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

I was a little involved in getting Moira into GSoC, so now I’ll tell you first-hand how this little step for open source and a huge leap for Moira happened.

A few words about Google Summer of Code

Each year, approximately one thousand students from around the world participate in GSoC. Last year there were 1072 students, they were from 59 countries and worked on 212 open source projects. Google sponsors student participation and pays scholarships to them, and project developers act as mentors for students and help them join open source. For many students, this is the best chance to gain experience in industrial development and a cool line in a resume.

What projects are participating in GSoC this year? In addition to projects from large organizations (Apache, Linux, Wikimedia), there are several large groups:

• 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)

Let me tell you how Moira appeared on this list.

Preparing and submitting an application

In January, acceptance of applications for participation in GSoC began. We talked with the Moira development team from Contour and understood that we want to participate. We categorically did not imagine - and still do not imagine - how much effort is needed for this, but we felt a strong desire to increase the community of Moira developers, add a few big features to Moira and share our love for collecting metrics and correct alerting.

It all started without surprises. First they filled out the project page on the GSo website, told about Moira and her strengths.

Then it was necessary to decide on what major features the GSoC members will work this summer. It was easy to create a page in the Moira documentation , but it was harder to agree on what tasks to write there. It was necessary in February to select the tasks that students will do during the summer. And this means that we will not be able to take them and suddenly make them instead of students. When discussing with the developers of Moira, what tasks will have to be “postponed” for GSoC, there were practically tears in our eyes.

As a result, tasks from the Moira core got there (about the API, health checks and channels for the delivery of alerts) and from its web interface (about integration with Grafana, migration of the code base to TypeScript and transition to native controls). In addition, we have prepared a number of small tasks on Github , with the help of which future GSoC participants could get acquainted with the code base and understand what the development in Moira will look like.

Fighting the consequences

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

... and the explosion in the chat of the developers of Moira . There came a lot of active participants with interesting names and started moving. Chat messages changed the language from the Russian-English mix to pure engineering English, and the Moira developers in the corporate style began to meet new members:

"Good first issues" on Gietgub spread like hot cakes. I had to do something that I hadn’t expected at all: inventing a big pack of small familiarization tasks especially for new members of the community.

However, we managed and happy about it.

What will happen next

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

Useful links:

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

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