Dear all,
although we have already started to discuss some technical questions
related to the GSoC projects, let me once again welcome this year's GSoC
students in the mailing list and let me also thank everybody who
proposed a GSoC project, but was unfortunately not accepted, for their
time and effort.
As this is the community bonding period and there are a few extra days
available before the official coding period starts on May 19th, I will
reiterate a few points about how we run the GSoC projects.
* Please do not be afraid to discuss issues (both technical and
organizational) on the mailing list and IRC. The mailing list can
usually offer you faster response times and options from more people
than your assigned mentor can offer you by himself.
Therefore we prefer the open and public communication over direct
student -- mentor communication. (Of course, we do not forbid direct
student -- mentor communication, especially if the subject at hand is
somehow sensitive. We just don't prefer it.)
* We consider the GSoC students to be regular HelenOS community
members from day one. Therefore do not hesitate to participate in any
of the community events we organize:
- HelenOS Meeting, in person, every second Saturday of each month.
- HelenOS Hangout, over Google Hangout, usually every Thursday before
the meeting.
- HelenOS Camp, a weekly hackaton, some time during the summer.
We would be happy to meet with you in person if it is logistically
feasible for you. The meetings usually take place in Prague, Czech
Republic, but we are open for discussing other possible locations and
venues that might make your travel plans easier.
* In our opinion, the GSoC participation is equivalent to a full-time
job for the student. That does not mean that you should spend exactly
40 hours every week on your project, but you should definitively
avoid underperforming and slacking. If you want to take a week off,
please talk to your mentor and make sure he is OK with that.
* As our past experience shows, sometimes the proposed timeline of the
project was too pessimistic and the implementation can actually go
much easier than originally expected. If this happens, please don't
take this as an opportunity to just lay back and enjoy working only
30 minutes a day on your GSoC project. We won't let you pass the
evaluation if you only deliver a few hundred lines of code (despite
it fulfils the original proposal) while you clearly had a plenty of
time and resources to deliver much more code.
Try to be proactive and if you are ahead of your schedule, try to
think about additional features related to your project that you might
implement. If there is really nothing feature-wise you could add, you
can always try to improve the existing algorithms, do some code
refactoring or just write more documentation.
* On the other hand, the proposed timeline of the project might be to
optimistic. In that case don't worry, we will always try to judge
your performance objectively and not only according to the number of
lines of code written. We understand how hard it is to code an
operating system sometimes and we can appreciate genuine effort.
* As already discussed, make it easy for your mentor and anyone else
to follow regularly your progress. Make your source branch(es)
publicly available, commit frequently and don't forget to sum up your
progress weekly in the form of a mailing list write-up or a blog post.
* If you are wondering where to draw the line between the technical
issues you should solve by your own while working on your GSoC
project and issues that should raise a question in the mailing list,
Michael Haggerty has summarized it pretty nicely in his recent blog
post [1].
On the other hand, in the case of organizational issues (not being
able to write any code for some extended period of time, etc.), you
should always contact your mentor ASAP. Remember, any problem your
mentor is not aware of stays only your problem.
We are ready to answer your questions and we are looking forward to
cooperating with you.
[1]
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.cz/2014/03/my-secret-tip-for-gsoc-success.html
M.D.
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