It's been my experience that cherry picking the really really hard problems and just saying "go fix that" rarely works. Mentoring is often about guiding people towards their own interests and helping smooth the way to the things that they might have solved anyway.
If you look at the case of mattp who is implementing ConfigSync, he had his own criteria for the type of stuff he was interesting in working on, and we came up with a list of possible things to do that met his personal criteria. He needed something that was a relatively standalone body of work, was able to be managed in a waterfall-like fashion (requirements -> spec -> build -> test etc etc) and was technically sexy enough to be a university project. We arrived at the decision to do the config sync project because half the project (the server half) was completely greenfield, the rest could mostly be done as a plugin, it aligns with modern themes (cloud support, Mozilla weave, etc etc) and we already knew that it would work and mostly how do it. We just hadn't gotten around to it yet because of higher priorities to scratch. As a general rule, if the problem is too hard for US to solve quickly then it's probably also too hard for students to solve (except in exceptional cases, and THOSE students usually identify those hard problems on their own because they are the ones with the specialist knowledge) I'd recommend we pull them into the channel first, and discuss their interests, rather than just coming up with some topics for them in advance. Adam K On 10 March 2010 02:28, Gabor Szabo <szab...@gmail.com> wrote: > This could be a nice opportunity to get more developers on Padre > and get further awareness to it. > > Who would be ready to mentor someone? > What Padre projects can we think of? > Finishing a feature or a plugin? > Writing some feature or plugin from scratch? > > Gabor > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Jonathan Leto <jal...@gmail.com> > Date: Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 7:55 AM > Subject: Calling All Google Summer of Code Mentors > To: parrot-dev <parrot-...@lists.parrot.org>, Perl5 Porters > <perl5-port...@perl.org>, module-authors <module-auth...@perl.org>, > tpf-g...@googlegroups.com, perl6-annou...@perl.org > Cc: tpf-steer...@perl.org, jerry.gay+gsoc2...@gmail.com, Parrot > Directors <parrot-direct...@lists.parrot.org> > > > Howdy, > > I am working on the application for The Perl Foundation and Parrot > Foundation to participate in Google Summer of Code 2010 [0]. GSoC is a > program where Google funds eligible students to hack on open source > projects for a summer. It is a great opportunity for the students and > the communities that mentor them. You also may be interested in this > summary of our involvement last year [1]. Our application will be > submitted by the end of this week. > > Please join us in getting prepared for this year. There is a page for > possible mentors to volunteer [2]* as well as a page for project ideas > [3]. If you would like to help with the wiki, our main GSoC page [4] > is the best place to start. You are also invited to join our mailing > list [5] and come ask question in #soc-help on irc.perl.org . > > Thanks! > > Duke > > [0] http://socghop.appspot.com/ > [1] > http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/10/perls-of-wisdom-perl-foundation-parrots.html > [2] http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc_mentors > [3] http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc_2010_projects > [4] http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc > [5] http://groups.google.com/group/tpf-gsoc > > * If you listed yourself as a mentor last year and you are not > interested this year, please remove yourself from the page. > > -- > Jonathan "Duke" Leto > jonat...@leto.net > http://leto.net > _______________________________________________ > Padre-dev mailing list > Padre-dev@perlide.org > http://mail.perlide.org/mailman/listinfo/padre-dev > _______________________________________________ Padre-dev mailing list Padre-dev@perlide.org http://mail.perlide.org/mailman/listinfo/padre-dev
