Interview with GSOC student - Shibani Shankar Dash
Wojciech Trocki
Hi everyone
I have the pleasure to introduce Shibani Shankar Dash who is working on the Graphback project done as part of the AeroGear community. Shibani is designing and implementing the DataSynchronization subsystem based on Kafka Event Streams and MongoDB database. Thanks to his work developers will be able to build distributed data streams that are easily consumable on the client-side.
Interview
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I am Shibani Shankar Dash, and I am pursuing a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar, India.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I like reading about the latest computer hardware, and sometimes play retro games as well as read comics every now and then.
Can you tell us about your GSOC project?
Graphback is a no-nonsense bootstrapping utility for GraphQL projects and the DataSync plugin adds support for building GraphQL backends with Data Synchronization and advanced Server-Side Conflict Resolution by utilizing technologies like Kafka and Debezium.
What was the reason for choosing this topic?
I was looking for challenging tasks that will involve research and nontrivial implementations.
I also wanted to learn how distributed systems work and how to work in true open-source projects like Graphback.
How is your project aiding AeroGear community?
This project will allow the developers at AeroGear to easily develop applications that have very complex requirements related to data involving a Data Synchronization engine for offline-first applications on top of established workflows and technologies like GraphQL and Kafka.
What was the most challenging element of your project?
The most challenging part of my project was implementing server-side data synchronization using the Graphback DataSync plugin. It required quite an amount of research to arrive at the most efficient ways of ensuring data consistency with databases like MongoDB and ensuring that our performance doesn’t suffer too much when we added these features.
Did you have any problems or obstacles when doing this project?
Back pains have been giving me trouble since quite some time, however during the project as my working times increased my problems with my back increased as well. I was left with no choice other than buying an office chair for my workspace but back pains have ceased since. At one point, it got so bad that I could not get up for days after finishing work and as a result spent an entire weekend sleeping, a first time for me but definitely not the last.
Any funny facts/experiences from your GSOC?
I have a really slow internet connection(less than even 1 megabit) and I generally have a lot of trouble whenever dependencies are updated because both build and install fails and I can never tell if it's specific to my system or happening to everyone.
Do you plan to be involved in Red Hat/AeroGear projects after GSOC?
Definitely, if possible.
Dara Hayes
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