The final week of Google Summer of Code 2016

Submitted by Milos on Wed, 08/17/2016 - 19:56

The final week of Google Summer of Code 2016

It’s been more than 13 warm weeks since I’ve started to work on my Google Summer of Code 2016 - Mailhandler project. During the past few weeks, I finished the coding and worked on latest improvements related to documentation.

In the past week, the project documentation has been updated which was the last step before merging Github repository and Sandbox project into Mailhandler. Drupal 8 release section was updated and it summarizes the features of D8 version. If you are wondering where you can use the code I developed this summer, feel free to read about a real-life Mailhandler use-cases.

This week, I am doing the latest cleanups and preparing the project for the final evaluation. It is the second evaluation after I submitted the midterm evaluation. In case you missed the previous posts from Google Summer of Code series, I am providing the project retrospect below.
 

Project Retrospect

In early February, in an ordinary conversation, a friend of mine told me about this year’s Google Summer of Code program. I got interested in it since I took part in GHOP (The Google Highly Open Participation Contest; This program was replaced with Google Code-In) during high-school.

In March, I’ve found out that Drupal will be one of the participating organizations and since I did a Drupal internship last year, this seemed to be a perfect opportunity to continue open-source contribution.

Among many interesting project ideas, I decided for “Port Mailhandler to Drupal 8”. Miro Dietiker proposed the project and during the proposal discussions, Primoz Hmeljak joined the mentoring team too.

The great news came in April. I was one of the 11 students chosen to contribute Drupal this summer! First Yay moment!

The project progress could have been followed on this blog, so I’m will not go into great details about this.

3 months of work passed quickly and at this point, I can confirm that I learned a ton of new things. I improved not only my coding skills but communication and project management skills too.

In my opinion, we reached all the goals we put on the paper in April. All the features defined in the proposal were developed, tested and documented.

Google Summer of Code is a great program and I would sincerely recommend all the students to consider participating in it.

Future plans

The future plans about the module are related to its maintenance. Inmail is still under development and it seems it will be ready for an alpha release very soon. I created an issue about nice-to-have features of Mailhandler. This issue could serve as a place for Drupal community to discuss the possible ways of the future Mailhandler development.


Thank you note

Last but not least, I would like to give huge thanks to my mentors (Miro Dietiker and Primoz Hmeljak) for being so supportive, helpful and flexible during this summer. Their mentoring helped me in many ways - from the proposal re-definition in April/May, endless code iterations, discussions of different ideas to blog post reviews, including this one :).

I would like to thank my company too for allowing me to contribute Drupal via this program and Google for giving me an opportunity to participate in this great program.