Hey everyone! Akshay here, and I was a Google Summer of Code student chilling with Hydra (a cool sub-org of the Python Software Foundation). This summer, I basically split my time between two awesome projects for Hydra:
It was a seriously great experience, and I had a blast working with Hydra CG. I learned a ton about Python, the Semantic Web, Hydra, Graph databases, and a bunch of other neat stuff.
I’m super grateful to my mentors, Lorenzo and Kristian Koci. They were incredibly responsive and helpful, and it was a pleasure working with them. A big shout-out also goes to Chris, a fellow student – collaborating with him was awesome!
Below is a quick rundown and links to all the cool stuff I worked on over the last three months.
GSoC Phase 1
During the first phase of GSoC, @chrizandr and I teamed up on Hydrus.
Hydrus is basically a bunch of Python tools designed to make creating Hypermedia-driven REST-APIs way easier and more efficient. It taps into the power of Linked Data to whip up some seriously powerful REST APIs for serving data. Hydrus also uses the Hydra(W3C) standard for building and documenting its APIs, which is pretty neat.
I wrote the following blog posts related to Hydrus and its architecture:
GSoC Phase 2 and 3
Once we got Hydrus up and running, we started tackling different projects. I was in charge of the simulation to show off what Hydrus and the Hydra Core vocabulary could do. I also chipped in on Hydrus development whenever I had a spare moment.
This simulation basically mimics a bunch of drones flying around, trying to spot fires or weird hot spots in a given area using an infrared sensor. Pretty cool, right?
I wrote the following blog posts related to the simulation:
The simulation consists of 4 repositories:
The Hydra Flock drone and Hydra Flock Controller are basically instances of Hydrus with a mechanics layer on the top to simulate the behavior of Drones and Central Controller.
The Hydra Flock GUI is a Javascript application that uses the data stored at the central controller and google maps to render the simulation in the browser.
Summary of work done
There were a lot of Pull Requests in different repositories. Most of them got merged but some of them were closed as we found some better alternative to do things.
It was a fantastic experience, and I’m really looking forward to contributing more to the Hydra community and Hydrus whenever I can squeeze in some time!