Community Bonding — GSoC 2022 with OpenMRS

Participating in Google Summer of Code was one of my primary goals. And this year, I was able to accomplish this goal by being selected for GSoC at OpenMRS.

I applied for the micro frontend project “Next Generation Form Builder UI for the OpenMRS Community”. The purpose of the project is to build and enhance the Ampath Form builder using micro frontend technology for OpenMRS Community.

Ampath Form Builder

Ampath form builder is an interactive interface that allows OpenMRS to build schemas/forms effortlessly. Users can create forms using their interactive form builder or by writing JSON in the Schema editor.

The current form builder is an Angular-js-based application. This form builder makes creating/editing forms more effortless. But the user interface of the form builder has various unexpected bugs and user experience issues. As a solution to this problem, the Form Builder UI can be redone using React JS with a improved UI and UX.

Therefore this summer I will be working with OpenMRS to recreate this module.

Community Bonding Period

Google Summer of Code allocated the first 3 weeks for community bonding. During this period interns are to familiarize themselves with the community, mentors and the dev environment.

During this period I joined the weekly micro-frontend squad calls, created a thread in OpenMRS talk, went through single-spa documentation and engaged in some tutorials related to react and typescript to improve my knowledge.

Until the last week, I was unable to contact my mentor because my recent mentor was really busy at the time. And finally, the administrators were able to assign two new mentors, Samuel Male as the primary mentor and Donald Kibet as the secondary mentor. Then I contacted them on Slack to ask them about a couple of problems I was encountering. And I started initialising the development environment by creating a new micro frontend module for the project.

On June 12th, the community bonding phase came to an end, and the coding phase began. For the next three months, I’ll be writing weekly blog updates detailing the progress of my project. So Stay Tuned, Peace.