Re: My advice for GSoC applicants

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

On 03/03/2014 11:29 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> [...]
> Multiple students seem to be hitting the same microprojects (aka "we
> are running out of micros"), which might be a bit unfortunate.  I
> think the original plan might have been that for a student candidate
> to pass, his-or-her patch must hit my tree and queued somewhere, but
> with these duplicates I do not think it is fair to disqualify those
> who interacted with reviewers well but solved an already solved
> micro.
> 
> Even with the duplicates I think we are learning how well each
> student respond to reviews (better ones even seem to pick up lessons
> from reviews on others' threads that tackle micros different from
> their own) and what his-or-her general cognitive ability is.

So far the list contains 10 microprojects, and as of yesterday I had
seen 10 students attempt them.  If I had made it clear from the
beginning that each student should pick only one project, then we
wouldn't be in all that bad a situation.

I might have time today to look for some more microprojects for the list
and to mark the ones that have already been attempted.  But other list
regulars should FEEL ENCOURAGED to submit microprojects to add to the
list.  (Either submit them as a pull request to the GitHub repository
that contains the text [1] or to the mailing list with CC to me.)  I was
hoping that writing the text and adding the first batch of microprojects
would be enough to get the ball rolling, but I'm not sure I have enough
time to be the one and only microproject muse.

On the other hand I've been very happy and grateful that other people
have taken a lot of time to interact with the students and give them
feedback on the mailing list.  I definitely think the students are
getting a realistic taste of how our community works.

Michael

[1] https://github.com/git/git.github.io

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/