Re: [Dev] My GSoC experience - GSoC students please read!

[Dinanjana Gunaratne]

Hello all,
Since this thread is discussing GSOC experience with WSO2 , I thought of
sharing mine as well. First of all this is my 1st GSOC event. I am a final
year undergraduate. My proposal for "Proposal 7: Improve production system
debugging capabilities of WSO2 ESB" got selected for this year GSOC
program. I have being working on the project for last 3 months and my
mentors were pretty helpful. True they are sometimes very busy with their
work but they are doing a full time job along with mentoring. So I guess we
should cut some slack for them. I too was pretty busy most of the time
since I had to mange both university work and project work together. I
guess communication between the student and the mentor is pretty vital
since it helps understand the situation of student as well as mentor. That
has been the case for me for this whole period. So with respect to my
experience, the GSOC experience offered by WSO2 is good.

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 12:43 PM, Abhishek Tiwari <
abhishek.tiwari0...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Imesh.
>
> Sincerely appreciate the response. The same guide also talks about
> MENTORING [1]. Specifically and I quote
>
> "*Don't Be That Guy*: No one likes dictators.  Work with your student on
> the development of expectations, rather then barking out orders."
>
> On my last call with Chamila, this is exactly what happened. He literally
> shouted at me and threatened to fail me on the project. Forget mentorship,
> is this even professional? I sent you PM to address this situation but you
> never cared to reply it. You were creating Github issues even after that,
> but you simply ignored my email.
>
> The goal of the project never included K8 and I have evidence to support
> it (design doc, project proposal and community bonding conversation).
> However, when community asked about it, I started working on addressing
> that, I was very close to complete it. I was pretty much done with that
> work, when I started getting these chats and issues from Chamila about
> changing names and params and so many things that were completely out of
> the scope considering the timeline. The code in question had been in github
> for about 2 months and no one ever cared to bring it up until 2 days before
> the deadline. Is this how software projects are managed ?
>
> I was always willing to work on everything, and was very interested to
> work even after GSoC period. My biggest problem is the way Chamila talked
> to me, it was completely unprofessional and disrespectful.
>
> Anyways, there is no point arguing over it, since at some point its going
> to become my voice against your voice and nothing productive will come out
> of it.  I just hope that I will receive an honest evaluation of my work!
>
> [1]. http://write.flossmanuals.net/gsoc-mentoring/setting-expectations/
>
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:59 PM, Imesh Gunaratne  wrote:
>
>> Hi Abhishek,
>>
>> Thanks for your feedback! We are really sorry to hear what you
>> experienced.
>>
>> We at WSO2, participated in GSoC for many years now with the intention of
>> giving students opportunities to contribute to open source projects for the
>> benefit of the entire community. This allows students to learn how open
>> source communities work, new technologies related to their academic
>> pursuits, give exposure to real world software development processes, etc.
>> In the open source world, there is no labour concept, no one is paid for
>> doing open source work. If someone is willing to contribute, they are most
>> welcome to share their ideas and send contributions. GSoC program is trying
>> to give opportunities for students to experience this and be a part of it
>> [3]. If you do not like that idea, you should have opted out of this
>> project at the very early stages.
>>
>> The GSoC Student Guide [4] has explained clearly how students should work
>> with mentors and what to expect from them. Mentors are voluntarily
>> contributing their time to GSoC projects with the intention of adding value
>> to open source projects. They do this while working on many other things.
>> Therefore delays in meetings and such occurrences may happen due to
>> unavoidable circumstances. Please accept our apologies for any
>> inconveniences caused in that regard. Please feel free to refer [5], [6],
>> [7], [8], [9], [10] on how WSO2 community and your mentors have appreciated
>> your contributions then and there.
>>
>> Changing requirements is part and parcel of software projects and
>> software world. However we believe that we did our very best to keep the
>> high level requirements of the project fixed. On high level, the main goal
>> of this project was to implement a test framework to invoke bash scripts
>> provided in WSO2 Dockerfiles and K8S Artifacts repositories for verifying
>> WSO2 container images. As we believe that is a straightforward goal and
>> nothing much need to be changed at the middle of the project except for
>> refinements.
>>
>> [3] 

Re: [Dev] My GSoC experience - GSoC students please read!

[Abhishek Tiwari]

Thanks Imesh.

Sincerely appreciate the response. The same guide also talks about
MENTORING [1]. Specifically and I quote

"*Don't Be That Guy*: No one likes dictators.  Work with your student on
the development of expectations, rather then barking out orders."

On my last call with Chamila, this is exactly what happened. He literally
shouted at me and threatened to fail me on the project. Forget mentorship,
is this even professional? I sent you PM to address this situation but you
never cared to reply it. You were creating Github issues even after that,
but you simply ignored my email.

