Week 2

The Code Sprint

The Fall 2014 UCOSP code sprint was held this past weekend, hosted at the Mozilla offices in downtown Toronto. I attended the thursday evening social gathering as well as the three days for the actual sprint. It was an excellent chance to put faces to the IRC names of my Freeseer student team mates, as well as one of our mentors, Joseph.

What I Worked On

I spent much of the sprint reading the Freeseer codebase and drafting a proposal for the project that I plan to undertake this term. Freeseer currently has a basic HTTP API implementation that allows the user to remotely record and access recordings on a machine running Freeseer in server mode. As it stands, however, a user is unable to remotely access or modify any of Freeseer's configuration settings. My proposed project for term involves writing the REST API for this system.

The first concrete task I worked on once I had received some feedback about my project proposal was refactoring the existing plugin classes with the intent of making their configuration details easily accessible for the future remote config API. I opened a work-in-progress PR (#589) so as to get some quick feedback and to make sure I was working in the right direction.

I dealt with a few other miscellaneous issues over the weekend, including learning to properly rebase my pull request branch so that it could be merged into the upstream master. I also opened issues for a couple of Freeseer configuration problems I ran into while setting it up on my laptop:

1. #575 was an issue with the dev_requirements.txt file missing the Sphinx dependency.
2. #577 was a sound issue caused by missing the required gst plugin for Jackaudio.
3. #578 was a video recording issue that was fixed by installing ucview on my Fedora laptop.

What I Will Be Working On

Over the next couple of weeks I will be working on refactoring the existing plugins to use PluginConfig classes, as needed. Additionally, I will be reviewing RESTful API design so that I can write the spec for the remote configuration API.