Hello Students and potential mentors for GSoc,
I won't be a formal mentor this year for the first time in many but
instead am going to offer backup for Tiago with the test and fix project
DERBY-5091, but wanted offer some thoughts based on my experience in
past years.
For students:
1) Critical to success and acceptance in GSoC in Derby is that the
student have some experience in the community. Get your build and test
environment set up and fix an issue or two so the mentors understand how
you can work with the community and what tasks are appropriate.
2) You are absolutely going to need to have a mentor interested in the
project you are proposing. If you look at the ranking process [1] , you
will see that the first step is for mentors to flag proposals they are
willing to mentor. Proposals that are not picked up by a mentor, no
matter how good they are do not go to the next step. We have three
issues now labeled gsoc2011 ideas [2], but so far just one mentor
volunteer for DERBY-5091. Unless you can find someone to mentor the
others your proposal will sit.
3) There is nothing wrong with having competing proposals for the the
same project. DERBY-5091 Derby Test and Fix, for example, is extremely
broad and could have multiple very diverse proposals.
4) Don't restrict yourself to the labeled ideas. If you look at the
issue assignments and you see an area where you think you could really
help out the person assigned on something important to them, you might
be able to convince them to mentor. This is what happened with me last
year, I planned not to mentor but Tiago put in a proposal for DERBY-728
which was on my list anyway.
5) Look at the ranking process [1] and make sure your proposal includes
all the aspects looked at there. GSoC can get competitive both within
and between projects.
For potential mentors:
1) Please volunteer to mentor and try to think of projects that are on
your list anyway where you might consider mentoring instead of doing it
yourself. It will grow the community and is lots of fun! Especially
quality projects I think are appropriate, like code coverage and
analysis, more thread interrupt testing, completing the JDBC4.1 testing
items etc.
2) If you just don't have bandwidth, thinking about teaming up as
Tiago and I plan to. This way vacations can be covered and experienced
mentors can help bring in the new generation. Are there mentors from
previous years that would be willing to support someone else as formal
mentor?
Thanks
Kathey
[1] http://community.apache.org/mentee-ranking-process.html
[2]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-printable/temp/SearchRequest.html?jqlQuery=labels+%3D+GSOC2011+AND+project+%3D+Derby&tempMax=1000
