Saptak's Blog Posts

FOSSASIA 2018 was my 2nd FOSSASIA conference and this year it was at a new venue (Lifelong Learning Institute), and for a longer time. As always, there were a lot of speakers and a lot of really exciting sessions. Last year I was a little confused, so this year I planned earlier which all talks to attend and what all to do.

22nd March (1st Day)

23rd March (2nd Day)

24th March (3rd Day)

25th March (4th Day)

Pycon Pune Homepage

PyCon Pune was held on 16th to 19th February but my association with PyCon Pune started long time back. The heart and soul of PyCon Pune 2017, Sayan Chowdhury was looking after the website development as well. After the first draft of the website was ready, he shared the website with me and asked whether I wanted to contribute. I was more than happy, was rather honored. First PyCon Pune, one of the web developers... Awesome experience.... After that slowly I started getting involved into deployments,  talk selection, scheduling and many more. I and Kushal even went on to website updating and other stuff in my vacation.By now, PyCon Pune was not one of "their" conference, it was more like "our" conference for me. So though it was just my second proper conference, I was super excited...

Unlike most others my main work related with the conferences was much before the conference. In fact most of the work was completed more than a month ago. Firstly, the entire website was made using staticjinja. It was my first experience with staticjinja but having worked with flask, it wasn't very difficult. As one after the other keynote speakers got confirmed, I was to add there pictures and details in the website. Then after few days, I got a call from Sayan saying we need to make a registration page. I was to implement a 3 column UI with all the details. As including bootstrap only for getting it's grid help would be too much, I wrote the grid system in CSS from scratch. Which might not be a big deal for most but since it was my first time writing a grid system from scratch, I felt great when it worked.

Static Jinja Codes for the Website

Then, apart from that was looking into the responsive UI of the website. Since no front-end framework was used, so responsiveness was also something I wrote a sketch. Yes, another happy moment for me. Then we started getting few contributors as well helping us with some of the components. So the next thing was to review and merge pull requests. Thanks to the already written grid structure, it was not much pain to make the other pages. And, obviously deploying the code to the server. It was a really great experience to be involved in the web development team of a PyCon.

Conferences for me was one of the ways of spending my GSoC stipend. This time we, a group of 4 friends decided we go together, book a proper airbnb apartment and have some awesome time along with the conference. So it was also an outing for us from the college days.

Conferences as I learned from PyCon India was not only for learning stuffs and listening to talks. It was more about meeting awesome people and getting to connect with them and to grow and help grow the community. So, PyCon Pune also I was eager to meet a lot of new people and to reunite with a lot of people I met before. Also, being a volunteer I had work to do.

So the first day started of by work in registration desk. I was late ( as usual ). But anyhow got busy with work, distributing ID cards, figuring out names, meeting people whom I have met only over IRC. Soon after, the keynote started which was followed by some pretty interesting talks. There were different booths where you could learn about some exciting and cool new tech stuff and communities. The venue was awesome... And so was the food (yes, I have to tell about food)... After the day ended with some awesome talks and meeting some awesome people, it was time for the speaker and volunteers meet. Got to talk with many speakers. And again I can't keep myself from saying, the food was delicious...

Second day was a special day because one my best friends, my ex-roommate, my project partner, Vivek Anand was going to speak for the first time in a conference about his project, Pagure with Fedora, along with Farhaan Buksh. I was super excited (and he was super nervous, I guess). And it was really good. Well, most of the things he said in talk he had already told me before but his talk didn't make me fall asleep (that's the best I can manage). After that the day was filled with sticker collection, tshirt collection, tshirt distribution, group photo and all the cool stuff associated with conferences. At the end it was all bidding goodbyes with promises to meet again on internet and in some different conference in some different place.

After that, we four friends - me, Vivek, Shubham(Bhendi) and Medozonuo decided to go for a movie. Well after all The Lego Batman has hit the theaters. I know this has nothing to do with PyCon Pune but after all It's Batman. So can't help but mention.

Medozonuo conducting Dev Sprint on Open Event with me

Next 2 days were devsprint. Few people were presenting their own projects. Others were contributing. I was presenting the Open Event Organizer Server project along with Medozonuo Suohu. The devsprint was at Redhat office in Pune. We got some 3-4 contributors who were really excited to know about and contribute to the project. We were ourselves solving some of the bugs that we were supposed to solve while debugging installation problem on Macs (yes, we need to improve the documentation). We managed to get 2-3 Pull Requests as well which was really good because we were getting new contributors which we really needed. There were many other projects including CPython itself which got a lot of attraction. I also sat there for sometime knowing about the codebase and scopes of contribution. Sadly, I couldn't contribute to it till now. Also, there were hardware devsprints which I was interested in but also couldn't participate.

Sadly, the second day of devsprint i was really really sick and couldn't make it to the devsprint. Had to spend the rest of the day in apartment. This was a little sad for me but after all the remaining conference was awesome. Meeting people I had met in PyCon India and SHD Belgaum again, connecting more with them, talking more than just tech stuff... Maybe Nokia and Conferences are synonymous - Connecting People. Waiting for PyCon Pune 2018... Hoping to start working in the Web Team again...

