DEV Community: Asmit Malakannawar

GUADEC 2023 - My first conference as an organizer

Asmit Malakannawar — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 16:35:13 +0000

Hey everyone!

In this blog, I'm happy to tell you about my time planning and going to GUADEC 2023 in Riga, Latvia. GUADEC is a big yearly event for the GNOME community. It's a week filled with interesting talks and workshops that bring lots of GNOME developers, users, supporters, and community members together.

Let's begin

After attending GNOME Asia 2022, held in Malaysia, I was stoked to participate and organize GUADEC 2023! I reached out to Kristi, and she was delighted to have me join the organizing team.

The preparations for the event began in January 2023, when our organizing team began outlining all the necessary details and the schedule for the event. Since I was new to this, I was assigned the task of finding interesting places to visit in Riga and researching transportation options for attendees. Deepesha Burse and I collaborated on this, and we shared our progress every Wednesday during our meetings.

As the conference date approached, my responsibility was to keep the website information up to date and to provide visa letters to participants who needed them in order to attend the event.

The conference was gradually coming together, and I was getting more and more excited about attending my first GUADEC in person. This trip to Europe would also be my very first one.

Pre Regsitration Event

The pre-registration event is a fantastic opportunity to connect with others who are attending GUADEC. For those who arrive early, they had a chance to meet and chat with fellow attendees, pick up their badges, and enjoy a pleasant drink. This event took place one day before the official conference days. I had the pleasure of meeting the local team from Riga, which included Peteris, Rudolfs, and Aija—very helpful individuals. I also had the pleasure of meeting Kristi, Anisa, Caroline, and Melissa, who were incredibly supportive throughout the organizing process.

Conference Days

The conference took place from July 26th to July 28th. The primary location was the University of Latvia Academic Centre. There were many fantastic talks scheduled, and I had the opportunity to attend a few of them.

As an organizer, my role involved coordinating with volunteers to ensure that the speakers could deliver their talks without any issues. This allowed me to interact with many outstanding speakers beforehand and make some valuable connections.

All the talks are available on GUADEC 2023 YouTube Playlist

The first day was really nice. I got to attend the talks I was excited about, like "Jack of All Trades: Embracing Versatility in a World of Specialization" by Jakub Steiner, "Community building and best DEI practices in Free and Open Source Communities" by Anisa Kuci, and "GNOME Design: State of the Union" by Allan Day, Cassidy James Blaede, and Jakub Steiner.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Jakub, who is the main designer at the GNOME Foundation. He had been a great help to me during my GSoC'22 project.

After that I attended "Communication matters: a talk about how to talk online" by Allan Day.

All in all, the first day was fantastic. We had interesting topics, met wonderful people, and had a great experience overall.

I tried to attend talks during the conference every day, but most of the time, I was busy with volunteer work. On the second day, I managed to attend Aryan's and Pooja's talk on "How to add 16.67% more users and contributors: A guide to creating accessible applications." This gave me some valuable insights into accessibility and why it's crucial to follow guidelines to make apps/websites accessible to a wide audience.

The lightning talks on day two were a real highlight due to their interesting topics and engaging delivery. I particularly enjoyed Melissa's and Pedro's talks.

On the third day, I had a great time listening to the talk titled "VanillaOS - not just another distro" by Pietro and "Building Student Communities to Foster OSS" by Hrittik. Later in the day, I attended the GNOME Intern lightning talks, which brought back memories from my GSoC period. All the GSoC and Outreachy interns shared updates about their projects, which I found quite interesting to listen.

We also took a group photo with all the GUADEC participants, and it was enjoyable to pose for the picture. It was quite funny, and I wish I had recorded the behind-the-scenes moments.

At the end of the third day of the conference, we had a GUADEC dinner arranged. It was a nice opportunity to chat with people in a relaxed setting. The food was delicious, and the desserts were the perfect finishing touch. Throughout these days, my main focus was on networking and ensuring the event went smoothly.

BoF Days

The conference took place in the main building of the University of Latvia on Saturday, July 29th, and Sunday, July 30th.

On these days, there were some interesting BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions planned. These sessions weren't recorded, but you can download some of the presentations from the schedule.

Conclusion

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip. I am grateful for the opportunity to attend and it wouldn't have been possible without them.

I went on my first-ever trip to Europe, and I really liked it. Riga is a beautiful city with a lot of interesting history and culture. I think everyone should visit it at least once.

This was my first time going to GUADEC, and I'm already excited about next year's conference. I enjoyed the talks, the chats with people, and how friendly everyone was during the event.

GNOME Asia 2023 is happening this year in Kathmandu, Nepal from 1st - 3rd December. Do register for it! I hope to meet everyone again soon in future GNOME events.

Google Summer of Code 2023 with conda-forge

Asmit Malakannawar — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 10:27:41 +0000

The conclusion of Google Summer of Code '23 marks the end of an incredibly remarkable three-month journey. I was a Google Summer of Code student in the year 2022 as well. You can read about the process and experience here.

This time, I had the opportunity to make contributions to conda-forge. I had been working on UI/UX of conda projects for six months before GSoC 2023 began, so I knew conda-forge would be part of GSoC '23. My mentor, Jaime Rodríguez-Guerra, has been a constant source of motivation and an invaluable supporter throughout this project.

This blog serves as a summary of all the tasks I completed during my time in the Google Summer of Code 2023 program.

Modernization of the conda-forge.org website

Around 8 years ago, approximately when the entire conda-forge project started, conda-forge.org was established. However, over this 8-year span, the website has become outdated. One evident issue is its lack of optimization for mobile devices. Additionally, it doesn't adhere to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), rendering it inaccessible to a significant number of users, particularly those with disabilities or those who rely on assistive tools to navigate the web.

The objective of this project was to create a fresh conda-forge.org website that not only aligns with WCAG accessibility standards but also enhances overall performance, all while ensuring an enhanced experience for contributors. This initiative also encompasses the development of a new UI design to complement the improvements.

My work

When I began working on this project, the WCAG guidelines were new to me. I hadn't used them before and didn't realize how important they are for making websites. These guidelines not only follow the law, but they also help people with disabilities use websites easily. Research shows that about 16.67% of the world's population has trouble reading, which makes it hard for them to get information from websites.

The main goal of my project was to make the website easy to use for everyone, and also make it look nice on the outside. This was the challenge I was excited to tackle.

In addition to focusing on accessibility and design, I also had to consider maintainability, since most conda-forge users are not familiar with frameworks like React and Docusaurus.

The Design Work

During the initial weeks of the project, I spent my time researching WCAG guidelines, looking at how different projects handle UI/UX, and coming up with basic color choices for the project's design.

