Bimalkant Lauhny has the coolest summer job. Selected to take part in the prestigious Google Summer of Code program, Bimalkant Lauhny, a 3rd year CS student at the National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, is spending his school break in the hills of Uttarakhand in Northern India integrating callstats.io with the Janus Gateway and the conferencing app Jangouts. But while physically working from home, he is a part of the global GSoC program, where thousands of students all around the world are honing their skills with real world tech challenges, all the while contributing to the open source projects and receiving guidance from the industry partners.
At callstats.io, we’re excited to be chosen as a part of GSoC. The task was devised together with the team behind Jangouts, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa in particular. From our side, our Client Libs Lead Karthik BR and Technical Account Manager Binoy Chemmagate have participated in mentoring the project.
During the summer, Bimalkant has integrated the callstats.io SDK with Jangouts, a reference application for Janus users, to activate callstats.io in the video conferencing app. This will make it easy for app developers working with Janus to monitor their conference stats and quality with callstats.io.
“I am a part of the open source family now”
For Bimalkant, getting accepted into GSoC was a dream come true:
“In our college, getting into GSoC, juniors look up to you and think you’re a hero, really. I’m grateful and excited to be able to learn and at the same time contribute to the software as a whole. I especially feel proud that I’m able to make a contribution to open source.”
“This summer has made me realise how invaluable the open source world is and how it’s helping ordinary people. Before, I didn’t know much about open source, but now that I’m a part of that family, I hope I will remain an open source contributor for the rest of my life.”
Crash course into WebRTC
Janus is a WebRTC Gateway developed by the Meetecho team. The self-hosted open source Jangouts (think “Janus Hangouts”) is a Janus based WebRTC videoconferencing app.
The GSoC project consists of two parts
- The callstats.io integration to the Jangouts service
- Integrating callstats.io with Janus, which will expose the health of Janus Gateway and WebRTC related stats.
Especially the latter integration has come with its own set of challenges for Bimalkanth, who has had to navigate incompatibility and data correlation issues. Now, with the project almost ready, he’s excited to share the outcome with the world.
Furthermore, WebRTC was not a familiar technology for Bimalkant beforehand. He originally envisioned that the project would be a learning experience in front end technologies.
Over the summer, however, Bimalkant’s had a chance to dig deeper into communications, peer-to-peer connections and the ongoing WebRTC standards development work. At the end of the project, Bimalkant is proud to say that he’s gained the WebRTC skills to create his own project like Jangouts.
The Jangouts integration to callstats.io will be released soon. In the meantime, explore the rest of our fast growing integration ecosystem.
