Community bonding ran from May 1 to May 24, and for me it was almost entirely about planning and aligning with my mentors before writing a single line of code. It kicked off with the joint onboarding session where all four GSoC 2026 contributors and the CDLI mentors got together, introduced ourselves, and talked through our projects.
Most of the real work this period happened in mentor meetings. I had two meetings with Vedant where we walked through the full scope of the project and split the coding period into two phases, each tracked as an epic on GitLab:
I linked every sub-issue under its phase epic, and each sub-issue carries its own design document covering the approach, edge cases, acceptance criteria, and a rough estimate, so once coding starts there’s no ambiguity about what each piece needs to do.
| Task | Issue |
|---|---|
| OpenSearch Setup | #2614 |
| ArtifactDocumentBuilder (PHP replacement for the Logstash Ruby filter) | #2616 |
| Incremental Indexing (Approach & Design) | #2610 |
| Task | Issue |
|---|---|
| Search Inconsistency Across Entity Types (Approach & Design) | #2611 |
| Fallback Reindex Utilities | #2615 |
| Elasticsearch Performance Timing & Logging | #2613 |
| Existing Search Issues (Triage & Grouping) | #2622 |
I also had a meeting with Émilie and Lars to lock down the trickier technical calls, mainly the Transactional Outbox pattern for incremental indexing, and the decision to run OpenSearch alongside Elasticsearch for a while so we can compare the two side by side rather than doing a hard cutover.
By the end of community bonding the full roadmap was agreed on and ready to execute, so I could jump straight into building once the coding period began.