After doing thorough research, I began deciding on the colors to use for the website. Since the old website didn't have a design system, I had the freedom to create a new one from scratch.

Now, considering the project's name is conda-forge, which relates to fire, sparks, and a bright atmosphere, I started playing with shades of red and orange. Working with orange was quite challenging as it's not easy to get right for everyone and can cause accessibility issues. I initially tried combining red and orange gradients, which looked cool, but it made the project appear too dark.

After several discussions and exchanges of ideas with both the team and my mentor, we ultimately settled on using a gradient that blended light pink and orange. This choice lent the website a livelier and more vibrant appearance.

In this stage, I also came up with about 10 different concepts for the landing page. My main goal was to make it straightforward and not overly fancy. To do this, I took inspiration from design systems used by various companies.

Just like I designed the homepage, I also worked on other parts of the website like the About, Contributing, and Supporters sections. I created various versions for each section. After several meetings and conversations, we settled on the final designs for all the sections that would look great on the website.

The Coding Work

With the design settled, it was time to start implementing the website. A basic site template was already available in the organization's repository. For this project, we used the Docusaurus framework.

We made sure the design was accessible, but when it came to writing code, ensuring accessibility was a different challenge. We need to remember and use basic HTML rules and features for this.

To start coding, I created a new repository and progressively added the code each week. Throughout the process, I sought feedback from my mentor and the organization's accessibility team at various stages.

Repository Link: conda_forge_website

Website Link: https://condaforge.netlify.app/

Future Plans

The landing page has been finished, but there are still a few pages left to work on, such as the donate us page, contact page, and reorganizing the documentation. Additionally, we haven't yet built a dashboard for conda-forge. Since I played a role in designing the design system, I plan to assist in creating the dashboard and other pages too. Because I've been involved in this project for around 3 months, it feels like a personal project to me as well. To ensure the project continues to thrive, I aim to introduce new features, oversee the contribution process, help newcomers understand the new system, and ensure that it remains functional and compliant as it grows.

Special Thanks

I thoroughly enjoyed working together with the conda-forge team and the Quansight team (which oversees open-source projects), during GSoC '23. I want to extend my gratitude to my mentor, Jaime Rodríguez-Guerra for his consistent guidance throughout the project. Mentors like him assist students in developing both personally and professionally. I'm excited about continuing my involvement in the conda-forge community and assisting new contributors as they become part of it.

From Mentee to Mentor: My Journey through LFX Mentorship

Asmit Malakannawar — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 19:01:27 +0000

Are you already actively contributing to open source and looking to take your involvement to the next level? You can participate in the LFX Mentorship program. Through the LFX Mentorship, I found a supportive mentor and a community that helped me overcome these challenges and achieve my open source goals. In this blog, I want to share my personal journey from being a mentee to becoming a mentor, and the valuable lessons I learned along the way.

Let's explore the power of LFX Mentorship together and discover how it can turn your open source aspirations into reality!

What Is LFX Mentorship Program and How Do I Apply?

The LFX Mentorship Program is a specialized 12 week program designed to connect aspiring contributors with experienced mentors in the open source community. The program aims to facilitate personal and professional growth by providing guidance, support, and valuable insights to mentees.

You can find more information about the program in the LFX Mentorship Docs.

For the LFX Spring Term, I worked on CNCF - ORAS: Develop ORAS website, which I will discuss about in this blog later.

Now, You Know About the Program, How Do You Apply?

Applying to this program is straightforward. You begin by creating an LFX Mentee account and then proceed to apply for the projects listed on the platform. As part of the application process, you will be required to submit a resume and a cover letter. However, it's important to note that the task doesn't end there. Many students make a mistake here.

I made the naive mistake of just submitting the resume and a three-page cover letter explaining my idea. Back in 2021, when I first learned about the LFX Mentorship program, I eagerly applied for the CNCF Buildpacks project. My proposed idea was to undertake a Web Redesign of Feature Comparison which involved creating a features page in Hugo. I began learning about static site generators, hoping to make a positive impact. Due to this, my application didn't go through at that time. However, I received valuable and detailed feedback from my mentor, which motivated me to continue working on improving my skills and knowledge based on the guidance provided.

My Experience and Background

Before applying for the LFX Mentorship program, ask yourself some key questions: What are your skills? Do they align with the project's requirements? Is the community supportive? Having a foundation in at least 50% of the required skills is crucial, as the rest can be learned while contributing to the project. Assess your readiness and choose a project that matches your abilities and offers room for growth.

After wrapping up GSoC'22 and GSoD'22, I was pretty sure about my next move. As an intermediate frontend developer with strong UI/UX skills, I began searching for projects in the LFX Spring Term that involved redesigning or building websites from scratch. During my search, I came across the CNCF: ORAS Project, which seemed to be the perfect fit for my skills. ORAS is the de facto tool for working with OCI Artifacts.

Working on the Project

Once I made up my mind about which project to work on, I immediately started exploring the project's repository and started engaging with the mentors. I was fortunate to have Feynman Zhou as my mentor for this project, and I couldn't have asked for a better guide. From the application period until the end of my term, Feynman supported me every step of the way.

As I mentioned earlier, many students make the mistake of solely submitting a resume and cover letter. To distinguish myself as a strong candidate, I took an extra step. I began creating a rough design for the website using Figma. Although it wasn't a required task, it served as a motivation for me to enhance my design skills and demonstrate my abilities to the best of my capacity.

Feynman greatly appreciated the efforts I put into contributing to the project and creating the design.

Having learned from my previous rejection from the LFX Mentorship program, I understood that the waiting period was an opportunity for active participation. I discussed my situation with Feynman and decided to focus on improving my design skills and working on other project pages. By taking this proactive approach, I not only grew as a contributor but also demonstrated my dedication to the community. As a result, I got selected as a mentee for the ORAS Project!

About the Project

The focus of my project was the development of a new website for the ORAS Project. Unlike the old website built with MKDocs, the new website featured a completely redesigned interface using Docusaurus. The primary objective was to provide a user-friendly platform for both new and existing contributors, facilitating their understanding of ORAS CLI and the supportive community. By simplifying the developer experience, the new website aimed to encourage more engagement and participation within the project.

Because my project involved creating a website from scratch, I immediately dove into refining the Figma design based on my mentor's suggestions. After a week of designing, I began developing the project using Docusaurus.

Since the old website was built on Mkdocs, I couldn't directly work on it. Instead, I created a new project in my own account and started building a proof of concept. Once I had a basic layout in place, it was time to make the site live!

To merge my changes into the main repository, I submitted a pull request. After making several more updates and improvements, the official new ORAS Website was launched on April 26th. It was a rewarding moment to see all my hard work come together and share the updated website with the community.

