Community Bonding Period

Before we actually get started with the project, There is a phase of time known as Community Bonding Period. Each Organization have their own set of rules, workflows and hierarchy to follow. To get new contributors familiar with the organization this period is crucial. In this time, Students get familiar with the work to be done in their community, know their mentors, plan their project in more details, receive guidelines for contribution, gets resources to gain knowledge on any topic etc.

Talking about my personal experience, On 20th May I got to know about the selection, Then I got a mail from mentor about an introductory call which we scheduled. In that, All of us Me and both of my mentors Guilherme Amadio and Bernhard Manfred Gruber had a brief introduction. Further, We had more project oriented discussion about what part am I supposed to look on more often. Then I got some links to Guest Accounts in CERN which was to be used for further communication and activities. After, The first call, I was playing around the repository and had few errors and questions. So, We on the next week had another discussion call where they helped me get these things fixed. Then I was advised to start working on the project in order to get started. Mentors taught me how the reports were generated, How to generate CSV reports and I got to know more about perf. They shared few presentations and documentations by them which helped me in setting perf. Now, After this I generated the reports by myself, Converted them into HTML Table. At first I used a Python script using Pandas but It was not a good idea because it doesn't allow much customization. So, I figured out by myself and got those table by using D3.js logic itself. Then once the tables were on the page, I worked for filtering out them.

I also got cleared that we were working on CMS which is a general purpose detector at Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I visited the CERN website and had a virtual tour of the CMS. Everything seemed like a rocket science to me, But I was blissful to have even a virtual tour of it. I wonder how great the people working there might be. Meanwhile, There was a GSOC Global Summit on 3rd June. So, I have attended the whole summit. I have noted few learnings which I took from the summit. Here is an article referring GSOC Summit Learnings

Meanwhile, I explored more and more about the project and Now, I was able to explain to people that CERN has CMS detector which was simulated by Geant4 and I am profiling that software and providing the visuals for the same. I also explored the Phoenix software of CERN-HSF which simulates CMS, ATLAS and other huge models out there at CERN. Also, Currently the GDML file is not available for ATLAS so we could not add up the visuals for ATLAS currently.

Google " GDML " for learning about it and also for virtual tour to CMS just google CMS CERN

At the end of the period, I already had a rough progress to me made and things were under control. Now, It was time to get into the coding journey since the community period was about to end. I also found that, My mentors were quit amazing personalities. One was maintainer at Gentoo Linux and other was very good at Free Running and Parkour. They had really good work life balance I guess.