Akash Sinha
akash2607 AtTheRateOf Gmail [doT] Com
sinha at irc.freenode.net
Homepage
http://web.iiit.ac.in/~akash.sinhaug08
Country
India
Academic experience
Currently having Grade Point of 8 out of 10.
Have skillset : Linux,C, C++,Python,Java,Scheme ( a LISP dialect),TML,XML,CSS, JavaScript , AJAX, JQuery , PHP ,ASP.NET , VBScript ,Web2py, Servlets.
Current occupation
Currently in 3rd year of my B.Tech in Computer Science at IIIT Hyderabad
Projects
Developed a complete utility site from scratch : This involved modules like FaceBook Integration,Wordpress Bridging , Forms Autogeneration , Payment Gateway Integration, User Profiling , Advanced College Search,Data Analytics and User Interfaces. Site is http://junctionadmission.com Technolgies : XHTML, PHP, CSS, JQuery, MySQL, Photoshop, Flash
Developed the Complete Alumni Website of IIIT Hyderabad from scratch . This involved applications like forming Alumni Chapters and creating acitivities, Status Updation , Student-Alumni interaction interface and several other aspects relevant to website. Site is at http://alumni.iiit.ac.in Technolgies :HTML, PHP, CSS, JQuery, MySQL, Photoshop
Developed a spell checker that can do spell checking in any language .We exploited PYTHON’s Unicode compatibility.The user would provide the necessary dictionary which should be in Unicode format.User Levishtein’s edit distance approach which is independent of the alphabets that constitute the language to find out the closest match for the wrong word.Hence this algorithm was used to get the correct word for every wrong one.
Created a learning system having features like Search API,lecture videos,realtime Text and Video Chat between students.
Developed a calendar application,similar to google calendar currently being used at my university intranet.
Created a Courses Portal for managing courses for students and professors ,is in use for last three semesters in my university.
Created a Web based Online Finger Print Recognizer as a part of a course project whose basic purpose was to authenticate students as well as any outer person by matching their fingerprints with the one stored on the central server and also server could be accessed from the different locations thus makes the memory consumption economic.
Experience Level
I have been working on web based projects for last two years. I have got some good experience in using PHP,HTML,CSS,JavaScript,JQuery.
Experience in coding in general
For the last 3 years,did a lot of coding in my course projects/assignment in C,C++,Java,Python,PHP and Scheme.
Did very much amount of coding in all kinds of languages.
Started 2008
Experience in Python coding
Yes,did a course on python and coded lots of codes in python in that semester and also Worked on some python course projects.
Developed a web based online reading system in web2py which is python based framework.
Started 2009,lots of programming in the course itself and in projects in web2py . (More than 150 hours)
Experience in HTML
started in 2009,A lot ( More than 200 hours).
Experience in CSS
started in 2009,A lot ( More than 200 hours)..
Experience in JavaScript/JQuery
started in 2009,A lot ( More than 300 hours).
Favourite programming language(s)
C/C++ ,
PHP ,
Python ,
Java
Tools you use for development
Vim,Netbeans
Did you already do full day work (8h/5d) over some weeks on some software project yet?
Yes, worked as a summer intern on 40 hours a week for 3 months.
And also Worked as a semester intern on 20 hours a week for 4 months.
I am dedicated to what i do,i will definitely give that much time which will be required to complete the work in consistent manner.
Project for Gsoc 2011
UI improvements in MoinMoin wiki
Abstract:
UI improvements is very important issue as the currently designed interface base for displaying the content is not very much intutive and also by doing some nice improvements we can provide a good infrastructure for the themes.
I will try to add nice views for the contents and items.I will try to add some good look in appearance by re-arranging the content by editing templates ( jinja2 editing ) and adding CSS.I will try to enhance the usability by adding Javascript/jquery actions on the pages and alo try to enhance some currently implemented feature.
Proposal timeline :
Before 30th April :
I will make myself familiar completely with MoinMoin's functionality and architecture,like how it works from the point of calling a url,how does a function get called in views etc.I guess the best way would be by going through the documentation more than once.
- I Will study in details regarding the usage and implementation of Jinja2 and Flask and also Flatland .
To familiarize myself more regarding UI implementation of wikis by seeing and analysing the design of other available wikis like Mediawiki,Xwiki etc and like what kind of views and feature they provide which is crucial and missing in MoinMoin.
- To do some coding for some easy to do features and trying to get them merged , to make myself comfortable for coding in moin and will get more ideas of coding standard,moin's architecture and version control system (as here its mercurial).
I will remain in constant touch with my mentor and the MoinMoin community by getting active on #moin-dev channel at IRC to discuss regarding the UI features
30th April to 7th May :
I have Endsem exams in my university so wont be able to spend much time.
7th to 20th May:
- Will discuss with the mentors regarding the plan layout and what features are needed to be there , which currently implemenetd feature needed to be improved and what is the priorities of different one such that we could complete most of the important ones in summer itself.
- Which method is to be adopted like using Jquery over javascript for better scalability or using ajax in place of page reloading for smaller content fetching.
- What issues needed to be taken care of while coding like test scenario of a feature e.g. what to do in javascript disabled environment for a feature.
23rd May - 5th July
- Will start coding for the features, discussing the issues faced with mentor and showing them the work periodically .
- Will do documentation of whatever i am adding to the code.
