Well, you are most certainty welcome!

Nonetheless, I can hardly imagine that I have done more for this community than 
this community has done for me. 

50% is not at all too high, especially if you are new.  This is because 
community bonding like this is the best (maybe the only) way to learn the code 
base.  So I know all about various parts of sympy that I would have never 
touched if I had not seen some question on IRC or the list and tried to figure 
it out.  

When I first started working with SymPy, I became involved in the community 
aspect because I wanted to be accepted into GSoC.  By the time I was accepted, 
I had done it enough that it was natural to continue.  

Also, I don't develop for SymPy because I use it for some research or because I 
want to implement my Python mathematics module in it, like many of the 
contributors.  I develop because it's fun.  I had a fun time during GSoC and I 
wanted to continue that. But part of the fun was meeting so many interesting 
people and helping them out to constrictively build or fix something.  

Aaron Meurer

p.s., Extra tip for GSoC students:  if you spend 50% of the time interacting 
with the community, spend the other 50% learning git, until you know it.  You 
will end up saving time by learning how to use git well sooner and not having 
to clean up your messes in it later.  

Aaron Meurer
On Apr 8, 2010, at 8:23 PM, Ondrej Certik wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Ted Horst sent me this interesting link:
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/19098/
> 
> from a Mercurial mailinglist, where Paul Malmsten writes about why one
> (as a GSoC student) should try to always work in public, comment on
> issue trackers, hangout on IRC, "and engaging in things other than
> just your project, including helping users". Very interesting is what
> he says:
> 
> "Plan on spending as much as half your time doing these things."
> 
> Well, it sounds like too much, and maybe it's a bit too much, but
> well, honestly when I counted what I do in my own time, I spend about
> 50% of it with these things (this week definitely).
> 
> From our 2009 Google Summer of Code students, I would especially like
> to thank Aaron Meurer, who besides his own project helped tons of
> people on IRC, in our issue tracker, on our mailinglist and continued
> doing that after the summer was over and this year he is helping other
> students write a better proposal for 2010 GSoC. That is an incredible
> help, which helped to grow the whole community around SymPy.
> 
> Thanks for that!
> 
> 
> Spending time on these things can be hard to justify, e.g. it's not a
> publication, it's not some result that you can show to your boss and
> it's not even coding. An open source project however doesn't run just
> "by itself". There have to be people around it actively pushing it
> forward. In the long term it pays off. The alternative is that one
> works alone, then one can spend 100% of his time doing his/her own
> things (and don't care about others), but then one never builds any
> team around the tool. And without a team, one cannot really achieve
> anything.
> 
> So if 50% is too much, even if you spend just 10% or 20% with this, it
> really makes a big difference (as opposed to 0%).
> 
> Ondrej
> 
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