Week #6 26/06 to 02/07
Well, I survived the first evaluation as you can all see. Made some mistakes along the way, recovered with the advice from my mentors and hopefully going strong into work period 2. Let’s talk shop, yes.
Since this is a special blog. I will be asking the questions… and going to answer them.
What did you do this week and what is coming up next?
I worked. Most people take the week off in the evaluation week. But, I know one thing for certain that when the college reopens in July then the pressure will start to pile up a bit. And, these days really can help make a difference in tough weeks ahead or easy sailing. Sharing some experience I had from GSoC 2018.
If you take a look here – https://github.com/vipulgupta2048/spidermon/projects/1
One of the main components of Cerberus which is validating is now in review, thoroughly tested and extremely powerful. I think Cerberus would be a worthy addition to the validation pipeline. The other component that is the translator, has also been created and will be finished as we go along.
The next major task that I would like to take on is, having Cerberus to play nice with other pipelines that are Schematics and JSONSchema. Most of that work has been done as well, but it doesn’t work so there is a need for debugging that is all. So, all in all, good work, in the next meeting, my mentors and I will assess and review the milestones for the next period.
What did you love about working with ScrapingHub?
The thing that truly loved about ScrapingHub is the feeling of working remotely, with some good amount of discipline, and commitment. Google Summer of Code provides us with a great opportunity to truly improve upon on our work, skills and push us out of our comfort zone. I feel great, being able to learn so many things on the fly as well as getting guidance from my awesome mentors. But, it doesn’t push us into a working schedule. There is work that needs to be done for the week and as someone who loves chasing deadlines under pressure, I usually was doing work only around the time of weekends. Well, until I started working with ScrapingHub.
The Scrapy Project and ScrapingHub has been great, I have been getting some good challenges to work towards, and lately, have resolved my shortcomings related to communication as well as the work that was needed to be done. I feel that has a good change coming in, I don’t work that hard. I distribute time evenly over the day, still write a lot of blogs, break down my tasks into smaller bits and look for feedback wherever possible. Life’s good working with ScrapingHub.
What has the 1st work period taught you in terms professionally as well as mentally?
The 1st work period helped me realize that things are almost almost never as simple as it seems. The more and more time I spent reading the code, documentation, trying to build a bigger picture in my head. The more I understood how big of a task I am undertaking, this also helped in reassessing the time as well recalibrate the effort that was being put into it.
I learned about debugging, testing, documentation, module management, python packaging, absolute and relative imports. Defaultdicts, __new__, list comprehensions, code readability, code coverage, logging, and tons of best practices. I am looking forward to learning even more, faster. Leveling up my Python, one step at a time.
That’s about it for the time, folks.
Live in the mix, this is vipulgupta2048 signing off.