This year will be the fifteenth Google Summer of Code, and 206 open source projects will take part in it. For 27 projects, this will be the first year, including Moira. This is our favorite emergency notification system built in Kontour.

I played a small part in getting Moira into the GSoC, so I'll tell you first hand how this small step for open source happened and the huge leap for Moira.

A few words about Google Summer of Code

Approximately one thousand students from all over the world participate in GSoC every year. Last year there were 1072 students from 59 countries working on 212 open source projects. Google sponsors the participation of students and pays them scholarships, and project developers act as mentors for students, help them join open source. For many students, this is the best chance to get industrial development experience and a cool line in the resume.

What projects participate in GSoC this year? In addition to projects from large organizations (Apache, Linux, Wikimedia), several large groups can be distinguished:

• operating systems (Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD)
• programming languages ​​(Haskell, Python, Swift)
• libraries (Boost C++, OpenCV, TensorFlow)
• compilers and build systems (GCC, LLVM, webpack)
• source code tools (Git, Jenkins, Neovim)
• DevOps tools (Kapitan, Linkerd, Moira)
• databases (MariaDB, PostgreSQL)

Now I’ll tell you how Moira ended up on this list.

Getting ready and applying

In January, the acceptance of applications for participation in the GSoC began. We talked with the development team of Moira from Kontur and realized that we wanted to participate. We categorically had no idea - and still have no idea - how much effort it would take, but we felt a strong desire to grow the Moira developer community, add some big features to Moira, and share our love for collecting metrics and proper alerting.

It all started without surprises. First filled project page on the GSoС website, talked about Moira and her strengths.

Then it was necessary to decide what major features the GSoC participants would work on this summer. Create page in Moira's documentation it was easy, but agreeing on what tasks to enter there was harder. It was necessary back in February to choose the tasks that students would do during the summer. And this means that we will not be able to take and suddenly make them instead students. When discussing with the developers of Moira what tasks will have to be "postponed" for GSoC, we practically had tears in our eyes.

As a result, tasks from Moira's core (about API, health checks, and channels for delivering alerts) and from her web interface (about integration with Grafana, migrating the code base to TypeScript and switching to native controls) got there. In addition, we have prepared some small tasks on Github, which would help future GSoC members get familiar with the codebase and get an idea of ​​what development in Moira will be like.

Dealing with the consequences

Then there were three weeks of waiting, a slight joy from the letter of happiness ...

...and an explosion in Moira Developer Chat. Many active participants with interesting names came there and the movement began. The chat messages changed from a Russian-English mix to pure engineering English, and Moira's developers began to get acquainted with new members in a corporate style:

“Good first issues” on GitHub went like hot cakes. I had to do something that I didn’t expect at all: inventing a large pack of small introductory tasks specifically for new members of the community.

However, we did it and are happy with it.

What will happen next

Next Monday, March 25th, Google Summer of Code website Applications will be accepted from students for participation in specific projects. Everyone will have two weeks to apply for summer participation in the development of Moira, Haskell, TensorFlow or any other of the two hundred projects. Get involved with us and let's make a big contribution to open source this summer.

Useful links:

• source on Github, developer chat и documentation Moira
• articles on Habré about Moira from developers from Accenture, Yandex.Money и Avito
• report on the architecture of Moira at the HighLoad Moscow 2018 conference
• others open source projects, created and maintained by Kontur

Also subscribe to blog Contour on Habré and our channel for developers in Telegram. I will tell in them how we participate in GSoC, and about other interesting things.

Source: habr.com