To make things even better, my mentor shared my project on Twitter! It was thrilling to see my work getting recognition and reaching a wider audience.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1651997624852152325-171'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1651997624852152325&theme=dark" }

During the next few months, I continued working on the website by adding new features, improving designs, and fixing any issues that arose. Throughout my mentorship, I made a total of 13 pull requests. Out of these, 11 of them were successfully merged into the project, while 2 were still under review.

Seeing my active progress, my mentor suggested that I become a maintainer of the ORAS Website project. The community voted for my nomination to become a sub-project owner. This opportunity allowed me to take on a more significant role and continue contributing to the project's development and success.

Well, the journey doesn't end here...

Becoming a Mentor

As the website was entirely new, my mentor proposed an exciting idea: creating an ORAS Artifact Explorer portal. Additionally, the documentation structure required a revamp. To tackle both these projects, I had the privilege of becoming the mentor for the LFX Summer Term! It was an incredible opportunity for me to continue contributing to the growth of the project.

Conclusion

The opportunity to work on the ORAS Project, from designing and developing the website to becoming an active maintainer, has allowed me to showcase my skills, contribute to a meaningful open-source project, and expand my knowledge in the field.

Through my journey, I have realized the importance of self-assessment, perseverance, and the value of a supportive community. To anyone considering applying for the LFX Mentorship program, my advice is simple: engage with the community, reach out to mentors early on, and demonstrate your skills by taking initiative. Instead of relying solely on being guided every step of the way, showcase your abilities by being proactive and self-motivated.

Don't be afraid to ask questions, seek guidance, and share your ideas. Remember, the program is not just about being mentored but also about actively contributing to the project and making a difference.

Thank you for reading and all the best! 😄

Google Season of Docs'22 Project Report

Asmit Malakannawar — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 06:33:42 +0000

Hey everyone,

This is my project report for Google Season of Docs'22 with Weaviate. You can read about my initial experience about getting selected in GSoD'22 here. This project was declared successful amongst other projects in Google Season of Docs'22.

Project Abstract

In an open source project, a contributor onboarding guide gives potential project contributors a quick overview of how they might help with your project or study group. A newcomer may not know how to execute the aforementioned tasks successfully and efficiently if they do not have access to a solid contributor onboarding guide. These instructions can help secure a product's success by attracting new contributors, whose contributions will ensure the product's success. A great user guide simply takes that communication and organizes it into a framework that everyone can use to achieve success.

Participants

The project team members on this project were:

Asmit Malakannawar – GSoD Student – Technical Writer
Sebastian Witalec – GSoD Mentor – Developer Advocate

Pull Requests

List of PRs that include more details and discussion:

Deviations From Original Proposal

In my initial proposal, I solely proposed the creation of a contributor's guide. But as the project team worked on the documentation updates, it became apparent that the tooling (based on Ruby and Jekyll) used to build Weaviate docs was a significant obstacle for new contributors, as it was slow and difficult to set up.

To address that, I researched and experimented with other open-source tools for building documentation sites. As a result, we decided to move all of our structured documentation to Docusaurus, enabling contributors and the Weaviate team to work on the documentation with ease.

As a proof of concept, we created a sample site and deployed it on Vercel. Here are the links to the repository and the PoC website:

Timeline

Here are some milestones from the project timeline.

June - July

Audited the current Contributor’s Guide and prepared a list of suggestions.
Created the mockups on how a contributor's guide should look, with a list of pages and content the final Contributor’s Guide should contain.

August

Created a writing plan, with the step by step process of writing a beginner friendly doc.
Started the work on Contributor’s Guide.
Added issue and PR templates.

September

Completed the first draft of the Contributor's Guide .
Compared multiple online documentation options and selected Docusaurus.

October

Created a proof of concept for Docusaurus and iterated it based on reviews.
Checked the documentation for errors and typos.

November

Project approved by the mentor and the Weaviate team.

Results

Created a detailed contributor’s guide. Including detailed guides on basic git and GitHub workflow.
Improved overall contributor experience – not only for beginners but also for current contributors.
Made navigation easier by pointing contributors in the right direction.
Updated GitHub issue and PR templates to make it easy for contributors to contribute to the documentation

My experience working with the team!

My involvement with Weaviate and the Google Season of Docs internship both helped me advance my knowledge of technical documentation. I gained a lot of knowledge about working with others, understanding a startup, and identifying opportunities to contribute. I've never had the chance to collaborate with an emerging open-source company more frequently. I appreciate the opportunity to work with Weaviate’s team on this project.

The project gave me numerous chances to brush up on my current knowledge of React, Docusaurus, and Jekyll, to mention a few, while working on the project. While the GSoD 2022 project comes to an end, Weaviate's documentation journey will continue.

Summary

Overall the project was a success, and we achieved our documentation deliverables.

We also started working on a new documentation site, making it a lot easier for anyone to contribute to Weaviate and our docs.

I want to give big thanks to Weaviate and especially my mentor Sebastian – for guiding me throughout this project – and to GSoD – for organizing such a fantastic project!

Google Season of Docs'22 with Weaviate!

Asmit Malakannawar — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 06:14:06 +0000

Google Season of Docs is an annual program by Google. Its goal is to bring technical writers and open source organizations together to foster collaboration and improvement of documentation in the Open Source space.

During the program, accepted technical writers spend between 3-5 months either building a new doc set, improving the structure of the existing docs, developing a much-needed tutorial, or improving the contribution processes and guides of an Open Source organisation.

More details here.

How I got into it?

I developed interest in technical writing when I was working on my portfolio website, and I found it hard to find the resources online. I had to search through many websites for technical problems, therefore I decided to jot down my learnings in the form of technical
blogs.

I came across Google Season of Docs program during my freshman year. But due to lack of experience and other commitments, I decided to apply for next term. I found this program very interesting as it would give me an opportunity lucrative to help me bolster my writing and documentation skills. I started my technical writing journey in July 2021, where I wrote various tutorials, installation guides, personal experiences, etc.

Due to my habitual writing and good content, I was reached out by Aviyel, for the role of technical writer for their platform. Aviyel is a community platform for open source projects to monetize and be sustainable. This opportunity helped me shape my technical writing skills. My content was reviewed and provided feedback.

Later, I searched more about eligibility criteria for Google Season of Docs, time commitments, looking at past organizations etc. I was pretty excited about this program and was hoping to contribute to technical documentation under guidance.

Google Season of Docs has a repository where organizations list their interest to participate in the program and the contributors reach out to them for more details.

Why Weaviate?

