DEV Community: redoC-A2k

Career goals

redoC-A2k — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 15:23:33 +0000

For this blog post , I will be using blog prompt from outreachy .

Are you looking for a job, internship, a grant, a volunteer position, or some type of other opportunity?

I am fine with internship, job, type of positions .

What types of work would you like to contribute to?

Being a computer science student , I would like to contribute to technical/development work . Although I am interested in learning AI/ML technologies , so I am comfortable with contributing to AI/ML too.

What tools or skills do you have that would help you with that work?

For development work , I am comfortable with web developement in mern stack as well as working in java and c (GTK+) . For AI/ML , I am learning tech stuffs

What tools or skills would you like to learn?

I want to learn AI/ML tech stuffs . I am also fine learning stuffs related to linux ( for example linux desktops) or may be kernel too .

What interpersonal skills make you a collaborative team member?

I am comfortable in communication with other team-mates , I can upscale or downscale my efforts for matching my output with my team's expectation

What languages do you speak?

Well I am comfortable with english and hindi.

Are you able to move, and if so, which countries/regions are you willing to move to?

If I need to permanantly shift then I am only open to saudi-arabia country ( and it depends ) besides this, I am willing to be in India. If I need to occasionally move then , I am open to other locations ( but here is also it depeneds on the frequency and duration )

Are you looking for a remote job?

Yeah , remote jobs are best suited to me !

Are you looking for a full-time or part-time paid position?

I am fine in both

Outreachy: Mid way blog post

redoC-A2k — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 05:45:36 +0000

Time flies ! Now I have reached to middle of my outreachy internship. This blog post will throw some light on my journey till now .

Timeline

Initially when I applied for outreachy I proposed this timeline .

May 30 - June 13 => replace gtk+-3.0 with gtk4 library and fix all build error which comes while doing so .( 2 weeks)
June 14 - June 27 => Fix runtime errors ( 2 weeks)
June 27 - july 18 => Replace libhandy with libadwaita and rewrite needed ui files and fix error which come in doing so ( 3 weeks )
July 18 - August 1 => Improve custom stlyes to make app work better with dark theme ( 2 weeks)
August 1 - August 15 => Make app follow Gnome HIG guidelines . (2 weeks)
August 15 - August 26 => It is the time which I have kept as empty to adjust my timeline above in case I need to .

I think the timeline was fine . But fixing errors is not that easy as I thought back then specially the run time errors . For fixing these I usually have to go through code , run the development version of application then edit the code and so on .
And in this cycle I also have to occasionally consult the documentation of different libraries getting used in the project .
We have changed a bit timeline and the new timeline looks like so

July 18 - August 1 -> Debug and fix gtk4 branch issues
August 1 - August 15 -> Clean the MR code and improve the code quality
August 15 - August 26 -> Document the current gtk4 branch problems and what's left and start a discussion with the community (users, translators and designers) about UI improvements

Progress

I have never ported any application from gtk3 to gtk4 before so I wasn't much confident whether I will be able to complete my project or not , how much time I will need ... So I started coding on my end a bit before the outreachy timeline . Therefore , right now I am nearly on my timeline . I have changed the gtk library version from 3 to 4 and also some other libraries with which gtk4 wasn't compatible with. The application can be successfully compiled now ( so all compile time / build time errors have been rectified 😊 but still there are some run time issues and errors ) .
I removed some functionalities while porting the application ( not the primary functionalities ) as well as there is a lot of code has to be clean .
In simple words application is now in workable state but not in a complete working state .

Week-5: Explaining project

redoC-A2k — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 16:17:07 +0000

How I learned gtk and got into this internship I have explained in part one of this series .

About Gtranslator

Gtranslator is an application which helps translators to do translation of application from one language to another through po files .

I am taking example of rythmbox po file to explain a bit about GTranslator . Your file name may be in different format ( which does not have git branch and language name) but it should end with .po .

Red dotted box labelled 1 in above image denotes ,

Red dotted box labelled 2 shows a translation table which on left hand side shows the strings getting used in the codebase of rythmbox (These strings are originally coded by developers these strings are in English in this case) . Right hand side of the table shows translations which are done by translators corresponding to the original message to the language ( as specified in po file i.e. hindi in this case).
Red dotted box labelled 3 shows the translation box where translators write translated message corresponding to original message ( In this case the box shows the translated message in Hindi language)

So a general workflow is you go to untranslated message rows in translation table , update their translation and then move to next untranslated message rows .

Red dotted box labelled 4 shows translation memory box and notes comments in po file , related to which row you are on .

This project is now in gtk3 and my project in this internship involves porting it from gtk3 to gtk4.

Tips if you are starting to contribute to this project

That's great if you are thinking to contribute to gtranslator , You are most welcome! . You should join gtranslator room , you can ask there for help related to project. You might find some functions which are doing some thing other than what their name indicates , or some other confusing piece of code .. that's fine as this app initially was in gtk2 which then ported to gtk3 and now it is getting port to gtk4, So a lot of change has happened in the codebase.

