Summer of Code/2016/SugarLabs Websites Redesign

I. About You

1. What is your name?

Juan Carlos Murillo Torres

2. What is your email address?

jc@juancarlosmurillo.mx

3. What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?

Jcmurillot63

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

murillojohn

5. What is your first language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.

My first language is Spanish. I’m very fluent in English (595 TOEFL and lived in Boston for 1 year.

6. 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 live in Monterrey, Mexico (UTC/GMT -6 hours). Since I will have no other commitment, my work schedule would be very flexible. I could be able to work during the morning (8 am – 2pm) or in the afternoon (2 pm – 8pm). In case a physical meeting is needed, I can openly plan a summer trip to New York.

7. 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?

During my career as software developer I have always worked on commercial and private projects at large companies and private institutions. I think I’m on the perfect time to start contributing to the community by working on open-source projects, and the Sugar Labs project is an ideal project to start my career as open-source contributor. I would like to start giving back to the community that has taught me a lot, and helped me unconditionally on my developments. There is no doubt, that thanks to the open-source culture we have seeing many exciting advancements in technology during the last years. It’s time to be a part of it! 

 === II. About your project ===  We are looking for projects that will enhance the Sugar Learning Platform. Please consider how your project will have impact on children learning.   

8. What is the name of your project?

“Sugar Labs’ Web Appearance Redesign”

9. 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?

My project would be focused on creating new, modern and elegant templates, and on applying them into the Sugar Labs main webpage, the Sugar Labs Wiki, the Sugar Labs Planet, the Sugar Labs Translation System, and any other suggested Sugar Labs website

The new Sugar Labs websites will be fast, responsive, consistent, user-friendly and easy to maintain. By observing and analyzing the previously mentioned websites, I conclude that the crucial aspects that need to be improved are:

1) Consistency to communicate a clear and consistent message among all Sugar Labs websites by adopting similar colors schemes, navigation structures, font families, and content organization. Bootstrap or Foundation framework can be very helpful for typography and content organization.

2) Responsiveness to ensure that Sugar Labs websites can be correctly displayed across all mobile devices. Bootstrap or Foundation frameworks’ fluid grid system would be perfect for designing a responsive layout.

3) UI & UX to provide a very user-friendly experience by using custom, accessible and responsive web components. Polymer, Bootstrap, Foundation or Materialize are all outstanding front-end frameworks for the UI design.

4) Speed to reduce user waiting times by minifying libraries, local storage caching, loading asynchronous resource, and applying browser optimization. A CDN like Cloud Flare can be a very valuable tool for this job.

5) Maintainability to facilitate site maintenance to webmasters by implementing a modern CMS on all websites. It can be a robust PHP-based CMS like WordPress or Drupal (I have experience working with both) or a JS-based CMS like RespondCMS, KeystoneJS or PencilBlue.

By developing a robust and sleek web redesign, there is no doubt that Sugar Labs will have a wider impact.

I designed two possible draft for the top section of Sugar Lab’s main webpage.

10.    What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is from mid-May to mid-August; 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 (end of June); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.

11. 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.

Currently I’m a senior Electronic and Computer Engineering undergrad at Tecnologico de Monterrey (best LatAm engineering program), and I have been designing & programming websites, videogames and applications since elementary school (more than 10 years of experience with HTML, CSS and JS). During my professional career I have built and sold more than 30 websites and Web-based apps, and I have developed projects for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Research Assistant during 1 year), Avaya (Network Security Intern for 1 year), Banco Base (Mobile App Developer), Diestel (Junior Developer), and IMCSA, a Mexican company acquired by Babcock & Wilcox. Since 2014, I have represented Microsoft in Mexico as its National YouthSpark Ambassador.

I share the same strong passion for education with Sugar Labs; my educative project “Sin Miedo a la Corriente” was the first Latin American project being awarded the international Microsoft’s award “YouthSpark Challenge for Change”. If a get selected, GSoC 2016 will be my highest priority during the whole summer. Since I will be graduating on May 2016, I will be free to dedicate all the time that is necessary for the project to be a high success. For a list of my projects, please visit my website http://juancarlosmurillo.mx/projects

III. 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.

One of the strongest impacts would be that more volunteers would be interested on contributing to the project because they will find Sugar Labs online presence more inspiring, trustworthy and attractive. A website is a company’s face to world, so it must be clean, gorgeous, and friendly.  

Walter Bender (walter.bender@gmail.com) – founder of Sugar Labs- answered the following “I am hoping that the impact will be (1) a coherent, consistent message (2) an upgrade to our look to better suit the variety of devices people use to access the web; and (3) better maintainability.”

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

“The only mistake you can make is not asking for help.”. Services like Google, Quora, StackOverFlow, and GitHub cannot be taken for granted. I have been using these tools during all my professional career, and whenever I’m stuck, I use them wisely to search for helpful knowledge. This time would not be the exception. The Sugar Labs community (mailing lists and IRC channel) is also a place I would definitely look for help. In addition, I have a large network of tech professionals who I could ask for help.

14. 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?

A good communication channel for the notifications and work updates could be a dedicated section on my personal blog (http://juancarlosmurillo.mx/) . I can ask questions or ask for help on any possible unexpected problem on the Sugar Lab’s mailing list and the IRC channel. Google Hangouts can be a very effective video communication channel between my mentors and me.

IV. Miscellaneous

15. If you plan to work on Sugar-Web projects we want to be sure that you're familiar with web technologies, so:

• Clone the Sugarizer repository

• Using instructions here develop your first Sugar-Web activity

• Send us a screenshot of your new activity executed in Sugarizer