I came across Weaviate after the list of organizations was announced for GSoD. The idea of creating comprehensive contributors and onboarding guides seemed like a good fit for me as I had worked with a few organizations before with similar ideas. I was curious about what vector search is and how it works. I asked my mentors for guides and materials which I could refer to gain my knowledge. I also came to know that Weaviate was using Jekyll to build their documentation site. I have had experience with it so started contributing towards it with the aim of making it more efficient.

As I researched about Vector based search engines, I got fascinated by the concept, which employs deep learning models to encode data sets into meaningful vector representations. I am thrilled that SeMI Technologies chose to make Weaviate open source. I extensively use open-source software in my projects/research work, and I understand the importance of a project having a good contributor and onboarding guide.

Google Season of Docs gave me an opportunity to work with an organization and improve their contributor experience. It's also a chance for me to stretch myself and explore new areas of technology.

Initial Contributions

Weaviate's documentation site was built on Jekyll initially. It had a lot of missing things, beginning with a detailed README on how to setup a project. Since, I had experience with Jekyll (thanks to Google Summer of Code), I decided to fix that issue by adding a detailed guide on how to setup a project.

Later, to actually understand what Weaviate is, I learnt about vector search engines, how they work, where it is used, etc. and wrote a blog about it.

Here are some of my initial contributions to the project!

During my contribution phase, I met awesome people at Weaviate like Bob van Luijt, Laura Ham, Saurabh Rai, who helped me navigate the project. Discussing proposal ideas with them gave me a clear idea on what needs to be focused in the contributor's guide. I drafted my proposal there after and got it reviewed.

Selection process

After submitting the proposal, I got an interview scheduled with Sebastian Witalec, Head of DevRel at Weaviate. He asked me a few questions about my past work, my experiences, blog content etc. The interview was pretty good and he made sure I was comfortable as well. He became my mentor for Google Season of Docs.

For getting selected at any organization, previous contributions always gives you an edge over the others. Communicating with mentors is necessary as it also states that you are interested in working on that project.

After the interview, I got a message on the same day that I had been selected! I was pretty much excited to contribute to the docs and improve the experience for the community!

Project Goals

Weaviate had user documentation and a contributors guide. Initially, the contributors guide was very limited. Good documentation on how to get started on contributing to Weaviate was lacking. The pages that were in the guide helped Weaviate developers who have a good amount of background knowledge and have been contributing to Weaviate before, but it was hard to get started as an unexperienced contributor.

My goal was to create a contributor's guide that serves as a comprehensive guide that assists new contributors from beginning to end. This includes sections on how to get involved and get started, how to create your first GitHub issue, how to format Pull Requests, and more. A beginner should understand the basic navigation of the repo and how they can contribute to the repository. Wonderful guides prevent hours of frustration and lost time.

So, this was my initial experience in getting selected for Google Season of Docs 2022. Hope you got any insights on it. If you have any questions, please connect with me on different social media platforms. I'd be happy to help you :)

GNOME Asia 2022 - My first international conference

Asmit Malakannawar — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 14:49:29 +0000

Hey everyone!

Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying this holiday season. In this blog, I am excited to share my experience about attending my first GNOME Asia 2022 Summit in Malaysia. The conference, which focuses on the GNOME Open Source desktop environment, was held in Kuala Lumpur, the vibrant and bustling capital city of Malaysia.

Let's begin!

Back in May of 2022, GUADEC 2022 took place in Mexico and Google Summer of Code interns had a chance to present their projects in that event, but due to some visa issues, none of the interns were able to attend that conference in-person.

Fast forward to October 2022, where we heard about GNOME Asia 2022 Summit which was going to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was pretty excited as we were invited again by the GNOME Foundation! Thank you Felipe Borges!

Getting Malaysian visa was pretty easy as it lies in Asia. Special thanks to Umang Jain and Melissa Wu for approving the travel request and booking the accommodations for us.

Two days before the event

Everything was ready, and I had reached Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport. As this was my first international flight, this was an adventure for me. Aman and Pooja joined me in my flight, so travelling was more fun! All the processes were smooth and finally boarded the flight.

A day before the event

Finally landed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at around 7 A.M in the morning. The organizing committee had organized a cab for us to travel from the airport to the hotel. It was a really great gesture. Thank you Kristi Progri and Syazwan for this!

Then I got to meet my other fellow GSoCers - Anupam and Aryan. All of us made this trip fun for each other!

Fellow GSoCers!

The day of the conference

As I walked into the conference center, I was immediately struck by the sense of community and collaboration in the air. The conference was attended by developers, designers, and users of GNOME from all over the world, and it was clear that everyone was eager to share their experiences and learn from one another. The schedule for GNOME Asia had some amazing workshops and talks.

The D.E.I Workshop by Jonna was fun and interactive. It was a community bonding period where I got interact with a few developers from Singapore and France.

After this workshop we had lunch and attended the Newcomer's workshop by Felipe. He was missed at the conference, but his talk was really nice who wanted to know more about GNOME Apps.

After the summit, we went out to explore Malaysia. And Malaysia is a really beautiful city with lots of awesome people around. First we visited the Aquaria, which is a super big aquarium! We got to see the Musical fountain and Petronas Towers at night! The view was astonishing.

Second day of the conference

Second day of the conference started with Aryan sharing his open source journey and GSoC experience. After that got to learn more about Open Source and Cybersecurity. After lunch break, I attended a few talks by Anisa Kuci, Mantoh Kuma and Matthias Clasen which were great! Kristi Progri mentioned in her lightning talk that the GNOME Foundation is open to anyone who wants to host GNOME Asia in their country. Do reach out to them!

After the conference, we again went to sight seeing and shopping. The Central Market and Chinatown are the best and cheap places to shop in Kuala Lumpur. Got some chocolates and show pieces from there, pretty amazing! Lastly, ended the day by visiting KL Tower. The view from there is gorgeous! You can almost see entire Kuala Lumpur from there!

Last day of the conference

I had my lightning talk on the last day. It was about my GSoC project "Faces of GNOME" which is built by developers for the developers to showcase their profile and projects they are working on. It was an awesome experience speaking in front of everyone and later and received valuable feedback from other attendees and GNOMEies in the conference. Open source community is just the best!

Awesome GNOMEies!

Let’s put it all together

Overall, attending my first GNOME Asia conference in Malaysia was a fantastic experience. I learned a lot, made some great connections, and had an amazing time exploring the beautiful city of Kuala Lumpur. I can't wait to attend another GNOME conference in the future, and I would highly recommend this experience to anyone interested in open source software and the GNOME community.

Here's a small trailer of the event with all the amazing speakers (and yes they included the interns in the thumbnail!).

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip. I am grateful for the opportunity to attend and it wouldn't have been possible without them.

