Machine Learning Plugin project - community bonding blog post

I am Loghi Perinpanayagam from University of Moratuwa. I was selected for GSoC 2020 for Machine Learning Plugin in Jenkins. I am glad to introduce my mentors to this project. I was assigned with four mentors who are really enthusiastic to help me on kicking off this summer of code.

Student

Mentors

I learned about this open source program in my second year. But atleast I tried last year on a different organization’s project that was related to Data Visualization Recommendation for Data Science. But the problem was I did not contribute as much as this year and was too late in the application process. As usual Machine learning related projects have a lot of competition compared to other projects. I prepared on learning Data visualization in Machine Learning and existing Models for the recommendation system. Finally I wrote a proposal with the SeqToSeq model without much knowledge on neural networks at that time. And I did not communicate much through the dedicated slack channel. That may be one of the reasons for the failure. But the main reason was my latency for GSoC 2019.

Since the time I realized how open source is needed and helpful for the community, I have been passionate about contributing to open source projects. At the instance, I finished my internship in Bangalore, India in 2019, I immediately focused on participating in GSoC. This is my last year (2020) as a student of my BSc Computer Science life, I wanted to get selected this year as a student.

There was a guidance seminar organized by our department, I got to know that Jenkins had opened their project ideas. That was an extremely impressive beginning of my GSoC 2020 journey. I walked through all the draft and accepted projects in the Jenkins.io page. As I am already interested in Machine Learning and I am familiar with Java, I picked the most impressive idea for me that does not have an initial repo. That means I wanted to use my knowledge to think and research a lot with this project. But I had to contribute and want to know about the infrastructure of Jenkins codebase. Because that makes the selection panel easy to pick up the student for the project. Then I repeatedly searched to contribute to Jenkins. I found issues that were easy for me to work from the git plugin and git client plugin. I started to contribute some test issues on git plugin and git client plugin. After I got a clear knowledge on how a plugin works in Jenkins, I started working on the POC with the hint provided in the project idea page. Actually, that was fun to code.

Mentors have helped many students during the application process. I was able to do a working POC that had a minimum capability to do the task of the project. Finally mentors opened for proposal submission. I hurried to prepare a draft proposal. After I got reviews from mentors, I started to improve the proposal. At the end of the proposal submission, I was able to deliver a good proposal for this project. As I was curious about this plugin, I dug into more on how to integrate Jupyter notebook with this plugin. I published an medium article as a result of my research during the acceptance waiting period.

The result was going to be announced on 4th May, I believed in my project proposal and POC and I got selected for this GSoC 2020. Whoa ! That was a goosebumping moment in my entire life. The feeling was like Something I achieved. As a result of my hard work, I deserved that. For example, I spent 7 days continuously making the POC work without any collision between maven artifacts.

After the release of results, I was preparing myself for the community bonding. There are lots of interactions happening between me and mentors than before.I had to update my project page and my profile in Jenkins.io. We had our first meeting with lots of excitement and love on 10th of May. Mentors and I introduced ourselves even though we know each other. We discussed the high level view of GSoC and I asked some questions that I had in my mind. As my plugin was a new repository, most of the discussion was related to the repository and its name. I had to find a name for the new plugin. We had regular conversations about the blogpost and presentations at the end.

In the second meeting, We discussed the process for hosting a new plugin in Jenkins, tracking issues with JIRA, blog posts and high level road map for the project. And I suggested some interesting plugin names but they were not matching to the goal of the project, mentors told me to try other names which perfectly describe the project. I was advised to read all the research guidelines and plugin naming conventions. We discussed how code reviews will be done and source code management through the git. After this meeting, our meeting has shifted to the official Jenkins Zoom account.

Our third meeting was quite serious about our project planning. I had been preparing my design document for the project with the help of mentors before the meeting day. Hence I got lots of reviews and useful examples for my future work on phase 1. At this point, we decided with the plugin name Machine Learning Plugin which was accepted by all mentors and I created the repo and requested a Jira ticket for the plugin hosting request. We were planning to remind the Jira ticket within the next 3 days. Mentors want me to make sure I updated the Jenkins GSoC page before the community period ends. Lots of discussion carried about the design document that I had been preparing last week before the meeting. Some important points from the meeting notes follows :

Therefore, I had to work hard after this meeting, this made me involved in the project more. I have to put my huge effort to make this opportunity golden. Our team has the willingness to complete this project and will definitely help the Data Science community with this plugin. Kudos to my team for the amazing work so far!!!

This was my entire journey until now. Hope you enjoyed it and hope you learned the mistakes I made last year and corrected in this summer. Thanks for reading, and Stay tuned I will be uploading blog posts for those of you interested.