I apologize once again from releasing this quite late, but in preps for concluding my Summer of Code program, I've been working for longer hours trying to patch certain things up, and the toll of the program has been somewhat heavy. The good news is that things are looking quite good from my perspective, and I'm sure I'll be on track for the final submission period. This summary of the week will be brief because I spent most of the time reading reviews of my PRs and making fixes to things as requested by the reviewers.
Weekly Check-in
My mentors and I touched on a few topics, one of which was about the fact that this project's work would likely feature in Wagtail's version 6.3 release. This would mean a lot more time to absolutely fire-proof the code, while still giving us a good timeline for the GSoC final submission.
We talked about the overall progress report of the project and the fact that my RFC had finally been merged!
I discussed my Internet Connectivity issues which I'll explain later, and Storm hinted at me updating the fixtures file for the demo project repo to reflect the changes I had made in the admin interface.
It was more or less a very straightforward meeting, and there was a mutual understanding of the week's tasks.
Challenges
I couldn't do as much as I would have normally done for the week because I had a big setback: internet connectivity. There was a nationwide protest in my country (Nigeria), and in a reactionary measure (possibly as instructed by government agencies), major Internet Service Providers shut down internet services. I couldn't even load simple web pages anymore. All my meetings lagged, my GitHub refused to connect, and I couldn't even install packages for a proof of concept I was trying to do for the next major iteration of this project (outside the scope of GSoC). This internet outage happened in the middle of the week, so things got unproductive quickly. To try to catch up, I moved my working hours to nighttime because the Internet was a little bit better at night, long after the protest hours. I had to do this for about 3 days, although it was quite tough getting my body to adapt to the sudden change in timing.
The next challenge I'd say I had was with some reviews that had open-ended questions. This was not a bad thing in itself, but it left me in a position where I wasn't entirely sure which of the options would be best for any given process. I did push for some more experienced Wagtail contributors to weigh in on the questions and comments.
Again, because I had bad internet problems, I wasn't able to do as much, and therefore didn't have too many challenges.
What I learned
Most of all, I'd say that for the week, I learned about the inevitability of unforeseen circumstances. I felt deeply helpless and embarrassed when my Internet went off. I also found myself wondering about just how much of my life revolved around computers and the internet. It felt like a sign to go and touch a bit of grass.
I also saw the importance of having multiple backups for essentials like the Internet (although the backups I had also failed). Overall, sometimes things really are beyond our absolute control, but that's okay. It's life, and life has a way of humbling us all.
Thank you for reading this far.
Till next time.
Cheers. 🥂
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