On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 3:28 AM, Kathey Marsden <[email protected] > wrote:
> 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 > > Thanks Kathey, for the email! I would like to carry out work on PlanExporter this summer as well, if someone willing to mentor me. PlanExporter is a very useful tool, which has only gone through one development iteration (last summer), but there are lots of ways that we can improve this. I will propose a rough idea in my mind, so that a possible mentor and the community could comment on the content. Thank you very much! -- Best Regards, Nirmal C.S.Nirmal J. Fernando Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Blog: http://nirmalfdo.blogspot.com/