In The Heat of Code or CodeHeat, as it is famously known right now started when Mario Behling started a discussion with me about how to encourage continuous contribution to projects by FOSSASIA even after GSoC. The scenario was most of the time students or participants stopped contributing after Google Summer of Code ended because there wasn't much incentive or profit of their's in continuing with the projects. So we decided to give people a reason to continue. In fact why just continue? Why not get completely new contributors??? And without distinguishing whether they were in university or school or working professionals. So we got others in FOSSASIA team also to drafting the idea into a proper event. And thus began CodeHeat. The official announcement was made in September 20th. The coding started on September 25th. I was to be a mentor in the Open Event Organizer Server project. And the registrations started coming.

We had a huge number of registrations but sadly there were very few contributions in the Open Event Organizer Server project. Most of the participants were more interested and enthusiastic in contributing to android app development and our project got a little less attention. Nonetheless, I and Niranjan continued our own contributions and reviewed occassional pull requests we received. It was almost end of November and though CodeHeat was going great I wasn't very happy as a mentor since our project didn't get much contributors.

Then in the beginning of December few of my friends from college asked me about codeheat and said they were interested in Python. I was delighted and introduced them to Open Event Organizer Server project. Soon there were participants from other colleges as well. We started getting more and more contributions. Then there were 2 participants -  Shubham Padia and Medozonuo who were not only contributing but were almost competing with each other. The result of their competition was we got huge number of awesome code contributions from both of them in all areas from frontend to backend to even database improvements.

From implementing the entire discount and access code system to providing more options and making it more customizable for CFS to solving tons of frontend bugs and export functionality, I and Niranjan almost started having a hard time reviewing their PRs since there were tons of them. I was delighted. The project was nearing release more and more and it was reaching a stage where we can actually make an attempt to use it in production. I and Niranjan often discussed how we hoped these 2 make to the top ten in CodeHeat. It was almost like reliving GSoC from a mentor's perspective.



Finally it was result time. Though it would be wrong to say I was nervous but I surely was excited to know whether any of the contributors of open event organizer server project made it to the top ten. To my utter happiness not only did they make to top ten but Shubham Padia and Medozonuo made it to the top 3. I was really happy for them since they truly deserved it. I guess Niranjan would agree with me in saying that we truly loved mentoring them. It wasn't like they knew each and everything but they picked up stuff pretty quickly and showed their contribution in all aspects of the code. Also, we were later able to get their help in reviewing other's code which was really helpful for me and Niranjan.

It was a really wonderful experience, mentoring in CodeHeat, reviewing PRs day and night, sharing knowledge with others. I simply loved the experience. The icing on the cake was 2 of the top 3 were contributors to open event organizer project. A lot many mentoring experiences are on the queue and I am really looking forward to them.

PyCon India is one of the best experiences I have had in recent past. PyCon India this year was held in New Delhi from 23rd September to 25th September, 2016. Three days filled with learning, interaction, meeting like minded people; couldn't have asked for anything more. The entire was one of python and development and I loved it.

Day 1 - Devsprint

Day 2 - Volunteering Experience

Day 3 - Last Day

There are certain fields in form where instead of a single value, we need an array of values to be stored. This are fields under the same category but having multiple elements, e.g., Tracks, Session Types, Microlocations, Sponsors, Social Links and similar such fields. Now as we know the way of doing this using simple html is provide the <input> tag with property “name” as “<field_name>[]”. So suppose we want to save the names of the mutliple tracks, we will have something like this

But the problem begins when you want to update name of a particular element (in this case Track). How to do it? Should we delete and create entries again? That doesn’t sound too good, does it? So what should we do? Let’s see….

Delete. Save.

So as said above, one of the easiest way of updating is when you get the updated input, you delete all the previous entries and save the new data again to the DB. Well that works perfectly fine with some fields such as Sponsors because no other table have dependency on Sponsors table. But what if another table has a foreign key constraint on the table you are updating.
For example, Sessions depend on the Tracks table because a session belongs to a particular table. So what happens when we delete a track and then save it again to DB to update. Well, the old track with the actual track_id is lost, which means the session is no more linked to any track or may in fact even be deleted all together depending on your constraint. All in all its a complete disaster!!
Thus, as anyone can say, this is not a good practice. So what should we do?

Use ID to Update

Well, this might seem obvious that we need an ID to edit or update the information, but how do we use tor submit the ID so that it can be used to update data in backend.
On way of doing it is hidden input field. You can use an input field which won’t be shown to the user, but contains the ID(e.g. Track ID) which is submitted on the form submit. At the backend you can get the object(Track) using this ID(Track ID), update the values such as name, color, etc., and then save back to the DB. This is pretty effective.

Another way of doing is before the form is submitted, you can send the array of IDs as a data appending to the already existing form data using Javascript. This is also a really effective way of doing.
However there is a small security issue in this one. One might modify the value of hidden input field using javascript hacks or inspect elements which would then actually modify a separate Track which they might not have permission to edit. So, how do we take care of this?
For this we not only filter the data from Table based on the Track ID(or any other ID) but also with the event ID. How this makes editing secure and correctly based on permissions is, users can only edit events in which they have write access. So if they send a POST or PUT request with a particular event ID, they must have permission to edit informations of that event. And since we also filter using event ID so the Tracks ( or any such fields like Session Type) that he can edit will belong to this event which he has permission to write. So this way we can handle the security issue in the backend.
One last thing to take care in backend is suppose we remove a Track while updating which was previously there. So we need to delete this track from the DB. So we make a check whether there was so Track ID presently which is no more present in the form data requested and delete all such entries from the DB.