Kuala Lumpur was great, lots of awesome people, food and culture! I hope to meet everyone again soon in future GNOME events.

Open Source FTW 🚀

Merry Christmas 🎄 and a Happy New Year ✨!

Google Summer of Code 2022 - Final Report | Faces of GNOME

Asmit Malakannawar — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 16:37:48 +0000

The three-month journey has been nothing short of remarkable as Google Summer of Code'22 comes to an end. This was the most memorable journey for me where I got to learn a lot of new stuff, collaborated with my mentors, added new features and experienced team management for the very first time. I'm thrilled to announce that nearly all of the development milestones for the Faces of GNOME are finished, and the complete source code is available at GitLab. This blog summarizes the same.

Project Summary

The ultimate goal of this project is to expand the GNOME community and make it more inclusive for everyone who wants to be a part of it, as well as to make this a successful endeavor. I hope that by completing this project, we will be able to promote transparency in our community, empower our contributors, and assist the larger community in recognizing the contributions of all contributors. The project includes simplifying the process for members to add themselves and blog posts, UI/UX improvements, populating the FAQ page, creating wiki pages, replacing old jQuery with modern ES6 JavaScript alongside deploying it to make it visible for public view.

Faces of GNOME is a website that highlights past and current GNOME contributors and was created using the Ruby-based site generator Jekyll & JavaScript. Contributors can provide their own unique metadata in the YAML files used for data serialization.

Example for my profile can be found here.

Coding Period

This is more of a learning and implementing period, in my opinion. The various problem-solving approaches I've learned during this GSoC period have been invaluable. My mentors were extremely helpful, and I will be forever thankful to them for providing such excellent guidance.

These are the list of all Merge Requests which got merged in the Faces of GNOME project:

fix: rename people of gnome to faces of gnome !94
feat: update packages !95
fix: update links from people to faces !98
fix: dockerignore file !99
feat: member addition form !100
update: update data in yml files to 2022 !102
docs: update readme regarding form action !104
fix: update placeholders and add examples !107
feat: populate faq section !108
fix: remove junk code !109
feat: add relevant images !110

Some snapshots of the project!

Future Plans

Though the GSoC period is coming to an end, but the project development is still not finished. There are lot of minor updates that we have to do such as updating vector graphics, releasing the project on a stable URL, adding analytics, using pre-existing data resources and so on. I would love to continue the development of the platform and keep contributing to GNOME!

Special Thanks

It was a pleasure to collaborate with the GNOME Foundation and the Engagement Team on GSoC'22. Special thanks to my mentors Claudio Wunder and Caroline Henriksen for their guidance throughout the process. Mentors like them assist students in developing both personally and professionally. I'm looking forward to staying active in the GNOME community and guiding new contributors as they get engaged in.

Google Summer of Code with GNOME Foundation.

Asmit Malakannawar — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 13:07:22 +0000

Google Summer of Code - every undergrad's dream to get selected in. I found out about Google Summer of Code in my freshman year, I was so excited that a program like this exists where open source contributors collaborate over projects with various organizations!

At first, Google announces the program in mid February, then after a month organizations are announced. Applicants start applying to various organizations and make proposals for the project they like. And in May, the results are announced and the period lasts for around three months.

Learn more about Google Summer of Code here.

When should I apply?

Google announces organizations around February. Look at the detailed timeline here. There's no right time to start contributing to Open Source and getting selected in Google Summer of Code. You can start right now, contact admins and work on your issues. This will increase your chances for the next term!

Tip: Look for projects from idea lists of organizations which didn't get selected for GSoC this year. Contact mentors and start individually contributing towards it. This will boost your chances, whenever you decide to apply :)

I will share my experience below on how I got started with Google Summer of Code and made into it.

Finding an organization

You should first ask yourself, what are my skills? What am I proficient with? Is the community supportive? Do I have any experience in this field? Do I know at least 50% of the skills mentioned by the organization? Rest can be learnt while contributing towards project.

I started looking for past selected organizations in February, found an organization named Metacall, which made polyglot programming easy. I made some contributions there. I looked into their past projects and tried to understand how the code base worked. The tech stack was mainly Python, C++, Rust, Nodejs, Docker. I knew very little about these.

I am intermediate in web dev, so alongside that, I also started looking for organizations which had web dev projects. Basically GSoC allows you to make a maximum of three proposals, out of which only one gets selected. I would suggest you to do your research first. I recommend you to choose only one organization and start contributing towards it.

How did I get to know about GNOME?

Since I used Ubuntu distro of Linux, it had GNOME Desktop. I was impressed that even the organization which made the UI for Ubuntu is Open Source. I researched about them and found out that they participate in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy internship programs.

In March, the selected organizations were announced publicly, I browsed through different organizations and their web dev related projects and I landed on GNOME Foundation's idea list page. As I was going through the different project ideas, the idea of Faces of GNOME - Continuing the Development of the Platform caught my eye.

Selecting and working on project

The Faces of GNOME is a Foundation-led initiative with the intent of championing the contributors and recognizing their continuous and previous efforts towards the GNOME project. Faces aim to be a historical platform where you're able to see the faces behind the GNOME project. From current contributors to past contributors. Faces intend to be a place where Contributors have their own profile, serving as a directory of the current and past Contributors of the Project.

The project used Jekyll, HTML, CSS, JavaScript as its tech stack. I had no idea about Jekyll when I started this project. Had worked with Hugo, which is a similar static site generator.

I started studying and experimenting with Jekyll as I had no idea about that static site generator. Took a week to study Jekyll and codebase and then jumped onto ongoing issues. My mentors, Claudio Wunder and Caroline Henriksen were supportive and helped me clear all my doubts (even silly ones)!.

After getting familiar with the codebase, I started making contributions by adding features, creating wikis, suggesting ideas, etc. Check out all of my contributions here.

Contribution and Proposal drafting period

Next, in April, we had to submit our proposal. I had proposed a few new features which was really appreciated by my mentor. Creating a project proposal was a difficult task as I had to cover every bit of project feature in detail. I talked with my mentor about how I approached each topic, which helped me understand what they expected of me as well. This is a crucial issue since I was interpreting some features differently while, in reality, they were designed to accomplish something else. This tiny misunderstanding could lead you to make a poor proposal.

Previous year's GSoC mentee, Arijit Kundu, helped me with drafting my proposal. I got my proposal reviewed from different foundation members who were overlooking the project. Received a nice feedback from everyone. Finally, I created my proposal utilizing the template provided by the organization.

One of the most significant judging criteria is timeframe, therefore take care when selecting or drafting it.

Even after making proposal, my contributions didn't stop and I started engaging with the community more. I asked doubts, joined different channels and talked about various features I wanted to implement in this project.

