2013-06-27

My summer

Hi Planet Gnome!

My Google Summer of Code project got accepted (yay!) and I just got syndicated on Planet GNOME so here's an introductory blog post about me, Maps, my project (trip planning in Maps) and my current progress.

About me

I'm a computer technology student and hacker based in Gothenburg with a passion for maps, open data and free software. I've been a GNOME lurker for many years and it feels really good to finally take the jump and start contributing. I've also worked on maps in a web development setting as my day job for the last two years.

Some history

I actually started working on Maps way back in march after a really inspiring chat in the hallways at FOSDEM with some core GNOME people. I quickly got overwhelmed by everything I had to learn just to bootstrap the project though (jhbuild, autoconf, gir and gjs comes to mind) and I almost gave up. Fortunately Zeeshan (my gsoc mentor) also was interested in working on Maps and started implementing the basics of a map client. With the help of Zeeshan and Paolo (who also joined us on IRC) I started learning more and more how to work in a gnome project and soon produced my first patches.
At around this time I realized I could apply for this seasons GSoC since I would be unemployed this summer, still had some courses left on my Computer Engineering degree and also wanted to work full time on GNOME for a while. Zeeshan said he wanted to mentor me and here I am!

My project

My project is about implementing trip planning in Maps (the whole proposal can be read here). Specifically I aim to implement fastest route searching for going by foot, bike, car and public transportation. The first three cases will depend on the awesome OSRM project and the last one will most likely be implemented via city-, region- and country specific plugins.

Progress

My hope was to be able to use all of the community bonding period on hacking since I got kind of a head start this spring. Unfortunately I'm easily distracted and a long list of various small tasks (gsoc- and non-gsoc related) took a lot of energy and focus in late May - early June. Good news is that I'm now gaining speed and has been doing code cleanups and working on implementing the sidebar and zoom control designs provided by Andreas and Fabiana for the last couple of weeks. 
You can follow my work in the wip/osrm-routing and wip/zoom-control branches for now. 

Final note

Please come say hi to us on #gnome-maps on irc.gnome.org or subscribe to our mailing list (very low traffic). Also, if you're coming to GUADEC this year and want to have a chat about Maps or anything in general please just say hi, I'm quite friendly. :)