GCI Task Ideas

The Perl community is so huge and diverse that no one person or small group of persons could possibly come up with one list of tasks, so we need your help.

Adding Tasks

Please add your suggestions for tasks that our students could undertake at the appropriate point on this page.

Here are the categories for which we need tasks.

• Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code;
• Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents;
• Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing;
• Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality;
• Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions;
• Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more;
• Translation: Tasks related to localization;
• User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction;

However, do keep in mind that the Google Code-in is a program for students of age 13 to 17. Proposing tasks of the complexity you'd normally have during the Google Summer of Code will be too complex and unwieldy.

The tasks we're looking for need to be able to be completed within a few hours to a few days by young students, often without much practical experience in working with the free software community. The duration given should be the elapsed time. Please reckon on students being able to work between two and three hours per day, but don't give any durations of less than two days. Ideally tasks should take less than four days. If the task is larger than this, see if it could be broken up into smaller tasks. Once a student claims a task they have that much time in which to complete it. If they do not do so, the task becomes available for another student to claim.

The are some examples of tasks on the main page. Some tasks may require close mentoring whereas others could be left for the student to complete reasonably easily with only moderate supervising.

Gnome's How to write a good task.

Signing up as a Mentor

If you are willing to sign up as a mentor, please edit the mentors page.

Reminder

When the time comes near to assign tasks, pull from the Test::More issue tracker. Do not pull before hand as that list is changing rapidly. In particular issues with the "Gardening", "Easy" and "Docs" labels. Please leave a comment on the issue that it has been made available via GCI so somebody else doesn't do it.

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Please use the example directly below as a template for adding your tasks. For further inspiration, see the full list of previously submitted tasks .

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Code

Tasks related to writing or refactoring code

Low Difficulty

Test the MetaCPAN codebase with the latest CPAN toolchain

Duration: 2 days

MetaCPAN currently runs on slightly outdated versions of its CPAN dependencies. We'd like to upgrade, but we're not quite sure if anything would still work if we upgraded.

This tasks involves getting a fresh installation of perl 5.14.2, installing all the MetaCPAN dependencies from CPAN, reporting all test failures in them, and running the MetaCPAN frontend and backend on it to make sure the basic functionality is still working and all its tests pass.

Medium Difficulty

Create MetaCPAN Author Brag Badge (Part 2 of 2)

This task relies on Part 1 having been completed.

Create a MetaCPAN author brag badge in the spirit of ohloh:

https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/8654/widgets/account_detailed.gif

The badge should not be a .gif like the ohloh example, but should be created with JS and styled with CSS.

Items which must be included on such a badge:

1) Author Name ie:

Florian Ragwitz" (FLORA)

where FLORA is a link to https://metacpan.org/author/FLORA

2) Author activity chart: https://metacpan.org/activity?res=month&author=FLORA

Items which could be included on badge:

1) Aggregate number of latest releases on author's page

2) Date of latest release

3) Author location information (with flag)

4) Some subset of author profile links (Twitter, Github, etc)

5) Some smaller version of the author's Gravatar

6) Aggregate number of ++ votes for latest releases on author's page

Duration: 2 days

Tasks related to research

Medium difficulty

Migrate from a Mediawiki database to a Perl Wiki database

Duration: 3 days

It would be interesting to search and imagine a tool to migrate from a Mediawiki to a Perl Wiki like Mojomojo. No tool or module made the job automatically.

A good way to do this would be to look at pulling the data straight out of the first database, munging the format, and inserting it into the target database.

See : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8069215/migrate-from-mediawiki-to-a-perl-wiki/8070895#8070895

Medium Difficulty

Create MetaCPAN Author Brag Badge (Part 1 of 2)

This task is the precursor to part 2. This task involves creating the MetaCPAN API queries which are required to complete part 2 of this task (listed above). The work involves:

a) getting to know the MetaCPAN API b) researching ElasticSearch syntax to create the correct queries

Ideally both tasks would be completed by the same student. You should come up with working queries for all of the required items in part 2 and at least 2 of the optional items of your choice.

Help is available in #metacpan on irc.perl.org and #elasticsearch on irc.freenode.net