GSOC 2015/Student Application aaboouelhamayed

• Your name: Ahmed AbouElhamayed
• FAS Account: aaboouelhamayed
• Fedora userpage: User:Aaboouelhamayed

Contact Information

• Email Address: alwahsh.ahmed@gmail.com
• Blog URL: https://ahmedabouelhamayed.wordpress.com/tag/fedora/
• Freenode IRC Nick: TheMonster

NOTE: We require all students to blog about the progress of their project. You are strongly encouraged to register on the Freenode network and participate in our IRC channels. For more information and other instructions contact Org Admins.

Why do you want to work with the Fedora Project?

Because I liked the idea of their project Design/GlitterGallery as I've been looking forward to contributing to something similar to Github without creating a useless clone of Github. Once I saw GlitterGallery, I knew that this project is what I was looking for. I've also liked the community of GlitterGallery and I wish to be part of it.

Do you have any past involvement with the Fedora project or any other open source project as a contributor?

Yes. I've developed a web app for KDE that collects and displays reports about the activity of their projects[1]. I'm currently the maintainer of that project.
I've also sent a few PRs to some gems that I used and found problems with or improvements opportunities. I've even sent a PR to the Rails project.
I've also contributed to the GlitterGallery project over the past few weeks[2]. I've fixed bugs, added new features, increased test coverage and refactored parts of the code to use best practice.

Did you participate with the past GSoC programs, if so which years, which organizations?

Yes. I was a GSoC student with KDE in GSoC 2013 and GSoC 2014.

Will you continue contributing/ supporting the Fedora project after the GSoC 2015 program, if yes, which team(s), you are interested with?

Yes, I'm planning to continue contributing to and maintaining GlitterGallery after GSoC. I also hope to get involved with other parts of the Fedora project with time. Websites team seems the right one for me.

Why should we choose you over other applicants?

• I believe I'm currently very familiar with the codebase. I've already submitted lots of PRs to GlitterGallery that got merged and that affected almost all parts of the project. Approximately 2k lines have been added/modified by me till now.
• 2+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails and Git.
• I have dealt heavily with Git repositories handling through rails apps in my project with KDE[1].
• I love testing. I've actually submitted tests with all my modifications to GlitterGallery code. A large percent of the tests that reside in GlitterGallery's repository were written by me(and more is yet to come as I want to get to full test coverage before GSoC coding period starts.) I've learned the importance of testing by making the mistake of not testing the code I wrote at the beginning of my rails life so I know how bad it is to not test.
• I know how to test complex projects. My project with KDE required mocking many services and preparing certain conditions for the tests. This introduced me to lots of gems used for testing and taught me lots of techniques for testing. Luckily, I used RSpec and Capybara which are used in GlitterGallery.
• I know how to deal with version control. This doesn't only mean that I can design a good application for collaboration between designers, but also that I follow a good workflow in my contribution to the project, using the advantages of version control.
• I try to follow best practice when possible. I've refactored some parts of GlitterGallery and planning to continue with that. This provides better code readability and easier modification. For example, I try to write a comment above each method I define and try to keep methods in their appropriate places.
• I am planning to continue maintaining GlitterGallery after GSoC. I'm actually looking forward to becoming part of GlitterGallery's team.

[1] KDE Reports

[2] My merged PRs to GlitterGallery