Another great summer ahead with OpenMRS :-)

I had a great summer last year with OpenMRS, was selected for GSOC 2012-Dynamic Autocomplete and List Entry Widget and was able to complete the project's requirements.(The project is currently being integrated with the HTML Form Entry Module).It was the best learning experience i ever had in my undergraduate life. Till then i had coding knowledge but when i started working for OpenMRS it was not just   about contributing to the open source community, it was about writing code systematically, commenting the code,documenting the code, making the code implemented to be of use by creating tutorials for it, all this just about code. Now comes the mentoring and interaction of this specific community, they welcome you with great warmth, if you have any questions just open up the irc channel and ask it, however silly or complex your doubt is, it will be answered, if you have doubts about a specific module ping the module creator,yes they might be a little late in responding but they will respond,  if you still feel they are not taking your request seriously you can ask it in the mailing list. I learnt loads of other things as well such as mailing etiquette, importance of having calls, having my code reviewed, testing and writing my own JUnit test cases for the code i created, importance of following a framework model and the list goes on.... there are many others which i might have not mentioned. 
When i actually was selected for this project i had no idea of what i had to do next, it was a completely new  setting i had been exposed to,  i didn't know what was happening where and even eclipse was new to me, till then i wrote my code in an editor. My mentor Steven Githens is responsible for guiding me when i had so less knowledge of the system through completing the project successfully, he never made me feel pressurized even when i was behind the schedule, he always insisted that he wanted me to learn rather than worry about objectives and goals, i couldn't have asked for a better mentor!. Another great help was Darius Jazayeri, my backup mentor, if i had a doubt in anywhere,any module, i would ask Darius and i never got a no from him. It was like Darius knew everything! i couldn't help but notice an irc conversation which made me smile, where everyone were speculating whether Darius was a robot or a human. He got married last year at that time and still he responded promptly to each of my questions , great guy! Not only them, i had the opportunity to interact with others like Mark Goodrich, Ben Wolfe, Daniel Kayiwa,Saptarshi Purkayastha.

In short it was an experience that changed my life a lot and i thank everyone who is responsible for it.

This year again they have placed trust in me by giving me the project- Openmrs-SDMXHD-DHIS2 integration and my mentor this year is Roger Friedman and backup mentors are Saptarshi Purkayastha and Bob Jolliffe. Truthfully speaking even this time i really have no clear idea as to what needs to be done, but Roger started making me understand all the terms and what needs to be done. This time i guess i would be needing help of lots of people who are working in different modules as my project is the integration of those modules.I guess this year i'm going to make a lot of friends!:-).

I have to wait and see what else i have in store this summer. Thank you OpenMRS for selecting me once again this year!! 

Saludos!!(this i learnt from Roger ;-))