Elgg Blog: GSoC Student Intro - Ravindra

Hello Elgg!

I'm Ravindra Nath Kakarla from India (blacktooth on #elgg). I am doing my third year undergraduate course in Computer Science at GITAM University which is located in Vishakhapatnam. I was introduced to Open Source two years back. The principles and ideas of Open Source fascinate me. Since then, I have been developing most of applications using the Open Source technologies. I can comfortably program in C, PHP, Java, Python and JavaScript. Web development is one of my favourite domains of programming. Some of my projects are hosted at bitbucket.

When offline, I love playing volleyball, cricket and listening to Carnatic music. I also enjoy cooking.  I prefer eating Indian and Chinese food. Soon after college, I want to join a Masters program in Computer Science abroad. 

My proposal for AJAXifying Elgg was selected for Google Summer of Code 2011.  I was introduced to Elgg a few months back and quickly fell in love with it. The source code is well organized and the architecture is elegantly designed which helps developers to get involved in the development easily. So this attracted me to choose Elgg.  Thanks a lot to the Elgg team for choosing me, especially to Brett Profit, Evan Winslow and Cash Costello!

Ajax functionality is implemented in a few plugins like messageboard and blog, but there are still many places which have to be ajaxified. Considering the hefty nature of the task and the limited time available (12 weeks), I would like to take suggestions from the community for identifying the places which have to be AJAXified the most and work on them first. Coming to my project, I planned the 12 weeks properly giving importance to coding, testing and documentation. My proposal has the complete schedule.

This summer is going to be more productive than ever as I am contributing a major feature to a real world open source project. I have developed a few web applications and most of them were individually done but Summer of Code is great opportunity for me to learn how community-based development takes place.  I am happy for getting into a community with awesome people all around!

Thank you all! :)

Evan Winslow

Software Engineer at Google. Elgg enthusiast. I wrote the Javascript and CSS frameworks for 1.8.

Latest comments