But what exactly is Melange? In short, it is a website front end to the database we use to both present information about GSoC and manage the participation of all the projects, mentors and students involved. Melange is a project that supports open source initiatives. Not surprisingly, it is open source itself and has participated as an organization in GSoC from its infancy.
The project was started in 2008 and developed primarily by a group of volunteers who dedicated a considerable amount of time so that it could be deployed one short year later. In the early days of Melange, the user interface was very simple. It visualized the underlying database layer with minimum graphics. Despite its simplicity and initial shortcomings it was a breakthrough, as a lot of tasks which previously had been completed manually became automated. The program could now continue to grow and scale with each year. By 2011 the layout was completely redesigned to provide a much better user experience. Since launch, almost 40,000 student proposals have been processed through Melange.
This summer we chose four students to work on Melange as a GSoC project and three successfully passed the midterm evaluation. They have all been working hard on projects that will have a real impact on both GSoC and GCI. At the end of the summer we should be able to resolve several high priority issues requested by our users.
Shikher Somal is improving the general workflow of a student participant. For example, student applicants will be able to rank their proposals in order of their own preferences. They will no longer have to rely on the organizations they applied with and program administrators to decide who gets to work with the student (which often occurs when multiple orgs like the same student).Denys Butenko from Ukraine is working on CSS improvements to make the user interface more responsive. The new UI will look much cleaner on different screen sizes, especially on mobile devices where so much traffic is coming from these days.
Our third participant, Piyush Bansal, is helping to make the Melange developer’s life a bit easier. Piyush successfully completed his first GSoC project in 2013 and has since become an important part of our community since then. This summer he is working on a continuous integration system. His changes are not directly visible to end users but are crucial to our daily workflow. We recently pushed to production a first release for which the developer did not need to run all the tests manually as a part of the deployment process. The buildbot did the job for him.
The summer has been going great and we are really excited about all the work so far. We have already integrated some parts of the students’ projects into the master branch. Is there any better evidence that a GSoC student can make an actual impact? And we are always happy to welcome new contributors. If you would like to make Melange even better, please start by reading the getting started guide. Feel free to get in touch with us on our mailing list.
By Daniel Hans, Google, Melange Developer
