Setting up the AJAX browsing interface was also a real challenge because I did not know a word of Javascript, nor of AJAX. Hopefully, the XML backend I set up in mod_mbox was clean and ready-to-use by the XmlHttpRequests, and all I has to do in Javascript was making all work together. After getting used to the language, the whole thing was built in a couple of days, including debugging. I was really impressed of the development speed for this part. 7. Do you plan on contributing to open source after the Summer of Code? ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- (a) Yes, I plan to continue working with the mentor/organization I worked with for the Summer of Code. I was already contributing to the open source community before the Summer of Code, but this project made me get in the ASF community, and I'm really thanksful to Google and the ASF for this. I'll continue my work for the ASF, the other projects I contribute to, and my own softwares, of course. The Summer of Code ++++++++++++++++++ 1. How did you hear about the Summer of Code? --------------------------------------------- Who could have missed it ? 2. What do you think could be improved about the Summer of Code? Note that taxes and paperwork are unavoidable. --------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Taxes and paperwork, yep. You already know everything about them, so I'll skip these topics. I think we should be doing status reports to Google. Let me explain myself. It would be nice to have a (public) page per SoC student, with some basic information (name, website, project, blog, photo?), agregating it's blog SoC category, but also displaying its project status. Periodically, every student would have to make a report to Google, including a (subjective) progression indicator that would be then displayed on its page. This would allow other students to know how others' projects are going, if they're late, etc, but also even *know* about other students' projects ;) 3. Please provide, in the space below, a one paragraph description of your project (with links to your project webpages) that we can put on the Google Code website. -------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- mod_mbox is an Apache module for browsing mailing list archives. Along with a statically generated mailboxes cache, it can handle your mailboxes files and display a nice and clean interface for browsing the archives. If your browser supports it (only Gecko-based browsers for the moment), mod_mbox uses an AJAX browsing interface that allows the user to browse the archive with a dynamic and more effective interface. For other browsers, or if you just don't like the dynamic browsing, a flat, Javascript-less, static and valid XHTML interface is available. mod_mbox is a third party Apache HTTPd module, hosted by the HTTPd project at the Apache Software Foundation. The official website can be found at http://httpd.apache.org/mod_mbox/.
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