Result Day!

Finally, the result day came and I was happy to get selected in Google Summer of Code'22 under GNOME Foundation. I never imagined that I would be a part of this program. Open Source truly does wonders!

So, this was my experience of getting selected into Google Summer of Code. Hope you got any insights on it. If you have any questions, please connect with me on different social media platforms. I'd be happy to help you :)

Happy Summers!🌞

What is a vector search engine?

Asmit Malakannawar — Sun, 01 May 2022 16:21:33 +0000

You might have come across the term Search engine a lot. In fact you do use search engines on daily basis to search through loads of data on the internet. A search engine is a piece of software that helps people find the information they need online by using keywords or phrases.

When you want to search a term online, you start with entering a term in the search engine. The search engine examines the website's title, keywords, content, basically all the meta content and employs algorithms to generate a list of sites.

So, what are Vector search engines?

Traditional search engines are fantastic, but they are limited to keyword matching and cannot capture context. A single word can have multiple meanings; for example, if you search for the word right, there are several meanings associated with this. It can be morally right, direction right, or human right. Because the search engine does not understand why you typed that word in the first place, it will return results/sites that contain the word right.

Image source: Google Cloud

How do we solve this issue? This is where Vector Search Engines come into play. In vector search, the text is encoded in such a way that semantically similar texts are near each other in the vector space, while dissimilar texts are far apart. To encode data sets into meaningful vector representations, vector search employs deep learning models.

In mathematical words, vector search allows us to represent unordered objects in a high-dimensional vector space as vectors. By comparing the distances and similarities between vectors, you can find similar content.

Image source: Google Cloud

In order to search, instead of comparing vectors one by one, i.e. using KNN algorithm, which would take a lot of time to display search results, search engines use ANN algorithm with the help of machine learning models. Many ANN algorithms divide the vector space into many groups, assign tags to each group, and search just for the tags assigned to that group. This method improves query times substantially.

Image source: erikbern.com

To get clear idea on how ANN works, refer to this video and an article written by the creator of ANN algorithm.

Advantages of Vector Search

More relevant results: Because vector search employs vector functions to locate similar content, the user can receive more relevant results. While the result cannot always be accurate, it does display more refined results rather than none at all.
Error handling: Because vector search does not rely on keywords directly, it handles a wide range of issues out of the box. Misspelled queries and phrases are not an issue because it tries to return similar results. Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that receive a small number of searches. They are very specific keywords aimed at a specific audience. Vector search engines can easily handle this as well.
Recommender System: Because vector search produces similar results, it is an excellent recommender system. Based on their searched keywords, users are presented with a plethora of options available on the internet. This also assists businesses in reaching out to more customers and expanding their product.
Easily available trained models: Many trained models are readily available on the internet, from which we can start implementing a vector search engine. To improve the relevancy, more specific models can be trained.
Trained models work efficiently: The collected queries are used to improve and train the underlying model of a vector search engine. As a result, users are presented with more refined and accurate results.

Modern search engines like Google Search, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc. all use vector search engines to provide users with best relevant results as possible. All the search results from billions of documents are displayed within milliseconds with the help of vector search. Vector search can be used in a variety of applications, including text, multimedia, image, and recommendation searches.

Vector search basically makes searching a lot more natural and intuitive and you search by the concept rather than by the keywords.
(Source: Microsoft AI)

Image source: Microsoft AI

There are a few vector search engines which are Open Source, so that other people can actually use it in their products and help improve by contributing back to the vector search project. These are some popular standalone vector search services.

If you want a proper curated list of various libraries and standalone services of vector search engines, refer to this awesome GitHub repository by Currents API.

If you want to experience vector search's capabilities, you can do it right now!! Two best resources I was able to find was:

Microsoft's Vector Search where you can choose or upload any images of your choice and see the similar results popping up.
Google Lens on your phone, where you can point to anything, text or object, and it will scan and display relevant results.

If you want to learn more about how vector search works and how algorithms display relevant results, check out the resources listed below:

This was a basic explanation of what vector search engine is and how it works. If you like this blog, do give it a like and connect with me on social media platforms.

Happy Searching!! 🔍💻

What is SEO?

Asmit Malakannawar — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 15:27:20 +0000

Are you looking to improve your website's visibility? Or are you a beginner who wants to understand the basics of SEO? Maybe you've heard that SEO may help drive visitors to your website and gain you higher rankings, but you're not sure how it works or where to focus your efforts? Well, you’ve come to the right place. I've summarized how SEO can help your website rank higher by utilizing basic strategies.

What does SEO mean?

SEO is a buzz word and you will find tons of definitions on the internet. SEO stands for "search engine optimization". In layman's terms, it refers to the process of improving your website in order to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business on Google, Bing, and other search engines. It obtains traffic from search engines through free, organic, editorial, or natural search results. Its goal is to boost your website's ranking in search engine results pages. Remember that the higher the website ranks in the search results, the more people who will see it.

How does SEO work?

Bots are used by search engines such as Google and Bing to crawl web sites, moving from site to site, collecting information about those pages, and indexing them. Following that, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking hundreds of ranking factors or signals into account, to determine the order in which pages should appear in search results for a given query.

A good SEO strategy entails a variety of activities, including:

Identifying relevant keywords that have a high potential for search traffic
Creating high-quality, valuable content and optimising it for search engines and users
Incorporating relevant links from high-quality websites, called backlinks
Measuring the outcomes and improving on it

Now that you have basic definition of SEO in hand, I’m here to tell you there’s a checklist you can use to help shape your SEO strategy. Sound's amazing right? Let's dive in!!

1. Check if your site is indexed

As mentioned above, search engines use bots/spiders to crawl websites and move from site to site. When a crawler discovers a website, it adds it to a massive database known as an index. This is how Google and other search engines can return search results when a user types in a query. Websites are not always found automatically by search engines. If another website links to yours, a crawler can find it while crawling the original site. However, in many cases, you must submit your site to search engines. There's no point in doing all of these SEO tasks if your site isn't in any search engines. To see if your site has been indexed by Google, type "site:" followed by the address of your site. For this blog post, I'll be using my own portfolio site as an example.

site:https://asmit2952.github.io/

If you don't see any results, it means your website isn't isn’t being crawled and indexed. Now don't worry if that happens. Jump on to the next point to know how it can be indexed.

2. Connect your website to Google.

Begin by connecting your site to Google Search Console. Simply sign up for an account if you don't already have one and follow the instructions to link your site. Search Console will notify you if (and when) Google has crawled your site, as well as any crawl errors, external links pointing to your site, and other information. You must create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console in order for Google to index the pages on your site. Allow a day or two for your already deployed site to collect and analyze data when you first connect it to the Search Console.

