Interview with Daniel Ko — Google Summer of Code 2021

Sep 7, 2021 by Armory

I’m personally excited about this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project try.spinnaker.io. Daniel Ko is the student who worked with Armory mentors and the Continuous Delivery Foundation to complete the project. After his midterm demo, I asked Daniel some questions about the project and why he chose it.

Nikema Prophet: What inspired you to work with the Spinnaker Project for GSoC?

NP: We’re midway through GSoC, have you had any challenges that were particularly satisfying to overcome?

NP: Do you have any examples of getting unblocked?

NP: What is something you’re excited about or looking forward to?

NP: Has your ​​experience so far matched up with the expectations you had coming into the program?

NP: Is there anything you need from the Spinnaker community right now?

NP: Any news to share or amplify?

Thank you, Daniel, for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer my questions. The demo looks awesome and I can’t wait to try out the beta!


Additional Insights from the Mentors

This year was the second year that Armory provided mentors to GSoC for the open source Spinnaker project. For this Armory blog post I asked the mentors Cameron Motevasselani, Dan Johnston, and Fernando Freire how it went from the mentor’s perspective. They had great things to say about Daniel.

On working with Daniel (and what he did well)

  • It “was a great experience.”
  • “He came up with a plan of attack, broke the project up into doable parts with milestones.”
  • It was an “ambitious project and he delivered.”

On overcoming technical challenges

  • “Daniel’s work touched many different areas, requiring help from different mentors. Having multiple mentors with a variety of experience helped. “
  • As a team, they implemented role-based access control (RBAC) to prevent abuse of service.

Advice for future GSoC mentees

  • “Be prepared to do research prior to diving into coding”
  • “Break the project down into achievable milestones”

A callout of Daniel’s technical skills

  • Locking down the instance and creating a plugin to modify RBAC was impressive.

A final thought

A great amount was accomplished even with a shorter project time this year.

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