Hi everyone, This e-mail is intended to all students who are planning on applying for Google Summer of Code 2011, having Derby as their organization.
It would seem that this year, contrary to the trend experienced in the last couple of years, I will be the only person who will be mentoring for Apache Derby. With that said, and considering I have limited free time, there will also only be one GSoC project that students can apply to. There have been a few (at least 2 or 3?) students who manifested their intentions of applying for this position, so some competition is expected. Unfortunately, I really can only take one student in the end. I've made a selection of a few issues that would be interesting to see solved as part of GSoC and they are aggregated under JIRA's DERBY-5091. As you probably all know (or should know), the application period for students is between the 28th of March and 8th of April, so make sure you have at least checked out our SVN trunk, compiled Derby and obviously, if you have shown previous engagement with the community by solving issues even before the program starts, this will influence your likelihood of getting chosen for this project. To apply, you will also need a good application submission, demonstrating knowledge about what the project entails and a good schedule of how you plan on progressing through the issues submitted on DERBY-5091. This is, obviously, up to you, but you can have a look at what I did last year as a student: http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/Tiago_Espinha It also needs to be mentioned that I will be mentoring with the help and experience of Katherine Marsden (kmarsden @ irc) as this is in fact, my first year mentoring. Also, obviously, you have our great community that you are encouraged to interact with as that is the true spirit of open source software. From my own experience, people in this mailing list are always more than happy to help. I would also like to once again point to this wiki page: http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/ForNewDevelopers which I believe all GSoC prospects should read if they are serious about applying for Derby. We have a fairly rich wiki, so I really encourage all students to have a read through important pages like this: http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/ConvertOldTestToJunitTips . Finally, it should also be noted that this year, an IRC interview will also count as a plus towards your application's acceptance. It's not mandatory, but it will enhance your chances. I usually hang around on IRC under the username etiago, so feel free to ping me so that we can have a chat about your application. I think that's all I wanted to cover. Good luck to all students! :-) Cheers, Tiago
