Hi there! Good to see you again. Now that the GSoC Coding period is in action, I thought that I should share my Experience of the Community Bonding period. This article summarizes the work done during the Google Summer of Code Community Bonding Period.
What is the Community Bonding Period?
The Community Bonding Period is a period before the start of the Coding period dedicated to the Contributor getting familiar with the Organization’s workflow and contributing guidelines. It also encourages the Contributor to communicate with their Mentor and community regarding the project.
Experience of the Community Bonding Period
I have contributed to Metasploit previously, so I have a good idea about the codebase and workflow. My previous contributions have included reporting issues and creating PRs, etc. Thus, in the Community Bonding Period, I have focused on the following points:
Introduced myself and my GSoC project: Albeit a bit late, I introduced myself and my project: LDAP Capture capabilities to the community.
Successfully set up the Development Environment: Forked the Metasploit Project Repository and set up a local development environment for working on the codebase locally and later create Pull Requests to merge the developed code.
Setting up my blog: Yup, blogging about my GSoC experience was a part of the Community Bonding work as well. It was my first time blogging so, it was a new experience. I hope to write more blogs narrating my journey ahead.
Worked on merging the existing PRs: I am also working on merging my Open PR which is about adding an autofill feature to the existing `creds` command which eases the setting of credential options like (username, password). I am currently working on improving the user experience.
Fixed Meeting times with my Mentor: Communicated with my Mentor, and set up a meeting schedule to sync on the work done and feedback. We currently decided to work out one meeting every week: on Saturdays, to evaluate the work done and for feedback and to plan the work for the upcoming week.
Talked with the mentor about the project: Together with my Mentor, discussed and clarified the scope and specifications of my project and also spent a great amount of time investigating the related codebase of my project. No major change to the existing project was discovered but there is always a scope for change and improvement.
Conclusion
The Community Bonding period was exciting and informative, where I got to know about the real-life workflow in an Organization and how to plan the timeline of the project effectively. This included Project Management, Official meetings, and of course, clear communication with my Mentor. I appreciate the essence of this period specifically dedicated to the contributors in getting acquainted with the Organization and learning about their workflow!
See you in the next blog :)
Github: JustAnda7
LinkedIn: Nishant Desai