My advice for GSoC applicants

My advice for GSoC applicants

[Michael Haggerty]

Hi,

Based on my experience so far as a first-time Google Summer of Code
mentor, I just wrote a blog article containing some hopefully useful
advice for students applying to the program.  Please note that this is
my personal opinion only and doesn't necessarily reflect the views of
the Git/libgit2 projects as a whole.

    My secret tip for GSoC success

http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-secret-tip-for-gsoc-success.html

Michael

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

Re: My advice for GSoC applicants

[Philip Oakley]

From: "Michael Haggerty" <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Cc: "Dmitry Dolzhenko" <dmitrys.dolzhenko@yandex.ru>; "Sun He"
<sunheehnus@gmail.com>; "Brian Gesiak" <modocache@gmail.com>; "Tanay
Abhra" <tanayabh@gmail.com>; "Kyriakos Georgiou"
<kyriakos.a.georgiou@gmail.com>; "Siddharth Goel"
<siddharth98391@gmail.com>; "Guanglin Xu" <mzguanglin@gmail.com>;
"Karthik Nayak" <karthik.188@gmail.com>; "Alberto Corona"
<albcoron@gmail.com>; "Jacopo Notarstefano"
<jacopo.notarstefano@gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
> Based on my experience so far as a first-time Google Summer of Code
> mentor, I just wrote a blog article containing some hopefully useful
> advice for students applying to the program.  Please note that this is
> my personal opinion only and doesn't necessarily reflect the views of
> the Git/libgit2 projects as a whole.
>
>    My secret tip for GSoC success
>
> http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-secret-tip-for-gsoc-success.html
>
> Michael
>
> -- 
> Michael Haggerty
> mhagger@alum.mit.edu
> http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/
> --

In particular I liked : " If the documentation is unclear, it is OK to
ask for a clarification, but then _fix the documentation_ so that your
mentor never has to answer the same question again."

So the rhetorical question(s) for students would be :-

- was the Git documentation useful - did you see the README?, did it
lead, easily, to the useful places [1]? How could the wording/layout be
improved for the first time reader?

- which points of clarification were most useful and are they in the
documentation? Where should they be included?

- which points needed repeating often, and why? Where was the
disconnect?

- what would a patch look like...

Philip Oakley

[1] README; INSTALL; Documentation/SubmittingPatches;
Documentation/CodingGuidelines;

Re: My advice for GSoC applicants

[Rick Umali]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 5:45 AM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>     My secret tip for GSoC success
>
> http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-secret-tip-for-gsoc-success.html

I enjoyed reading that BLOG post. I daresay some of the points you
raise are pertinent for any new contributor to any open-source code
base.

Re: My advice for GSoC applicants

[Junio C Hamano]

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> Based on my experience so far as a first-time Google Summer of Code
> mentor, I just wrote a blog article containing some hopefully useful
> advice for students applying to the program.  Please note that this is
> my personal opinion only and doesn't necessarily reflect the views of
> the Git/libgit2 projects as a whole.
>
>     My secret tip for GSoC success
>
> http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-secret-tip-for-gsoc-success.html

Thanks for writing this.

Also thanks for the MicroProject approach to introduce potential
students and the community.

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.

Re: My advice for GSoC applicants

[Michael Haggerty]

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/