The goal of the project never included K8 and I have evidence to support it
(design doc, project proposal and community bonding conversation). However,
when community asked about it, I started working on addressing that, I was
very close to complete it. I was pretty much done with that work, when I
started getting these chats and issues from Chamila about changing names
and params and so many things that were completely out of the scope
considering the timeline. The code in question had been in github for about
2 months and no one ever cared to bring it up until 2 days before the
deadline. Is this how software projects are managed ?

I was always willing to work on everything, and was very interested to work
even after GSoC period. My biggest problem is the way Chamila talked to me,
it was completely unprofessional and disrespectful.

Anyways, there is no point arguing over it, since at some point its going
to become my voice against your voice and nothing productive will come out
of it.  I just hope that I will receive an honest evaluation of my work!

[1]. http://write.flossmanuals.net/gsoc-mentoring/setting-expectations/

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:59 PM, Imesh Gunaratne  wrote:

> Hi Abhishek,
>
> Thanks for your feedback! We are really sorry to hear what you
> experienced.
>
> We at WSO2, participated in GSoC for many years now with the intention of
> giving students opportunities to contribute to open source projects for the
> benefit of the entire community. This allows students to learn how open
> source communities work, new technologies related to their academic
> pursuits, give exposure to real world software development processes, etc.
> In the open source world, there is no labour concept, no one is paid for
> doing open source work. If someone is willing to contribute, they are most
> welcome to share their ideas and send contributions. GSoC program is trying
> to give opportunities for students to experience this and be a part of it
> [3]. If you do not like that idea, you should have opted out of this
> project at the very early stages.
>
> The GSoC Student Guide [4] has explained clearly how students should work
> with mentors and what to expect from them. Mentors are voluntarily
> contributing their time to GSoC projects with the intention of adding value
> to open source projects. They do this while working on many other things.
> Therefore delays in meetings and such occurrences may happen due to
> unavoidable circumstances. Please accept our apologies for any
> inconveniences caused in that regard. Please feel free to refer [5], [6],
> [7], [8], [9], [10] on how WSO2 community and your mentors have appreciated
> your contributions then and there.
>
> Changing requirements is part and parcel of software projects and software
> world. However we believe that we did our very best to keep the high level
> requirements of the project fixed. On high level, the main goal of this
> project was to implement a test framework to invoke bash scripts provided
> in WSO2 Dockerfiles and K8S Artifacts repositories for verifying WSO2
> container images. As we believe that is a straightforward goal and nothing
> much need to be changed at the middle of the project except for refinements.
>
> [3] http://write.flossmanuals.net/gsocstudentguide/what-is-
> google-summer-of-code/
> [4] http://write.flossmanuals.net/gsocstudentguide/working-with-
> your-mentor/
> [5] [DEV] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Project update - Migration to Golang,
> http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-July/065571.html
> [6] [Dev] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Added ability to run smoke tests from test
> framework, http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-August/066879.html
> [7] [Dev] GSoC Dockerfiles weekly status meeting minutes,
> http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-May/063294.html
> [8] [Dev] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Status update, http://mail.wso2.org/
> mailarchive/dev/2016-June/065107.html
> [9] [Dev] [DEV] [GSoC] Meeting minutes from Dockerfiles test framework
> demo, http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-June/065162.html
> [10] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Meeting minutes, http://mail.wso2.org/
> mailarchive/dev/2016-July/066247.html
>
> Thanks
>
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 2:06 AM, Abhishek Tiwari <
> abhishek.tiwari0...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello Everyone,
>>
>> There are some organizations that looks at GSoC as getting free labour
>> and use 

Re: [Dev] My GSoC experience - GSoC students please read!

[Imesh Gunaratne]

Hi Abhishek,

Thanks for your feedback! We are really sorry to hear what you experienced.

We at WSO2, participated in GSoC for many years now with the intention of
giving students opportunities to contribute to open source projects for the
benefit of the entire community. This allows students to learn how open
source communities work, new technologies related to their academic
pursuits, give exposure to real world software development processes, etc.
In the open source world, there is no labour concept, no one is paid for
doing open source work. If someone is willing to contribute, they are most
welcome to share their ideas and send contributions. GSoC program is trying
to give opportunities for students to experience this and be a part of it
[3]. If you do not like that idea, you should have opted out of this
project at the very early stages.

The GSoC Student Guide [4] has explained clearly how students should work
with mentors and what to expect from them. Mentors are voluntarily
contributing their time to GSoC projects with the intention of adding value
to open source projects. They do this while working on many other things.
Therefore delays in meetings and such occurrences may happen due to
unavoidable circumstances. Please accept our apologies for any
inconveniences caused in that regard. Please feel free to refer [5], [6],
[7], [8], [9], [10] on how WSO2 community and your mentors have appreciated
your contributions then and there.

Changing requirements is part and parcel of software projects and software
world. However we believe that we did our very best to keep the high level
requirements of the project fixed. On high level, the main goal of this
project was to implement a test framework to invoke bash scripts provided
in WSO2 Dockerfiles and K8S Artifacts repositories for verifying WSO2
container images. As we believe that is a straightforward goal and nothing
much need to be changed at the middle of the project except for refinements.

