It’s official, I got accepted to Google Summer of Code 2017 and it’s been awhile since I felt so excited and yet terrified at the same time. But primarily excited…I think. Since I was eligible for both GSoC and Outreachy I made a proposal for both, ended up getting selected for GSoC with my Outreachy proposal, goes to show how intertwined these programs are.
I honestly haven’t heard about the project until Carlos Soriano gave a talk about it at my university couple of months ago. “Be proactive” was the main phrase popping up throughout the presentation, so I did just that. I found my mentor Christian Hergert and started figuring out the ins and out of the GNOME Builder. Keep in mind I was quite new to the FOSS in general so the amount of information I was getting through seemed endless. While I was going down the rabbit hole I realized that I found myself working on a Builder as a form of procrastination while studying for my exams.
As result of my preparation for the application process my two more significant bug fixes/ feature were the addition of the retab, which is an option in the context menu to convert white spaces to either tabs or spaces. And the little pop up notification that signifies that the build has finished when your window is out of focus.
So now to the main part of the GSoC, the actual project I will be working on. The Documentation Cards for GNOME Builder. This neat feature will enable quick look up in the documentation especially for the newcomers. By clicking on the code the user will access a card shoving the relevant parts of documentation. Looking back this would probably save me a lot of time going back and forth between the browser. I had couple of ideas what more to add to the cards that could be useful to the user such as adding contact on the author (most likely a person that will know a lot about it) or being able to add cards as favorites. If you would like to suggest something you would find handy don’t hesitate to write it in the comments.
I honestly can’t wait for the summer when I can stop juggling my school and devote my full concentration to GNOME. I will update soon with progress.
Luci Code 
sounds really interesting! me and Carlos has been working on the newcomer experience for a long time and having something like this would be really valuable I think. As you say, prevents a lot of unnecessary going to the browser. 🙂
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Yes, as being newcomer my self I think that I’m going to be able to pinpoint what information on the cards will be most relevant. 🙂
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Congratulations on getting selected!
Documentation cards sounds like a brilliant idea, sure to be very helpful for newcomers and experienced alike.
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Thank you, congratulation to you as well. 🙂 The idea to in corporate documentation cards in Builder is from Christian Hergert and it sure has a potential to help out a lot.
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