Community Bonding Period

Within the Google Summer of Code program we are currently within the "Community Bonding" period. Within this period it is expected that we research documentation surrounding our project, get involved with the opensource community that has been working on the project and work with our mentors. 

So far everything has been amazing. As mentioned in the introduction post I am working with the Apache Software Foundation with their Cloudstack Project. Sebastien, Coordinator for the GSoC program within Cloudstack has been of great help and has given guidelines and tasks towards getting started.

Our first task was pretty simple, It was just a case of introducing ourself, registering on JIRA, review board, and their confluence based wiki. Along with this we had to convert our proposals to docbook format and submit them to the git repository by uploading patch to their review board. The support supplied by the community for this was fantastic, they had written documentation for creating a patch on their site http://cloudstack.apache.org/develop/non-committer.html. Along with this Sebastien create an intro to git screencast for us which can be viewed on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c5JIW4onGk.

For me my experience with the GSoC program will probably differ from most others. Paddy Power's platform team are facilitating me within their offices. Working with them so far has been an great experience. It is supplying me with exposure to how things are done within industry and it is filling in a lot of the lose ends college theory fails to cover. I will be following their producers for project deliverance, this should help me to develop a good understanding of agile software development. 

My personal research so far has been going OK. I setup a development environment and used their devcloud appliance to supply a host following community written instructions: http://cloudstack.apache.org/develop/environment.html. There were few things that didn't execute exactly like the instructions stated but I eventually got around it and got Cloudstack build and running successfully. I plan to do post about setting up the developer environment and issues I hit at a later date. As my project require an LDAP server I also did an installation of OpenLDAP and linked it up with Cloudstack. Again I will do a post at a later date detailing the setup of this. 

I am currently looking at creating unit and acceptance tests. I have been playing about a good bit with Selenium in an attempt to create automated acceptance tests for my additions to the project. I will follow up on my progress with this over the next week hopefully.