Google Analytics is another extremely useful tool to which you should connect. This is where you will keep track of all your SEO efforts. You can see how long people spend on your pages, which pages receive the most organic traffic, and so much more. You only need to embed the gtag.js snippet to get started. There are also a few certification based courses provided by Google themselves to get started with Google Analytics platform. Check them out here.

3. Carry out keyword research

Keywords are the foundation of any SEO content strategy. When creating content, you should keep one main keyword and a few related keywords in mind. When conducting online research, people use keywords to find solutions. So, if your content is successful in reaching the audience during their searches, you stand to get more visitors/traffic.

Assume you go to a library and tell the librarian what book (keyword) you want to read. The librarian has gone through every book in the library (index) and can tell you which one contains the information you want.

Tools that can help you plan your keyword strategy:

4. Carry out competitor keyword research

Never forget the competition's strategy. Well you can't know everything in detail, but carry out your search. Google search is very competitive. There isn't enough space for all the search results to appear on first page. Your job is only half done if you employed keyword tools to select your target term. Look at the top results when you search for your desired term. What are the top-ranking results looking for? Examine the content's format, the topics covered, and any other features employed. When you start writing, this should help you plan your strategy.

5. Make use of internal links

Internal linking is an SEO best practice that assists crawlers and users in finding pages on your website. It also helps to construct a hierarchy of content, which makes site navigation much easier. Your homepage is an excellent place to begin. If you don't have a navigation menu, you should make one. Depending on your requirements, you can include connections to other significant pages such as your blogs, a about us page, a contact page, and so on. It's a good SEO activity to link to your new content in any previous piece of content when you publish fresh content. Just bear in mind that you want to incorporate links only where they are relevant.

6. Analyze backlinks

Backlinks are the foundation of off-page SEO, just as keywords are the foundation of on-page SEO. When other authoritative websites link to yours, they transfer part of their site's worth to yours. This increases trust and credibility between you and search engines, which improves your ranking in search engine results pages. It's critical to understand where your backlinks are coming from, and there are numerous tools available to assist you. Begin with free tools such as the:

Google Search Console can also provide information about your backlink profile. One advantage of Search Console is that it allows you to examine any crawl issues on your site.

7. Mobile-Friendly Design & User-Friendly Design

Your website and your content should be easy to access and read on any device. Users will have a pleasant site experience when you execute mobile SEO since it appears fantastic on any device, regardless of screen size. Google has implemented a "mobile-first index" as more people use their phones to browse the web. This indicates that Google's crawlers will prioritize your mobile site. A non-mobile-friendly website will harm your ranking in search results, resulting in less visitors, fewer leads, and lower revenue for your company. To check whether your website is mobile friendly, you can simply use Google's Mobile Page Testing tool.

8. Use an XML sitemap

XML sitemaps assist Google in crawling and indexing your website's pages. An XML sitemap is a document that includes all of the URLs that you want to appear in search results. A sitemap tool or a plugin can help you easily create one. You should submit your sitemap to Google Search Console once you've created it. After that, allow Google to crawl your website. The Sitemaps report in Search Console can help you determine when your site was crawled and how many URLs were discovered.

9. Use robots.txt

Robots.txt is similar to an anti-sitemap. It's a file that instructs search engines what they shouldn't crawl on your site. It may seem odd to exclude specific parts of your website from search engines, but it can be really beneficial in certain cases. Maybe you have a highly targeted document on your site that you don't want search engines to find, or maybe you have a redirect page once someone clicks on a call to action. Not everything on your website should be immediately accessible to the general audience. However, take care not to prevent crawlers from accessing pages that you want to appear in search results. Read this guide on how to create a robots.txt file properly.

10. Check your site’s speed

A slow website provides a terrible user experience, as not all pages load at the same rate. Just because your homepage loads rapidly does not imply that your blog posts, about page, and contact page do as well. You can use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to get a score for any of your pages, as well as a plenty of useful ideas for how to improve them faster. The most straightforward answer is to compress any multimedia information on your pages, such as images or infographics. You should also avoid directly posting videos to your website. Place them on sites like Dailymotion or YouTube.

11. Secure your website

Last but not least, site security is considered for ranking purposes. Here's a high-level overview:

Sites with URLs that begin with HTTP are not secure.
Sites with URLs that begin with HTTPS are secure.

https://asmit2952.github.io/

Emails, passwords, addresses, and other sensitive information are all protected on secure websites. This makes it more difficult for hackers to steal your personal information. You must acquire and install an SSL certificate to safeguard your website.

If you perform any of these SEO requirements for your website, you'll be well on your way. This has only scratched the surface of what SEO entails. There's a lot more to it than that. I would recommend you to read through the websites listed below and learn more about SEO details.

Resources

What is SAWO Labs Champ Program?

Asmit Malakannawar — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 14:14:10 +0000

Hey everyone, you might have heard about different ambassador programs or student community programs which help students grow their soft skills and hard skills. There are tons of ambassador programs available, you can check a few of them here.

Today, I am going to introduce you to a new ambassador program called SAWO Labs Champ Program and tell you how I applied, got selected and my journey so far :)

What is SAWO Labs?

SAWO is an authentication solution that helps websites and apps, onboard users, without passwords and OTPs thus reducing bounce rate and increase conversion.
Check their official documentation here.

What is SAWO Labs Champ Program?

SAWO Labs Champ Program is an initiative led by SAWO Labs, which aims to uplift contributors who are adding value to the community using SAWO. This is their way of saying thank you to the contributors who help SAWO grow as a product and as a community.

In the Champ Program, there are two profiles:

Developer Champ: Champs who will contribute to SAWO SDK by using it in different projects, provide feedbacks to the developers and inspire others to use SAWO in their projects and join their Discord community.
Community Champ: Champs who will contribute by speaking and hosting community events of SAWO. They can publish technical blogs, write about experiences with SAWO, inspire others to use SAWO in their projects and join their Discord community.

How I got in?

I first heard about SAWO Labs when I participated in Developer Days hackathon. I joined the Discord community and everyone was so welcoming. Got so many insights on different career opportunities, got handful of great resources, made new friends, overall this was the best online community I ever joined.

Then in the month of February, I came across SAWO Labs Champ Program. The deadline for applying was 3 days away when I heard about this program. I quickly applied, and was hoping to get selected. I thought applying late would make very little sense as many people might have applied and got selected already. But to my surprise, I received a selection mail saying that my application has been accepted, and there would be a telephonic interview.

First interview was conducted by Animesh Pathak and Chhavi Garg, both were SAWO Champs from Cohort-1. I was nervous and hoping my interview goes well. The interview went very well, questions were based on our technical skills, what do you expect from this community and how would you contribute towards it.

