Community Bonding

I got involved with OSM back in January. Now its been 4 months and I think its the right time to make an introductory post.

I started looking for interesting projects, and iD caught my attention. The first bug that I fixed was pretty simple, It required me to fix a faulty regex. D3 was new to me, as I come from the fancy React/Angular land which obscures most of the internal working. My mentor Bryan was more than happy to help me out. After my first week I discussed with him about the possibility of an OSM GSoC on #dev channel. Which brought up a lot of heated conversation regarding the pros and cons of GSoC for the organization. The channel did admit that overall GSoC 2015 was a success. Which got me pumped up to spend my summer working on iD.

While this was happening I also started going through OSM wiki/diaries to learn mapping. I planned on mapping my college. My college and its surrounding had a spotty coverage. Since, I was a newbie I tried to map things I was most confident with. In India we call dormitories hostels, so I started marking my college buildings with hostel tags. When I showed my work to Bryan he was to quick to point out that might not be the case everywhere. He suggested me to tag all the buildings with University Building tag.

This is what my college and surrounding area looks like now.

One of the best things that contributed to iD was the multiselect feature, which I implemented with the help of Bryan. This feature took a lot of days for me to implement and gave me a good understanding of how iD works.

Another exciting feature which helped me build confidence with the iD code was the imagery offset. The earlier implementation of imagery offset was unintuitive and required a fix. This feature request required me to fix the UI and to make it easy to use. Know more about this feature, click here.

Future

I will continue with my investigation on the lane editor for GSoC. And learn more about D3 to fix some of the pending bugs of iD. I plan on writing about my progress weekly from now on, so that the community knows where I stand and give me inputs on how to improve upon my work.