Hi, Ted Horst sent me this interesting link:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/19098/ from a Mercurial mailinglist, where Paul Malmsten writes about why one (as a GSoC student) should try to always work in public, comment on issue trackers, hangout on IRC, "and engaging in things other than just your project, including helping users". Very interesting is what he says: "Plan on spending as much as half your time doing these things." Well, it sounds like too much, and maybe it's a bit too much, but well, honestly when I counted what I do in my own time, I spend about 50% of it with these things (this week definitely). >From our 2009 Google Summer of Code students, I would especially like to thank Aaron Meurer, who besides his own project helped tons of people on IRC, in our issue tracker, on our mailinglist and continued doing that after the summer was over and this year he is helping other students write a better proposal for 2010 GSoC. That is an incredible help, which helped to grow the whole community around SymPy. Thanks for that! Spending time on these things can be hard to justify, e.g. it's not a publication, it's not some result that you can show to your boss and it's not even coding. An open source project however doesn't run just "by itself". There have to be people around it actively pushing it forward. In the long term it pays off. The alternative is that one works alone, then one can spend 100% of his time doing his/her own things (and don't care about others), but then one never builds any team around the tool. And without a team, one cannot really achieve anything. So if 50% is too much, even if you spend just 10% or 20% with this, it really makes a big difference (as opposed to 0%). Ondrej -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
