GSoC Student Application

[Adrián Blanco]

Hi,

I am Adrian Blanco, a journalism student moving to code. I am based in London and working as an intern for an international news agency. I consider myself a junior data journalist -that's my background- moving to journocoder. Until know, I have worked with Python several times to extract data from websites. Although I have some experience, all the projects were basic and in most of them I had to follow a tutorial or I have made it with the help of a developer colleague. That's the reason I want participate in this edition of GSoC to improve my level in Python and be able to code by myself.

I want to improve my code skills and contribute to generate a journalism community in coding.I would like to take part in GSoC in order to improve my knowledge on Python. I consider I have a basic level, so taking a look of the ideas proposed, I think in which I can help in these projects: 

-Simplified Scrapy add-ons
-New Scrapy signal dispatching

Let's talk about my knowledge of Python -and if you think I am ready for it, we can discuss and intermediate level-

Level

I think I have a basic level of Python but in order you can check it, here it is the courses I have made and the tutorials I have followed, most of them with the intentIon of scraping websites properly:

Courses

http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/python

Tutorials

http://www.gregreda.com/2013/03/03/web-scraping-101-with-python/
http://first-web-scraper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
http://blog.basilesimon.fr/2015/01/14/scrape-CENTCOM-data-with-python-and-beautifulsoup/

Readings:

https://github.com/veltman/learninglunches/tree/master/scraping

I also have intermediate level of HTML and CSS. And I am learning Javascript.

Benefits for me

-Online. I can assume it without forgetting my current occupations.

-Work with a mentor to learn and develop the project.

-Apply coding to journalism and improving my level of Javascript and Python.

-I want to code properly. All my senses on the project.

Benefits for the community

Help to develop a project and share all the knowledge with other young journalists interested in moving to code. Share the experience of the simbiosis between journalism and coding. 

This is everything right now, if you need more info, questions, instructions happy to attend them. 

Waiting for your feedback and hoping to be one of the selected students.

Thanks

Regards,

Adrian Blanco