My FreeCAD project was accepted into Google Summer of Code!

It's been almost a year since my last post, which just so happened to be about FreeCAD as well. It's been a busy year: I've been studying machine design, robotics; partial differential equations in general, and heat and mass transfer in particular. I've also been studying the source code of FreeCAD while honing my sysadmin skills by helping maintain project infrastructure. My hard work has paid off, and my Google Summer of Code project proposal was accepted! I'm going to be working on improving the parametric part design workbench and writing test code to make the module more robust for future development.

As a result, I've decided to publish my daily log here. I'll be posting weekly summaries once the coding period begins on May 30, as well as more in-depth ad hoc blogging on interesting developments over the summer. My goal is to both document my project and to produce a useful reference for other developers wanting to get started contributing to FreeCAD.

The rest of May is part of the Community Bonding Period, and so I'll ramp up to full speed with an introductory series of posts. Here are a few rough-draft titles to highlight my planned topics:

• Neovim as an IDE:

  1. Building your base, or practically pluginless

  2. What makes an IDE? An overview of features

  3. Unix as an IDE, or knowing your tools

  4. Neovim with Python 2 and 3

  5. Neovim with C++

  6. Asynchronous autobuilding with Neovim

• Distributed compilation with distcc

• Speaking source code: how to fix your first FreeCAD bug

• Contributing to open source communities (and FreeCAD in particular)