User:Enow97/Blog 3:Modifying Expectations

Hey everyone! Welcome back to another blog.

It’s been long since I posted. I'm currently halfway done with my internship at Wikimedia Commons and I think it's about time to post about the progress of what has been accomplished in the first half of this internship. I will talk about my initial project timeline, what has been accomplished so far, the delays I experienced, and what's left for the next half of the internship.

My Initial Project timeline

Initially, when I had to propose a project timeline, I was optimistic that I would stick to every goal decided for the project and will be working according to my plan. But when the internship started, I was introduced to the asynchronous nature of the work to be done, which took me a bit to adjust, and thanks to my mentors' guidance, I quickly learned how to adapt. The mentors were to plan my weekly tasks and at the end of every week we were to discuss on the progress of those tasks.

Originally, I had planned to follow a top-down approach in tackling my project. That's basically, reading about some basic concepts about the asynchronous API development with Flask, then testing my knowledge of those concepts, implementing them in the project, and finally submitting a push-request (PR) for review to my mentors. Also I had planned to have started working on the frontend of the Imagebulk tool before working on the backend to increase the number of file downloads, and then testing and deploying the tool.

What has been accomplished?

The timeline for the tasks I planned earlier has in a way been reversed, though some have taken more time than expected to be accomplished. For instance, I'm currently about to start the frontend of the Imagebulk tool, which wasn't the original plan. However, I'm so glad that most of the backend work has been completed, including extending the number of files to be downloaded, which was increased from 50 to 250. This task alone has caused a major delay in this project, as there was some issues with the Commons API not allowing files to be properly zipped for download. Thankfully, after series of checks with my mentors on the source code, we were able to pull through it.

What's left?

For the next half of this internship, my focus will be on the frontend of the Imagebulk tool started last year by Wikimedia Commons but which needs to be separated from the backend. I am super excited to enter the second half of my internship, and I am looking forward to building the frontend completely and linking it to the backend!