This is our blog series interviewing our 2019 Google Summer of Code students, who will be working remotely for InterMine for 3 months on a variety of projects. We’ve interviewed Laksh Singla, who will be working on upgrading imjs and imtables.
Hi Laksh! We’re really excited to have you on board as part of the team this summer. Can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I am excited to be a part of the team too!! I am a Computer Science undergraduate student studying at BITS Pilani, India. I will be entering my third year in August. I was originally passionate about web development, but after entering my sophomore year, I was exposed to a wide variety of fields in computer science, and hence my current interest is primarily divided between exploring new web technologies, understanding internals of computer systems and a little bit of data science (read above as I am confused 
).
I listen to rock music a lot and my favorite band at the moment (and maybe forever) is Queen. I used to play Basketball too but left it soon after entering college. I am constantly looking to diversify my interests.
What interested you about GSoC with InterMine?
After getting to know about open source, I was determined to actively take part in GSoC. One of the primary reasons why I was interested in InterMine was the friendly and helpful community of mentors and volunteers who enthusiastically answered all my doubts. Moreover, bioinformatics is a field that I have never explored and I thought it would be fun to gain some insight into it without getting much out of my comfort zone.
Tell us about the project you’re planning to do for InterMine this summer.
My project over this summer has multifold tasks, all towards a single goal – maintenance of the im-tables and imjs libraries. Following are the major tasks which I plan to complete over the summers:
- Upgrade current dependencies of the libraries
- Improving the test suite of imjs libraries
- Updating current docs to be more newcomer friendly (user side for imjs, developer side for im-tables
- Adding a few helper functions to query the intermine-registry data
Are there any challenges you anticipate for your project? How do you plan to overcome them?
One of the serious challenges that I will face would be fully upgrading dependencies of both of the libraries, as it has been a pretty long time since they were last updated and the Javascript/Web ecosystem moves fairly quickly. Mocha (for imjs) and CoffeeScript (for im-tables) on being upgraded broke the library. Although the errors encountered during upgrading Mocha were decent in number (approximately 200 total errors, 5-6 distinct errors), I was able to debug some of them down giving me a little bit of confidence that they could be overcome.
For CoffeeScript however, the whole grunt system has gone obsolete and the error messages are esoteric and non-informative. I am not certain that all of the dependencies for im-tables would be able to get updated, and might require a rehaul of the library, something that is not possible during the timeline stipulated by GSoC. If such a case occurs, I will make sure to create a doc highlighting issues faced, long term goals regarding those pending upgrades and hopefully vulnerabilities present in the old (i.e. currently used) versions of those libraries.
Share a meme or gif that represents your project
InterMine 
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