5th July - 15th July
- Will propose the implemented features for merging by doing some good testing over them in different environment and test cases.
15th July - 5th August
- Will improve the functionality of the features if required.
- May have to add some new feature that could be useful and could be easily done by taking support of previosly implemented one.
5th August - 25th August
- Will finalize the documentation of my work and all the features which have been implemented.
Some of my ideas regarding the features :
- We could add a tree like indexing in the index page of a item and also could provide the option for renaming/removing any item from there itself.
moving? copy?
- Adding auto completion of search input for a item using ajax.
- Add a section on the page for Related pages and Most viewed pages.
- Can provide the history of pages a user navugated in his last session.We could use Cookie management here for doing that.
this is similiar to the pagetrail? use an account in a moin-2 wiki and look below the item name
- Adding option to change font size of the content,could be helpful for the users with vision problem and in some other scenarions also.
look also on the alrernate css style sheets developed by students during GCI2010
Please add more ideas also look at GoogleSoc2011/InitialProjectIdeas#UI_improvements. You can also look at all views or modify tools currently implemented and suggest improvements. Because you have plenty of time in between May 23rd and August 22nd. E.g. if you think that you have much time left you can also suggest what you want to do after midterm, e.g. goal after midterm to implement mediawiki like theme. We need a list what you want to do and what is doable and it needs to cover work time over the whole period of the contest.
Below section Updated by Akash Sinha
My ideas
1) We could add a tree like indexing in the index page of a item and also could provide the few more options out there ,such as
i) Renaming item : We can open a popup box (or a inline renaming could be done but comment option will not be there) and give option to either short rename or full rename like for item abc/xyz we can have option to edit xyz part(such that parent wont get changed) or the whole part.
ii) Destroying item : Give option to delete a item on one click (ofcourse first a warning will be issued )
iii)Copying : Similar to rename.
iv)Moving : Changing the parent of the item ,could be done by just drag and drop the item below its parent in tree indexing.(dont know whether this kind of quickness in action is required or not, in this case.)
For all the above methods,ajax with Jquery will be used and also will have to add few new templates for each actions.
2) Adding auto completion of search input for a item using ajax.
We can show the list of items, similar to so far entered text in search box.In this case i guess just searching over the item titles will suffice ,as more advanced search will be used after submitting the form.
After adding each character in textbox by the user, a ajax function will make a call in the backend and will fetch the data in json/html format and will display in suggestions box just below the searchbox.
3)Showing the author list - means who has contributed in what pages
I guess this is to be done from scracth ,from writing the underlying python function to creating the view for it. This view could be filtered by author basis.
And also by using these datas we can add some 'karma' (say 'sitare' i.e stars in english ) like thing to user profile which shows how active a user is towards contribution to the wiki.
4) Improving Global history view, Adding cutsom icon for each action and mime type
Could be grouped in day wise/month wise (as done in moin1.9)
And adding a filter option like filter on date basis ( e.g from 1/Jan/2010 to 10/Feb/2011 OR just Jan/2010 to Feb/2011 as done in Mediawiki ) ,as currently in moin1.9 it is for last 10,20,90 days ,so in moin2 we can provide both the options )
5) Global index should be categorised alphabetically : Like rather than just showing the flat index we can have all items grouped alphabetically..
Eg. there are items: Ant , Bat , Apple , Cool , Ant/Egg , Ant/Egg/Fun , like this ..so in global indexing under category A -> we will show Ant,Apple under E-> we will show Egg and under F we will show Fun..like this
We could choose which option to keep whether tree like navigation or this alphabetic one or could be both.
6) Sliding-Notification at the top of page : we could use animating view of notification at the top of page ..something similar in twitter,and no need to reload page just to clear the notification ,just will put a hide button.
We could use some onload jquery function which checks if that notification section is there on page or not and if it is we will just show it in sliding down motion. (simliar thing is done in web2py)
7) Showing inline diff ,we could show somewhat similar to [[ http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/InlineDiff | pmwiki ]]
I have come to this code for doing such thing but it is showing character wise diff,i will have to workout it with words rather than characters.
code : diff.py
In above for each kind of opcode we will add a different style ,which will be more intuitive for each action,eg. showing line-through thw words whic got deleted. I guess i need to wokr out more with difflib python library to get the perfect output.
8) Showng the tags associated with each items in bottom of the item page and also we could also give option to show meta there only,like we can load them using ajax and no need to go to the different page just to see the meta elements.
9) Adding an option of Random Page on top..just to give start to user OR on top of each page we could option of next page (something similar is done on blogspot blogs).
Also we can add a section of related pages in bottom of each page,this will me something similar to "Like pages" done in moin1.9x .
Why i am suitable ?
I am pretty much comfortable in python,hmtl,css,javascript/jquery and got a good start in jinja2 templating.I have past experience of working in several projects single handeldly and also in a co-operative environment.I am very much eager to learn useful and cool technologies which could improve my knowledge in the field.
I guess with the help of these skills and desing and usability skills,will be able to complete the task.
Further contributions
I am also willing to be the part of MoinMoin community for a longer period of time i.e even after the Gsoc period i will be contributing to the project.
Other Engagements
For the entire summer i.e mid May to start of August i will be having summer break in my university,so there wont be any exam or any such indulgence. So for this period of time I will be able to concentrate fully on my gsoc project.