[tor-reports] Tor Hackfest report - IITM

[Sathyanarayanan Gunasekaran]

As part of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras's techfest[0], neena
and
I were invited to conduct a hackfest on Tor along with a bunch of
other orgs(mediawiki, mailman, KDE) last week. We had around 12
students working on the Tor projects over 3 nights.

The students were mostly new to Open Source and we spent a fair
amount of time setting up the systems, teaching the basics of git and
introducing them to Tor and it's ecosystem. I picked three python
projects to hack on initially - Pyonionoo, Compass and Stem, but we
didn't have time to hack on Pyonionoo.

Some of the things we did at the hackfest -

* Sowmya hacked on Stem, she fixed[1] #7868(but Damian was too quick
  and fixed it before we could push out our changes :(; and started adding
  more controller commands to stem's control.py such as RESOLVE.

* Sreenatha worked on adding a tutorial to Stem - #7505. This was a
  fun task with the institute's proxy messing up every now and then.

* Govind hacked on Compass - #7834 and #7640. I need to review the
  commits and merge them once I get enough sleep.

* Sabyasachi and a bunch of others worked on fixing some integ tests
  for Stem(Damian beat us to it again) and then moved on to extending my
  half assed Torrc parser for stem and adding tests for it.

* Sourbh hacked on #7713(Stem).

* A bunch of people were completely new to Python and I spent some
  time running through the basics of Python and pointing them to
  proper documentation; a couple of others knew Python, but didn't
  know Flask(used by Compass), and I ended up explaining
  about the MVC architecture and how dynamic web apps work( .. using
  facebook as an example :/)

I was pleasantly surprised that students new to Python could grok and
fix code within 3 nights. They seemed pretty enthusiastic about
contributing Open Source at the end of three nights and hopefully
they'll apply to the Google Summer of Code program this summer for
Tor :)

[0]: www.shaastra.org/2013/main/#events/hackfest
[1]:
https://github.com/abcdef123/stem/commit/e755536fc8562bf0e1025d8479f3635808d2b1b6
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