On 08/22/2012 05:43 PM, Platonides wrote: > My GSoC project was developing a program for uploading > Wiki Loves Monuments photos to Wikimedia Commons [1] > > Timing seemed great, chaining the end of my previous task > with the beginning of GSoC and the end of GSoC with WLM 2012. > Maybe it would be a little adjusted at the beginning, but > not being a too exigent GSoC project, there would be plenty > of time for completion. Or so I thought. > The work in the Real World delayed, pushing down the Google > Summer of Code, which by its own nature had lower priority. > I also made another appreciation error when considering how > much I would advance with a "foreign" computer. > I ended up sprinting the last days to get a deliverable by > the deadline, something that seemed impossible at times, > while I was regretting signing up. > > I should also talk about my relationship with my mentor, > but it was pretty much non-existant. With little to no > advance to report, I wasn't motivated to contact her, and she > was too busy with other duties to contact me. So we failed > from both sides. :( I'd love to work with her in the future, > but under different conditions. In the given circumstances, > I feel it was an error for her to accept me as student. > The mentor slot should have been assigned to someone else. > Had a student new to mediawiki, with a project needing > more support, received this level of mentoring, I doubt > he could have finished / it would have been a mergeable result. > OTOH, if someone was going to receive this, I guess I wasn't > that a bad election. :/ > > Despite the smashed planification, results weren't too bad. > I completed a prototype [2], which implements the core > functionality, asking the user all the needed information and > performing the uploads. It misses one dialog, and has the big > drawback of not being internationalised: the application is > hardcoded in the mixture of languages I used (for distributing > as mockups) when developing. > I had envisioned a translation method which involved making > a new translatewiki backend, but it was clear pretty soon that > translations would need to stay out of the 'release'. > Another point I had planned that was not fullfiled was > preference-handling and load/save of sets of monuments. All > preferences are hardcoded right now. Those are easy to add, > though. > Currently, the program has a functionality similar to the Upload > Wizard, in that you need to be online to work with it. However, > I feel it is superior in the usecase of uploading a full folder, > both in selecting and preparation (plus uploading in the background > while preparing new files). I plan to slowly be adding -outside > of GSoC- some of those missing features and dealing with the > (previsible) feedback. > > Although short of time due to the above mentioned issues, > it was refreshing to do some C++ coding. I had only worked with > dynamic languages recently, or with lower-level C. C++ provided > enough class magic to make for comfortable coding, with enough > pointers to crash your program (and a framework complex > enough to discard valgrind usage) :) > I was disappointed with wxWidgets HTTP support, though. There > were a couple of problems I had to overcome by myself and had to > patch a third one on the library. > > I have uploaded at [2] the source, windows and linux binaries. > Everyone is welcome to play with them and test the application. > Following the lead of the mobile team with beta uploading, > those binaries upload to http://test.wikipedia.org/ instead > of Wikimedia Commons. It doesn't have many of the commons > templates the program expects (you can preview in Wikimedia > Commons if you wish), but it doesn't disrupt the project. > > Best regards > > 1- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wikilovesmonuments/2641 > 2- http://toolserver.org/~platonides/sube/
Thanks for the wrapup, Platonides. I decided to mentor this project because several engineers sounded enthusiastic about the idea and because Platonides had such a strong reputation as a past contributor. I tried to find a mentor with more domain knowledge, but no one accepted. I decided that all Platonides needed was project management, and that I could provide that. I was wrong. I now know that I can't mentor a GSoC student, especially not while I'm also the organizational administrator, and that if we can't find an enthusiastic, technically knowledgable mentor for a student then we simply shouldn't accept them at all. (In my defense, I did ping and email Platonides many times during the summer, but sometimes we both lagged, a lot, in our responses. I already knew it was best practice to have a weekly check-in call, and it's my fault that we didn't set this up first thing, in May.) On a more positive note, I'm glad the prototype is out, and I hope other folks will try out SUBE and that it, along with https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Up! and the new WLM Android app, will aid this and future mass-uploading to Commons. I also hope the localisation team can give Platonides pointers on what he needs to do to make this truly internationalized. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
