GSoC'23 - Coding Period Begins
Hello folks,
The last two weeks for me were all about managing GSoC and the last few days at college. :)
I have started working on two interesting projects in parallel:
Following a topic: One of the 5 most requested features for the Zulip project overall
Apart from attending the contributors' summit organized by the GSoC Team, I was mostly involved in going through the subsystem docs (once again) and design discussions before starting the actual coding part.
Hats off to the Zulip team and the contributors who have maintained such detailed (150k words) and high-quality documentation. 🎉
Personally, it was fun to learn about the various design decisions taken to simplify problems like the "idle desktop problem", and "hard disconnect problem" involved with notification implementation in chat products.
The "soft deactivation" and "local echo" techniques that Zulip uses to reduce latency while sending messages were the other two things that felt like beautiful pieces of engineering work to me. 💙
Understanding the complete process behind RabbitMQ, Tornado, and Django working together to implement the real-time push system of zulip (long polling) was a bit hard initially, but it was worth the effort and time. 🙌
As a part of working on the "@topic mention" feature, I also got the opportunity to go down the markdown lane. (Well, still a lot to cover; some another day)
This week, we also got the question of how multiple smaller database migrations should ideally be handled.
do migrations with the server down? or announcing a maintenance period? or a series of migrations that can each be done without downtime?
We had a brief discussion about it, and it made a lot of things around database migrations in larger organizations clear to me. 🚀
Regarding the PRs, I'm working on:
We do a regular check-in at chat.zulip.org (all the communication around Zulip development takes place here) to keep everyone updated on our work:
#25640 and #25828 are the PRs I'm currently working on in parallel.
That's all for now!
Cheers! 🎉
ps: World Test Championship Final is starting on June 7, excited? 👀