User:Gouzouni

A: An introduction

• My name is Georgios Ouzounis. I am a fourth year undergraduate student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Aristotle's

University of Thessaloniki, Greece link (engineering bachelor include 5 years of studies in my country). I love computer programming, mathematics and engineering and I hope to be able to stay involved with them through my whole life. My native language is Greek and I can also use English very well. As the title of my School indicates, my current field of study is Electrical and Computer Engineering involving subjects related to electrical and electronic circuits and also subjects related to computers and engineering such as control theory, analog and digital signal processing, computer networks etc...

• Applying for participation in the Google Summer of Code(GSoC) is my first step towards real world software development. Until now I have been programming mainly for university projects so what I hope to gain from GSoC is experience and knowledge on how to create software to be used by others. I have never had any similar to GSoC experience and it is the first time I get in touch with a programming community.

• The past two years I had to deal with many university projects that required the use of software like Matlab or Octave. Using both of them I came

to realize the power of such tools. That is the main reason why I chose Octave. I have actually wanted to contribute to Octave long before finding GSoC but never found the nerve to try it until now.

C: Contact

• My nick in IRC, wiki.octave.org and the patch tracker is gouzouni (Gouzouni on the wiki). The time zone in my country is UTC+2

(Eastern European Time Zone) and this is not going to change during the whole GSoC period. I usually code around 17.00 to 1.00 but time is not really a matter. Mornings are good as well!

• Other contact informations are my e-mail ouzounis_georgios@hotmail.com and my Facebook account "Georgios Ouzounis". You can also find me in

Skype under the name (guess what :P ) "Georgios Ouzounis".

E: Coding experience

• I have been writing code in C and C++ for the last 4 years both for university projects and personal use. I have a very good understanding of these languages. I am well aware of the object oriented programming concept and I can use debuggers such as GDB very well. As far as Octave m-scripts are

concerned, I have been writing such code for the past 2 years mostly for university projects. I have written scripts for a wide spectrum of subjects such as optimization, image and signal processing, system recognition, control systems, machine learning and mathematics. I have very good knowledge of mathematics which helps in many ways such as writing vectorized code which is much faster than using loops.

• Other programming languages that I use frequently and am comfortable with are Java and Assembly. I have also used Python for some time. I am comfortable with using PThreads, Cuda and MPI and I am comfortable with parallel computing in languages such as Java, C++ and Matlab/Octave.

• I have no experience working with open source or free projects. I have good experience with being in a development team but only for small projects, nothing as large as Octave.

• The biggest project I have written code for is an Android application, a calculator, I developed last summer. It is about 2500-3000 lines of code. What I have mainly learned from that is if the small parts are well developed and documented then the big ones can be done quite easily. On the other hand, not being cautious in the first steps is going to be a big trouble on the later stages of a project. I was the only one working on that project so I had no specific role.

• Until now I have committed the patches #8379, #8383 and #8384. The first one inculdes the uencode and udecode functions of the signal package, the second one includes the peak2peak function of the signal package and the third one includes the shiftdata and unshiftdata functions of the signal package.

F: Feeling fine

• I am new to IRC but I have been using mailing lists for a while. I am also new to Mercurial and generally source code management systems.

I am comfortable with make, gcc and gdb but I wouldn't say I am a master of the last one.

• I intent to stay in Octave's community after GSoC is over no matter if I get picked to participate or not. I like programming and Octave's nature

(mathematics, digital and analog signals etc...) is what I am comfortable working on. I would love to continue contributing.

O: Only out of interest

• My access to Matlab was(and still is) limited only inside the university campus so if I wanted to work my projects at home and not stay until late in the campus I had to use other software. That is how I found out about Octave two years ago. I have been using it for the last two years and another

reason why I want to contribute to it, is to help make it bigger. What gave me a hard time was the lack of a fullest symbolic package, that is why I want to work on it.

• A thing that I had a little trouble finding an answer to how to contribute to Octave's development but I guess that was due to the fact that I had

no idea what a source code management system is.

P: Prerequisites

• For the past year I have been using Ubuntu 13.10(13.04 before) and before that I used windows 8. I have both these operating systems installed

on my laptop and I have root access to both of them.

• I have a 24/7 access on an Internet connection, a computer and a computer with my progressing work on.

• I am free to install any new software on my laptop.

S: Self-assessment

• After realizing that I was not born a good programmer (that was a long time ago :P ) I begun to appreciate any criticism. It's not that I like to be

told that I am wrong, but if I am, I try my best to correct my mistakes.

• When I get a project on my hands I usually have a good deal of questions at first. Mostly clarification questions. After a while and when I get to

understand what is actually needed I can say I am pretty autonomous both in working on the project and solving the new questions coming up. What I like though, is a frequent feedback on whether I am on the write course or not. I hate what some of my university professors do, giving me a project and meeting me again a month after to check on what level I am. I like a frequent, say every 7 or 10 days, communication with other members on the project or the mentor in order to check if everything is ok. It's the more frequent the contact is the better the outcome will be.

• My answer is yes. I don't expect to have everything figured out from the beginning but I like to have a decent schedule before starting writing code.

• Yes I do. I like to try many different ways of doing something in order to find the best. Since how will it turn out is not clear at the beginning,

throwing work away, even if it is a week's work, is a risk I am willing to take.

Y: Your task

• I have selected two tasks from the proposals list. The first is the development of the symbolic package link and the second one is the improvement of the MPI package link . I would really like to work on any of these tasks but the truth is that if I had to choose I would go with the symbolic package.

• I haven't come with an actual time line yet and here is where I would appreciate some comments. How realistic is it to expect to have the symbolic

package half or more done at the end of the GSoC? What about fully completing it? (By fully I mean having the main trunk done, there will always be something to add). I will add a time line for each one of the above projects after a while.