GSoD Progress Documentation

This wiki is to share the progress of the GSoD project, includes weekly updates and tracking of the progress report. Would be updated on a weekly basis.

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Project overview

The STE||AR has extensive documentation existing for it's project HPX.

HPX is a C++ Standard Library for Concurrency and Parallelism. It implements all of the corresponding facilities as defined by the C++ Standard. Additionally, in HPX we implement functionalities proposed as part of the ongoing C++ standardization process. We also extend the C++ Standard APIs to the distributed case. HPX is developed by the STE||AR group (see People).

The goal of HPX is to create a high quality, freely available, open source implementation of a new programming model for conventional systems, such as classic Linux based Beowulf clusters or multi-socket highly parallel SMP nodes. At the same time, we want to have a very modular and well designed runtime system architecture which would allow us to port our implementation onto new computer system architectures. We want to use real-world applications to drive the development of the runtime system, coining out required functionalities and converging onto a stable API which will provide a smooth migration path for developers.

GSoD team

Writer - Rachitt Shah
Mentors - Mikael Simberg, Hartmut Kaiser.

Weekly Progress report - Month One

The team currently identified API Documentation as the first actionable task that needed fixing.
Here's why was this identified -

1. Currently, the indentation style for is improper and less readable for users.
2. Users have trouble identify codeblocks and need to go over the complete documentation. The search function is also broken in some cases for APIs, which leads to users spending more time on looking for documentation than learning/solving their queries on the platform.
3. The current theme was identified as an possible reason, and is currently being fixed upon by the HPX docs team.

Week One

Writer on-boarding and formalities for the hiring were executed. This week involved lesser activity, being the first week of the documentation period.

Week two

The documentation team and the writer has their first standup. Agenda includes a proposed roadmap, and feature identification. API documentation was given the highest preference according to the HPX team, and it was agreed to work on API documentation.

Week three

The docs team and the writer performed installation of couple of themes for the Sphinx platform. Included testing 2 themes, with more being tested alongside for getting better results for the docs.

Week four

Ongoing with the API themes for Sphinx documentation. The docs team also increased frequency of the meeting, so as to improve efficency of the process. The team also floated a feedback form for our users to give the team an idea where should we improve from an end-user point of view. This would be the agenda for the coming weeeks, alongside fixing the APIs which carries higher importance.

Feedback

The team also conducts feedback sessions from the users, and is looking to expand the time investmemt in this area for further fine-tuning of the docs.