Subhangi Choudhary is working on Mote as an outreachy Intern. This blog post is her experience and project update so far.

Experience so far

I had heard Outreachy internship from one of my seniors who was sharing her experience in my college when I was in my second year. I decided to give it a shot with utmost dedication and learning after understanding how Outreachy can be a great learning experience – needed to excel in the IT industry. Outreachy helps people from under-represented groups and is a life-changing experience for a contributor. I feel happy now that I am working with amazing mentors who guide and motivate me at every step. This opportunity wouldn’t be possible without the support of my parents, friends, and mentors.
I always have shared my knowledge and experience with beginners, and this is a chance for me to prove myself capable and then help other people contribute to Open Source. I am excited for the next 3 months of knowing community members and helping with the project.

I am currently in week 5 of my Outreachy Internship and I must say it’s going great. Every day is a new learning experience for me with lots of new implementations, goals, and tasks. This keeps me motivated and afresh with the project.

Project update

Once the community bonding period was over, My mentor and I started working on detailed timeline and road map.

In the first week, I worked on the landing page of the Mote project and its design and UI. I was trying to implement a calendar from scratch in Vanilla JS. Thankfully my mentor recommended I use an existing customizable calendar plugin called fullcalendar.io. Documentation for this plugin is well maintained and has been extremely helpful as I started implementing the backend. I used the calendar to fetch data of all the meetings that happened in the last month. Once the calendar page loads, a function is called to fetch data and render UI.

However, it will display the recent meetings fetched in the calendar as events of that particular date. We made two views – week and month. In the week view, it will display all the meetings week-wise in the current month. We also worked on today button which will become active in the week view once you navigate to the current date. On clicking the meeting, it will redirect to the meeting details page that shows the minute. I adjusted the aspect ratio to widen the navbar controls to occupy the width taken up by the container for the calendar. But as it varied and changed according to the screen size, I had to do window reloading and set up the width so that the scrollbar gets removed and the calendar width is same in all the screens. I also used bootstrap theming and font awesome to change the colors of the month, week, today, arrow buttons, and the meetings block. I set it according to the matching theme of the Fedora. Also when the calendar was being loaded, the meetings fetched used to display very late to which my mentor suggested to first render the empty calendar and then use the indeterminate spinner that is rendered by default when the modal is loaded up to be replaced or removed when the contents have arrived.

After the calendar implementation, I worked on the search bar where in the dropdown I had to display the list of minutes fetched. It calls the function from the backend as we type the characters and displays results in the dropdown. By default, we see 5 meetings in the dropdown along with a ‘show more’ button which opens to the modal of the list of meetings happened with details like date, time, and channel name. So till now, these are the tasks I have completed under the guidance of my mentors.

Thank you for taking out time to read my blog and have a great day!