GSOC Update 4

My Google Summer of code is about to close! It’s been very educational time working on my project to implement exporting as svg. Now that it’s just about done its time I put my thoughts on how my GSoC project went.

Things that went well

I think I learned quite a lot working on this project. It was the first coding task with a fairly large scope that I’ve done. All of my past contributions have either been small bug fixes or extending currently existing code. This was the first time I had to make entirely new classes, files, and logic to get something working. That resulted in a lot of needed discovery and investigation to get all the pieces to fit together.

After an unexpected change in the plan in the project (using a nodeVisitor with a saveContext) I was able to pivot and figure out how that out and get that code working. I had a lot less starting context on how that part of the code worked since it wasn’t a part of my initial investigation for this project. But despite that I was able to fit the pieces together (with some help).

Things that could have gone better

Sadly I didn’t get to complete my goals for the project. I think this was mainly from my own inexperience in development. First there were a few times that something I thought would be fairly easy turned out to much harder to figure out than expected. Even though I had some padding in my project timeline I wasn’t able to meet the goals I had originally set. Although many of these were just first time struggles so things should go more smoothly next time.

The other thing I feel like I can do better is with asking questions. I don’t think I made as good a use of the mentorship as I could have. I never really feel truly “stuck” since I always have an idea of something else to investigate/research to better understand the problem. Eventually that gets a solution but sometimes it is just easier (and faster) to ask for some more help. Next time I’ll try to be more lenient and ask for help when I’ve been stuck a little sooner.

For the Future

GSoC is officially done but I still plan to work on my project. I think I’m actually just starting the fun part so I’m actually excited at whats coming next. I’ll still be updating this blog with my progress (although now not for GSoC) so stay tuned to watch my journey!