After a few days, I got another mail, saying that I aced my first interview, and they would like to conduct 2nd and final interview round. This interview was conducted by Meghna Das, she is community manager at SAWO Labs. This was more of getting to know the community and why should they consider me as a Champ for this program. This interview also went very well and finally after a few days, I get a selection mail saying I was selected into the program!!

My experience with the community

After getting selected, there was an onboarding call, where all the Developer and Community Champs interacted with each other. All of them shared their fun little experiences, but the main highlight of that call was Prabhat Sahu. He made the onboarding call so much more interactive and fun.

The SAWO community is growing and has been great throughout. You can share your resources, hangout with community members, participate in weekly quizzes, get your GitHub profile reviewed!! My profile was reviewed by Aditya Oberai, and since then I have improved upon it and got so many new opportunities.

There are so many benefits one can get by joining SAWO Labs!! After getting selected into program, they made social mentions on their public profiles!!

Did I tell you they give out swags? Yes, you read it correct, after winning a weekly quiz, they send out swags to top three winners!!

Any Harry Potter fans here? SAWO Labs have divided Champs into four houses:

Gryffindor
Hufflepuff
Ravenclaw
Slytherin

I am part of Hufflepuff, which is led by previous Super Champ, Divya Sri Darimisetti

In this program, we are engaged in doing tasks which can be writing blogs, building projects, spreading the word about this community, etc. There are weekly fun sessions on Discord channel where all community members interact with each other. If you get stuck anywhere while using SAWO SDK, or have any doubts, you can even have one-on-one call with Super Champs.

My takeaways

In these 2-3 months, I learned a lot from this community. It helped me grow personally and professionally. With the tasks, support, and the resources they gave, I was able to learn how to work in a team, solve queries, manage my time and increase my engagement with online community overall.

Hope this blog helped you all to understand what SAWO Labs Champ Program is and how it can benefit you if you are a part of it!!
Do join SAWO community today on Discord!!

What is FOSSology and how to set it up?

Asmit Malakannawar — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 15:42:14 +0000

Understanding how copyright and licenses function, and being able to clearly and precisely express them, is critical to ensure that your contributions are suitable for use in open source projects, and that licensing statements accurately reflect your goals. Licenses grant others that wish to use your code authorization in advance. Being able to minimize difficulties and uncertainty is useful for both inside business projects and contributing to open source projects.

Whenever you install a software, or use a software to create another software, you have to follow certain license compliances provided by those third-party software. If you are working with a software, you must understand clear understanding of these three things:

Things you are required to do (MUST)
Things you are permitted to do (CAN)
Things you are forbidden to do (CANNOT)

You must also follow certain open source compliance practices if you want to build and ship open source software. It's critical to understand how this works so that you or the organization don't make costly mistakes when adopting, using, and deploying open source software. Few of the practices listed below are:

Identification of the origin and applicable licenses
Tracking open source software within the development process
Performing open source practices review and identifying license obligations
Fulfillment of license obligations when the product ships
Oversight for Open Source Compliance Program, creation of policy, and compliance decisions

So, where does FOSSology fit into this picture?

FOSSology is a open source license compliance software system and toolkit. It is essentially a web-based/command-line utility for ensuring software license and copyright compliance. Since, it provides a web based interface with a database, it has multi-user/multi-tenant support to organize all your clearing jobs.

What does FOSSology do?

The FOSSology project offers tool-based licensing identification. These are the basic set of features of FOSSology toolkit:

Identifying license-related texts
Aggregation of licenses in hierarchical view
Highlighting text occurrences
Identifying phrasing discrepancies in comparison to reference texts
Looking for licensing terms
Bulk processing of files with same licensing
Reporting of discovered licenses
Reusing of license conclusions

Other features of FOSSology are:

Copyright, authorship statements scanner
Export control and customs scanner (ECC)
Workflow integration with command line interfaces
Reporting
- SPDX RDF and tag-value
- Debian-copyright
- Plain text output
Files sorting in buckets
User, group and upload management

Now you know about the features of FOSSology, let's setup FOSSology toolkit in our local environment. This tutorial is for installation of FOSSology from source code in Ubuntu 20.04.

First you need to clone the repository in the machine using this command.
```
git clone https://github.com/fossology/fossology.git 
```
Once you have cloned the fossology repository in GitHub, move to that folder first using the change directory command.
```
cd fossology 
```
This program requires the lsb_release command, so we need to install lsb_release package.
```
sudo apt install lsb_release
```
Now we can proceed with installing necessary dependencies required to run FOSSology. There are a lot of dependencies which gets installed during this command. Make sure to add -y flag in front of your install script to avoid prompts asking for your permission to install the required dependencies.
```
sudo ./utils/fo-installdeps -y 
```
Now you have all the packages required to compile and run FOSSology. We'll now build the FOSSology project by running this command. There would be a few warnings generated, but you can ignore them.
```
make
```
Next, we will install FOSSology in our system. Run it with root privileges. Again a few warnings would be generated, but feel free to ignore them.
```
sudo make install
```
Once everything has been set up, run the post install script. This will create fossy user in your system and setup a Postgre database.
```
sudo /usr/local/lib/fossology/fo-postinstall
```
The basic installation has been completed. Now test this installation by heading over to http://localhost/repo and login with username and password as fossy.
After this start the scheduler daemon. This will start FOSSology on each restart of the machine.
```
sudo systemctl enable --now fossology
```
Start the daemon
```
sudo systemctl start fossology 
```
Verify that the daemon is up and running by heading over to
FOSSology UI > Admin > Scheduler and check for the Status
and click submit. It should show one daemon running.
You can also configure and tune your system. There's a detailed wiki which would let you manage disk space, configure PHP, optimize Postgre, etc. We will configure PHP settings in this step. By default, PHP ships with 2 MB upload limit, which is very less for uploading huge applications. We can overwrite php.ini file with memory limit, upload limit and set a timezone.
```
sudo ./install/scripts/php-conf-fix.sh --overwrite
```
Verify this change by heading over to FOSSology UI > Upload > From File and look at the maximum upload size. It should be
changed to 700Mbytes.
If the change isn't visible, restart your Apache server.
```
sudo service apache2 restart 
```
Now again, head over to that page and you should see
700Mbytes written as maximum upload file size there.

Now, FOSSology would be finally up and running in your machine for basic usage. You can still configure and tune your machine and use FOSSology according to your needs. Go through the detailed wiki here.

If you are looking for video tutorial installation of FOSSology, please refer this video.

Checkout FOSSology project on GitHub and join their Slack to interact with the community!!