This is a guest blogpost from our Outreach Program for Women participant Jessica Tallon. Thanks for your participation Jessica, and for this great post!
As most who read my blog know, over the summer I have taken part in the Outreach Program for Women. I have been working on GNU MediaGoblin federation and the PyPump library which allows you interact with the new GNU MediaGoblin API I'm building and Evan's Pump.io. The time however has come that the outreach program has come to it's end. This is my "wrap up" blog post and for any prospective future applicants to Outreach program to Women, I can't recommend it enough, it's a fantastic opportunity.
I have learned many things over the summary from the inner workings of OAuth to database migrations. I've had to work with OAuthlib to interact with pump and GNU MediaGoblin servers and implement OAuth support for GNU MediaGoblin so that my client and others can authenticate with it for it's API. I've also learned a lot about the various technologies MediaGoblin use: Werkzeug, SQLAlchemy, unit testing, etc. There are also many things to learn about being in a large project with many contributors, working with users who want to utilise the work you're doing.
Both Chris the project lead, and my mentor Joar, have been fantastic throughout it all. Every step of the way throughout the summer they have offered their help when needed. I can't say enough how great they are, future candidates of OPW for GNU MediaGoblin are very lucky there is such a fantastic team. I also want to thank the other developers including the other Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women people, and also the great community they have.
So, what is the result of all this work? PyPump has been rewritten, it's now supporting liking, sharing, deleting, posting notes, images and has a easy ability to test as well as some of the core parts tested, not to mention documentation of a lot of PyPump. GNU MediaGoblin's Federation is not complete but, I have made some good progress and there is now a solid groundwork which to build upon. GNU MediaGoblin has OAuth1 support and support for some of the API endpoints pump provides (User endpoint and image endpoints).
So, where does this leave GNU MediaGoblin? Don't fear, while the summer programme is over, I will continue my work until we have robust federation (and probably for a long time after). My near future goals are to finish up the image uploading API and get it fully tested. I am hoping that this will make it into the next release of GNU MediaGoblin allowing everyone to be able to easily do mass uploads of images to GNU MediaGoblin, a well requested feature. After that I will continue to work on federation including web UIs and more API endpoints.
I am lucky to be flying out to Boston later this week, to celebrate the 30th birthday of the FSF and to attend the GNU MediaGoblin hackathon and their "GoblinCon" for the MediaGoblin developers! I hope to see you there but, if you can't make it I am always in MediaGoblin's IRC channel. (Edit: This post was written before the GNU 30th "GoblinCon" hackathon, which has now happened; see the FSF's wrapup post!)
A final and last thanks to the Gnome foundation for enabling the Outreach Program for Women to happen and all the work that's gone into that. I'd also like to say another thanks to everyone involved with GNU MediaGoblin, developers and users, it has and no doubt will continue to be a pleasure working with you all.
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