Hi ! This blog post is a summary of the awesome experience that I had throughout the Google Summer of Code 2017 working with the Project Teem under Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Security, Harvard University. I would like to thank Berkman Klein Center for selecting me for the project Teem for this summer!
While writing this post I was thinking, how fast did we reach the end of Google Summer of Code? Really, time just flies when you start enjoying something!
Introduction to the project
Teem is a web application meant for collaborative development through commons based peer production. I liked the idea that Teem is a decentralised application, meaning that you can host on your own! As I was reading a bit about decentralised technologies I found an interest in contributing towards Teem!
I started exploring the suggested ideas page given by Berkman and there was one line written over there that caught my attention and there was one line that caught my attention, it was:
Internet applications do not exist as independent islands but rather as a part of a live ecosystem where everything is connected.
I started darfting my proposal keeping in mind the above written line and hence came up with the proposal containing three major goals to be covered over the entire summer. These 3 major goals were:
Link previews in Teem
We all like to see how facebook or whatsapp show us a small contextual link preview of the URL’s we paste in the those websites. Why not add this to Teem also, after all our goal is to have a application that is an all round place for collaborative development. We don’t want this place to be lagging from other social web applications!
Better sharing of Teem pages
Since Teem entirely depends on javascript for rendering all the data, we need to take care in some cases where data has to be fetched by a web crawler. Since a web crawler will not allow Teem to execute javascript, it will not be able to render any useful data. Thus, in order to have better sharing on social networking sites, I decided to add this as the next goal.
Integrating third-party apps
We want Teem to be a one stop collaborative development environment and in order to do so, we have to add integrations in Teem that allow people to do more! So I decided to work on to integrate Trello with Teem so that people can better track what work they have done!
With all this given in the proposal I was ready to start the summer.