How's the community and mentors have helped me

Initially I too was confused as the codebase was large and some random functions were there , I communicated with my mentor regarding those and it comes out that it was left over functionality from gtk2 and doesn't need to be used any more.
I then started working on project and pushed some commits , the folks in the gtranslator room were also there and always ready to help me . Even one of the room member reviewed all of my commits and provided me many useful suggestions .
These reviews helped me in identifying my mistakes , pointed me to new components in gtk4 which I could use to fill the gap for the components which are not in gtk4 while they were in gtk3 .

Outreachy Week-3: Everybody struggles

redoC-A2k — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 02:47:08 +0000

This blog post is on my progress till week-3 and vocabulary terms which I got to know while working on this project .

Journey uptill now

When I initally replaced gtk3 version with gtk4 version there were so many errors about 300 or so and double warnings 😵. Then I went through each error one by one , and figured out that I have to change some parent classes . Because now in gtk4 version , some classes have been made final which were not final in gtk3 and now we can no more derive from those classes . This was a big task as there were many components which were deriving from those final classes for example DL-teams page, projects page and Poeditor page some other components . The one which was looking toughest to me was poeditor page . It was a component deriving from GtkNotebook , we have to remove that component and modify GtrTab component as its replacement .

Some vocabulary terms which I got to know

When I started working there were many terms related to translation which I was coming accross like po file , internationalisation , localisation etc. I read some sections from gettext manual .

Beginning Outreachy journey with Gnome

redoC-A2k — Wed, 25 May 2022 16:08:44 +0000

This blog post introduces myself , how I got started as a contributor to gnome as contributor and what my project is about .

About me and my first encounter with gnome

I am currently in the third year of my integrated Master's Program at a tier-3 college in Indore, India. I am a technophile since childhood and in those days , I once installed kali-linux in vm (as google searches always show it was easy to hack neighbour's wifi with kali-linux 🤣 and cellular internet was expensive back then) but to my surprise the kali-linux looked very complex, then I again google searched and one advice got fix in my mind and that was "Kali linux is complex , start with a simple linux distro (ubuntu) and use it instead of windows" (A simple way to learn a tech thing is to use it). So When I entered college, one thing I was determined at ... and that was using Linux. I installed ubuntu Linux and loved the way it was beautiful and responsive, just one click and the application gets open immediately. Later I come to know that GUI which I am looking at and experiencing is actually gnome desktop.

From gnome user to gnome contributor

I then tried other DEs (desktop environments) . But sometimes they offered less functionality to get the work done and other times provided more features than needed, making them complex and crashing occasionally. Gnome is a proper match of the two. The applications in gnome were simple to use, stable and provided all needed functionality.
In one subject of our college, we need to submit a study report on an open-source application. So at that time, I decided to get to the development side of gnome. Although, studying big thing as gnome application, is itself a very big thing and I was a newcomer back then . Fortunately, that was an online semester and most of us submitted copied report from the internet.

How I get started

I looked at this repo. But still going through official Gtk documentation was difficult for me, I went through this book. But some things still were not clear to me. It turns out I needed to learn about GObject and then it became more difficult. Hopefully, there was vala which works with objects similar to java,c++.This playlist is must watch, after watching this and coding alongside, I developed some confidence and then following my principle (use tech to learn it) I tried to write this gtk app (although it is still work in progress), while working on this application I realized that a lot of code has to be written . So to get some idea what are good practices for coding and proper way to structure the project I started to understand gnome-clocks codebase and then one fine day I made my first MR .
But everything isn't in vala and how does gobject works that I still wanted to know , then finally, I found these two gems 💎 one is chapter 2 of "The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide" and this documentation.

Besides, I also asked many of my doubts on newcomers channel .

How I got outreachy internship ?

When I made my first contribution to gnome (!194 to clocks) ,
that was the time around february and in that month, I also filled my initial application of outreachy, then around 25 march I received mail that my initial application has been accepted. So when project list got finalized , I started contributing to Gtranslator . Then I filled my final application with contributions and submitted it. On 20 May I was on cloud nine , when I saw this mail in Inbox.

About my project

My task in this internship is to port the gtranslator from gtk3 to gtk4 under mentorship of Daniel Garcia Moreno .

Gtranslator is a gui program which helps the translators to translate a application , under the hood this internationalization happens with the use of gettext library .
In this porting we plan to achieve these tasks -

Updating Gtk version from gtk3 to gtk4.
Replacing libhandy with libadwaita.
Update custom styles to make app work with dark theme.
Adapt the app's ui to gnome HIG.

^{NOTE: All the books I mentioned can be found online for free with google searches . And second thing is I didn't use gnome-builder while writing vtodo app, I just followed youtube playlist way. Third I didn't read all the books completely , but rather just some specific chapters.}