Attendees: Alyssa, JMM, Mark Waite, Kris Stern, Mukul Kumar, Jake Leon, Rajiv, Shashank Sah, Saarthak Maini, Sonali Rajput, Vandit Singh, Tabbie Mutiso
Agenda & Note:
- Question Mukul: “how to enter an unknown codebase”
- MW: You will spend a lot more time reading code then writing code because you have to understand first. Trick: run the product and see how it behaves. Watch it from a user experience and see how it behaves. Run the product from a debugger, set breakpoints on things you find interesting and try to hit them. The debugger is my friend for code comprehension. The trigger here is you discover how the code behave…what you thought you knew but you didn’t. IDE is your good friend can help you navigate code. Knowing your environment can help make your comprehension faster.
- JMM: 3 Tips: Look for tests that have integration. Reading the tests exposes more details. Alter the code on your local copy and add flags that you know and observe what happens.
- KS: Good practice to set yourself up as user first so you have first hand experience what to expect in every stage, the functionality.
- Rajiv: The best thing is learn by doing.
- Question Mukul: “I have a feature request, I created a function not knowing another function has already been implemented, now we have 2 functions doing the same job. How do I handle this situation?”
- MW: You started w/ writing the function, someone told you there’s a way to simplify it. You start where we are, simplify it, revise it, and keep going.
- Question Saarthak: “What advice can you give to negotiating salary?”
- MW: Salary negotiation is different from country to country. Plan for it and discuss with people that know the target company.
- Question Mukul: “How to reproduce a bug? Is it required to set up the exact same environment (memory, VM, etc)?”
- MW: Try first with what you’ve got because it’s local to you, it’s convenient and fast. This might be enough to duplicate the problem. If you can’t duplicate the problem that may be telling that you need more info from the person who filed the bug. It’s rare it’s environment specific. In this case you can ask for log files, diagnostic, inject additional diag.
- JMM: Try first to reproduce the sequence of steps. It is very rarely infrastructure related.
- QuesitonTabbie: “Could we continue to contribute via Github if we don’t get accepted into GSoC?”
- JMM: Yes, pls continue as you will learn and will have experience to prepare you for next year’s GSoC.