Joomla GSoC 18 with Geetanshu Mathur

My name is Geetanshu Mathur. I am from India. I am pursuing my bachelors in computer science engineering. I am a web developer and also a data science enthusiast.

Starting

Starting from the beginning. I was really crazy about building dynamic apps with different languages like Ruby, Javascript, PHP, JAVA and even C++..!!. It was really a fun struggling with these languages. But I was not able to manage the things in an appreciable manner, then I decided to go on with PHP because of fewer lines code, easily understandable and damm! things at least worked in here..!!!

Then I looked for the suitable framework build over PHP subsequently, I get to know Laravel. I was just blissed away by laravel. It was amazing, the thing I admired the most was Eloquent - database query processing engine. Things were never simpler before. It was really a fun when coding in Laravel and there was no more struggling with code.

Open Source

Although Laravel is a great framework which has many integrations and supporting libraries which make life simpler but there was a need for more supporting libraries. So the widest source for searching and getting them was github so here the journey begins.

Getting up with Joomla!

To be real I started my journey with Joomla! in February 2018. Before that all I knew about Joomla! was "It is an open source content management system which was used for mainly blogging purposes".

But after working with Joomla!, I realized that Joomla! is huge. It has got it's own CMS and framework. It is also a community of great individuals and it has proper MVC layout.

So, based on my project selection for GSoC I started looking on the component com_media.

Contribution to Joomla!

In here I would like to thank Kasun Vinthange, member of media-manager team of Joomla! and GSoC'17 student for Joomla! media-manager. He has guided me through very basic steps starting from setting up the environment for development. I have made several contributions to Joomla! New media manager. Although my contributions were not big shots, but they really gave me a better understanding of the New Media Manager for Joomla! 4X.

Got Selected for GSoC

So after all the worries of the results, finally, I was very relaxed when I came to know that the proposal I have submitted for GSoC was selected and now I am gonna code for Joomla! whole summers...

Community Bonding Period

In this time period, I had the first ever Joomla! official meeting with admins, they assisted me with the things which further needed to be done. The meeting lasted for almost 90 minutes. After meeting I got myself registered in Joomla! Volunteer portal and also  got enrolled as a member in Joomla! project organization on github.

After that, I simply forked the repository created for adaptive images(my project) and tried to understand the code.Then I had another meeting with my project mentors, we were refining the idea and was establishing milestone. We were also able to setup an approximate time limit for each milestone in this meeting of  90 minutes. For the meeting, I have also written a report which can be found in joomla volunteer portal.

Finally. I have created a new group of GSoC’18 student of Joomla! for discussing the issues faced in the period of development for Joomla! 4X so that we all can collaboratively solve that issue.

Also, I have found some of my friends who got selected for GSoC’18. We have a group on whatsapp and we are planning a meetup soon.