[3]
http://write.flossmanuals.net/gsocstudentguide/what-is-google-summer-of-code/
[4] http://write.flossmanuals.net/gsocstudentguide/working-with-your-mentor/

[5] [DEV] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Project update - Migration to Golang,
http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-July/065571.html
[6] [Dev] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Added ability to run smoke tests from test
framework, http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-August/066879.html
[7] [Dev] GSoC Dockerfiles weekly status meeting minutes,
http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-May/063294.html
[8] [Dev] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Status update,
http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-June/065107.html
[9] [Dev] [DEV] [GSoC] Meeting minutes from Dockerfiles test framework
demo, http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-June/065162.html
[10] [GSoC Dockerfiles] Meeting minutes,
http://mail.wso2.org/mailarchive/dev/2016-July/066247.html

Thanks

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 2:06 AM, Abhishek Tiwari <
abhishek.tiwari0...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
>
> There are some organizations that looks at GSoC as getting free labour and
> use it to get as much done as they can within 3 months time, WSO2 is one of
> them. I was working 60 hours a week and never received any appreciation
> from mentors. It was very disappointing but I always kept a positive
> attitude and tried to meet all the deadlines. Mentors were very
> unprofessional, they would agree on a meeting time and then never show up,
> or they would keep delaying the meeting saying there is another meeting (I
> have chat and emails to prove that). They never even cared to send an email
> about it, there were so many such incidents, where I ended up waiting
> hours. New requirements kept coming as they wanted to get as much work as
> possible. There was no feedback on code so I did not learn anything from
> code perspective, then just before 2 days mentor provided comments which
> changed everything and I had rewrite most of it. The expectations from WSO2
> were completely unrealistic from a student point of view. I sincerely hope
> that Google looks into it.
>
> Yesterday I was having a hangout call (over a weekend) to discuss the
> newly created issues and I was trying to convince that I should work on the
> high priority issue rather than changing the whole codebase and
> architecture because there is an extra JSON parameter [2]. My mentor
> shouted at me and threatened to fail me in the evaluation. This is very
> disheartening as I have worked so hard on this project. My college is
> already started and I am taking  leaves to work on the project. If anyone
> else has experienced similar situations in WSO2, I would recommend reaching
> out to GSoC officials as I have done already.
>
> I am a 19 year old, first year engineering student (Freshman). All these
> skills I learnt by myself. In the span of GSoC project, I had to learn
> Docker, Dockerfiles, Puppet, Kubernetes, Bash scripting, Go language, WSO2
> codebase and many other things. It is evident from the code 

[Dev] My GSoC experience - GSoC students please read!

[Abhishek Tiwari]

Hello Everyone,

There are some organizations that looks at GSoC as getting free labour and
use it to get as much done as they can within 3 months time, WSO2 is one of
them. I was working 60 hours a week and never received any appreciation
from mentors. It was very disappointing but I always kept a positive
attitude and tried to meet all the deadlines. Mentors were very
unprofessional, they would agree on a meeting time and then never show up,
or they would keep delaying the meeting saying there is another meeting (I
have chat and emails to prove that). They never even cared to send an email
about it, there were so many such incidents, where I ended up waiting
hours. New requirements kept coming as they wanted to get as much work as
possible. There was no feedback on code so I did not learn anything from
code perspective, then just before 2 days mentor provided comments which
changed everything and I had rewrite most of it. The expectations from WSO2
were completely unrealistic from a student point of view. I sincerely hope
that Google looks into it.

Yesterday I was having a hangout call (over a weekend) to discuss the newly
created issues and I was trying to convince that I should work on the high
priority issue rather than changing the whole codebase and architecture
because there is an extra JSON parameter [2]. My mentor shouted at me and
threatened to fail me in the evaluation. This is very disheartening as I
have worked so hard on this project. My college is already started and I am
taking  leaves to work on the project. If anyone else has experienced
similar situations in WSO2, I would recommend reaching out to GSoC
officials as I have done already.

I am a 19 year old, first year engineering student (Freshman). All these
skills I learnt by myself. In the span of GSoC project, I had to learn
Docker, Dockerfiles, Puppet, Kubernetes, Bash scripting, Go language, WSO2
codebase and many other things. It is evident from the code that I have
written so far [1]. It is very easy to judge someone without being in their
shoes, and I feel like my mentors have been pushing work and standards
without caring about my experience level, which in my opinion is completely
unfair.

I am sure there are so many other great mentors in the organization and my
experience might be just one off. However, if any other student has felt
similar situations, it should be investigated.

Thanks
Abhishek

[1]. https://github.com/abhishek0198/wso2dockerfiles-test-
framework/commits/master
[2]. https://github.com/abhishek0198/wso2dockerfiles-
test-framework/issues/22
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