magarcia

Midterm

‐ 2 min read ‐ - views

A retrospective about the work done during the Google Summer of code.

GSoC midterm just passed. I think it's time to do a review about the work done since I started the project. After this weeks working on Jangouts and using it regularly for follow up meetings I can say that I love it like it was mine. It's really rewarding to work on a project like that, not too big but with a growing community behind. Nowadays Jangouts it's in an early stage, at least this is what I believe, but with a lot of potential.

Work done

I have not fulfilled the timings defined initially by myself, but I'm really close and the worst part passed. Until now Jangots was migrated to Typescript with a new build/development process and it's a hybrid application with Angular 1.x and Angular 2.

Jangouts is composed of different components:

  • browser-info
  • chat - Migrated
  • feed - Almost migrated
  • footer - Migrated
  • notifier
  • room
  • router
  • screen-share
  • user
  • videochat
  • signin

The migration process for each component implies a conversion from Angular 1 to 2 and a collection of tests with as close as possible to 100% of coverage. The most complex component to migrate from my point of view are feed and room because are the component in charge of the video render and the communication with Janus backend. Probably router will be problematic, but because with new Angular 2 router it should be a complete rewrite.

Mentors

All that I can say about @ancorgs and @imobach is good. We make daily meetings (when it's possible) giving me feedback about what I'm doing, but with enough freedom to take my own decisions (whenever I give reasons).

Next steps

For the next weeks, I will continue migrating components until I can quit Angular 1 from the project. When migration finish, Jangouts will be an Angular 2 project with a quite complete test suite, so can be considered that my GSoC work will be finished, but this is not enough for me. I think a lot of things can do better:

  1. Restructure the project moving some login that now are inside components to services.
  2. Take more profit about Observables (probably using @ngrx/store)
  3. Improve the UI and the mobile UX (progressive web apps concepts will be useful here).
  4. Improve communication and community (a project webpage, better contributing docs, etc)