The Community Bonding Period officially wrapped up on June 1, and the coding phase is already off to a solid start.

During CBP, we successfully migrated the legacy 3DMR repo from GitLab to the new official GitHub repo. This cleanup made collaboration and discussions way easier. I also dove into pygltflib to handle glTF files, experimented with the obj2gltf converter.

I spent a good chunk of time mapping with the iD and JOSM editors, focusing on features from my home village. It’s oddly satisfying to see buildings you’ve walked past for years show up as polygons and tags. I plan to keep adding more local features whenever time allows. I experimented rendering both my mapped data and some iconic Indian landmarks using OSM2World, let’s just say it made my village look unexpectedly fancy.

With coding underway, my first priority was building out the test suite. The project didn’t have one before, which would’ve made every upgrade feel like defusing a bomb in the dark. I’ve opened a PR for it, currently under review. While working on this, I found a few minor bugs lurking quietly in the codebase for years, filed them, fixed them, and thankfully had those PRs merged.

The Django 5.2 upgrade is nearly done and is clinging on my forked repo as i am writting this… Most dependency updates and refactoring are complete. Now I’m exploring edge cases, making sure nothing’s hiding in the shadows ready to throw a 500 error when nobody’s looking. Once the test suite merges, we’ll be in a much safer spot to modernize the stack.

On the personal side: I’m a long-distance runner and have been using summer break to improve my endurance. I run 5 to 7 kilometers daily, a good counterbalance to all the screen time, long debugging sessions, and occasional existential dread that come with working through old code 🙃. I also have a few books lined up, both fiction and non-fiction, hoping to get through them—unless I get distracted again.

Being home for summer has its quirks. The internet here is… not exactly production-ready. It’s a noticeable step down from the high-speed Wi-Fi on campus. There were a couple of rough calls with my mentors early on where the connection didn’t hold up and I inherently fell back on classic desi troubleshooting: “Can you hear me now? No? Okay, let me try reconnecting.” Don’t know why and how that works… Thankfully, things are smoother now that we’ve found a rhythm with the reality.

This is also my first time communicating professionally outside India. Initially, I struggled a bit with my mentor’s German accent, and I’m pretty sure my own version of English caused some raised eyebrows too. In India, English isn’t our primary language, but thanks to a long colonial hangover, our education system has made us fairly fluent, at least in writing. Spoken English, though, often comes with a solid desi twist.

But all said and done, I have found myself incredibly supportive and encouraging mentors, we’ve found our flow, and thankfully, I believe the conversations have been productive and easygoing since.

Looking ahead, my immediate goals are to get the test suite merged, finish up the Django upgrade with final cleanups, and start prototyping glTF upload support and validation. The plan’s in motion, and it’s exciting to watch it take shape.

Overall, the project feels easier than it did while drafting the proposal, let’s see how we unfold.

- SUO Ayush Dhar Dubey