User:Neha

About You What is your name? Neha Ummareddy

What is your email address? nehaummareddy@gmail.com / neha.ummareddy@research.iiit.ac.in

What is your Sugar Labs wiki username? soham_25

What is your IRC nickname on irc.freenode.net? un10

'''What is your first language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)''' I am comfortable using English, Hindi and Telugu.

'''Where are you located, and what hours (UTC) do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)''' I am located at UTC + 530 Hrs. I am used to work at nights as well, so can comfortably extend my work time as suited.

'''Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?''' Most of the applications or projects I have used all through and am constantly using have been open source. The OS [Linux], browser [ Mozilla], documentation softwares[ Libre Office, Open Office ] have primary been open-source. Even for college course work we are mostly encouraged to use open source. Though I haven't worked before with any open-source, I have been lately exploring it on these lines. I find this a opportunity to dive into the world of open source contribution. I wish to give back to community by my little ways possible. In particular Sugar labs is something which I find close to my heart, even as part of college I have worked with college clubs which are involved with teaching kids, during which we have always wanted to explore innovative ways to teach people. Sugar labs is one such platform. Sugar labs for me is coming together of 2 of my passions.

About your project What is the name of your project? Abacus JS

'''Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?''' Sugar Labs has been activities which run as a part of sugar shell. Abacus is one of such activity, which is every efficient for easy understanding of mathematical representation as well as calculations. With increasing practice it allows speeder calculation possible. As part of GSOC I will be replicating a Abacus activity for web using JavaScript. Various kinds of Abaci are part of Sugar labs Shell, which will be replicated for web. As part of this project I will be implementing various operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication etc. Parallelly I will also be making attempts to make it more interesting.

'''What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is from May 19 - August 22; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (27 June); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.'''

April 21 - April 28 and  April 28 - May 5 : Discussion with Mentors, Getting clear with project expectations, basic flow maps as to how to handle the project. Set up the required Framework.

May 5- May 12 : Get started with Javascript basic abacus framework

May 12 - May 19 : Build Abacus framework

May 19 -May 26 : Done with Abacus Framework

May 26 - June 2 and June 2- June 9 : Start with Operations

June 9 - June 16 : Tool bar and other additions

June 16 - June 23 : Buffer time for work review

June 23 - June 30 : Mid Term Evaluation

June 30 - July 7 : Complete tool bar and other operations

July 7 - July 14 and July 14- July 21 : Extend to different Abacii

July 21 - July 28 : Buffer week for work review

July 28 - August 4 : Improve upon as requried and based on feedback

August 4 - August 11 : Review and soft deadline. Get feedback and little changes needed.

August 11- August 18 : Final Evaluation. Pencils Down. Hard Dealine.

'''Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.''' Being a Compute Science major I have been involved with many projects even as part of course work and as part of my research work. I can comfortably work with python, C, HTML, JavaScript. Apart from coding naïve things, as part of my research I also tend to get involved with various fundamental issues of computer science like work at level of semantic data representation, Graph modeling etc. This way of working has helped me with a micro as well as macro level few of working at various domains. Being at college I have learned to handle heavy deadlines for various projects and assignments and knack of working with group as something with came as plus as we tend to do major course projects at group level. 1. Built a tag recommender system for book marking sites like delicious [ Information retrieval and extraction course project ] 2. Built a dummy Linux like terminal with functions for creating file, directory, to run basic commands like ps, ls, background processes, foreground process. [ Operating system course project ] 3. Built a game in OpenGl [ Part of Graphics Project ] 4.Built a automated political conflict prediction machine [ Honors project ] 5. Built a small applications to for kids to learn alphabets along with audio [ Random Hackers of Kindness ] 6. Built a optimal design for organizational hierarchies 6. Dynamic political Learning Machine [ Current Project ]

As part of course work I have also done many other smaller projects,
 * Built a TCP peer to peer set up implementation [ Part of Networks Course ]
 * Built a efficient working model which could manage database for a commercial organization efficiently [ Part of Data Base Systems Course ]

Project Codes : https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5j4t5hXoFgmVVdlNEJlUG1ubmc/view?usp=sharing PS : Due to proxy issue in college I am not able to update the latest code in git, Therefore have shared it in drive. As soon as it gets resolved will be sharing the individual git links to the projects.

You and the community '''If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Sugar Labs community, at least one of whom should be a Sugar Labs GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.'''

Abacus is medium to learn different representation of numbers and a visual way to understand various calculations. Completion of this project would be a step towards making sugar activities available as browser versions as well. I think with growing web activity the project would allow more people to easily access various activities.

“ As Sugar becomes more web-friendly, we can take advantage of web services and also facilitate our users to craft their own tools and services. It is fun and empowering.” - Prof Walter Bender [ Source : http://walterbender.org/ ]

What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?

I will get in touch with regular people on IRC and ask it over mailing list. Web being a vast source of information, I will try looking for ways to resolve at other forums and communities relevant to the issue. Googling will always provide some sought of insight into what the issue can be and in case of bugs there aways finite possibilities for it to pop up. I will try analyzing it in all possible ways, get required feedback from the above sources and try to figure out what is the issue. If I am still not able to figure out, I will move ahead with other tasks which are independent of it and wait till my mentor gets back.

How do you propose you will be keeping the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project? I will be blogging about the progress of the project and keep updating my mentor regularly. If needed I will maintain a git documentation.

Miscellaneous '''We want to make sure that you can set up a development environment before the summer starts. Please do one of the following: Send us a link to a screenshot of your Sugar development environment with the following modification: when you hover over the XO-person icon in the middle of Home view, the drop-down text should have your email in place of logout. Send us a link to a pull request or merge request you have made on a Sugar or Sugar activity bug. It's normal to need assistance with this, so please visit our IRC channel, #sugar on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.'''

Required changes have been made in buddymenu.py to display email in place of logout. Following is the link to the screenshot : https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5j4t5hXoFgmNHpGbkxVTTlxMXM/view?usp=sharing

Describe a great learning experience you had as a child. As I a child I was very inquisitive. I loved to experiment. I was involved with some or the other activity like painting, making something out of little things at house, writing little poems, which make me laugh when I read them now. I always came up with ideas to make a world with no troubles, a car which would run on land, air, water[ inside water as well, was inspired by submarines ]. The world of child is so subtle yet strong. Its a beautiful space which is open for everything no stereotypes, no fears, no boundaries, all that is need a artist whole can make it colorful them.

Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more? This is project as I mentioned is merging of two passions, coding and making learning more immersive. It has always been challenging to come up with something out of box to make learning a more fun activity. I have learnt abacus as a child and I think the whole idea of using abacus makes it more visualizable than trying to add numbers dryly. It is more fun to add up beads. On a abacus you actually see operations happen. These are just a few reasons for me to try to become part of this project. I hope to make impact-able contribution to it even out gsoc.

Please include the category tag at the bottom of your page the Catagory tag for 2015 GSoC applications.