I would love to see my work on HTMLDiff continued this year by someone who's
good at client side scripting. Of course I can help out with the server side
stuff.

I think the main reason why my project was a "mixed success" is that I felt
like I was pretty much on my own. Actually this is the first time I read
about interest from the community in HTMLDiff since September last year.
So my advice is:

   - Make sure that as a community, you embrace the project you choose, or
   don't choose it at all.
   - Select mentors that are available and that have the time to help the
   student out when a task is outside of the student's skill set. My mentor
   last year was a celebrity, a great guy and possibly a genius, but I think I
   would have been happier with a mentor that was more average, that could work
   with me without giving me the feeling that I was taking up the CTO's
   valuable time.

Cheers,

Guy

2009/3/11 Brion Vibber <[email protected]>

> On 3/10/09 10:59 PM, Nicolas Dumazet wrote:
> > I don't know how to put it "nicely", but the key for GSoC to succeed,
> > on the mentor/senior devs side, is just to be *very* available. Easy
> > thing to say, I know, but that would be nice to keep this in mind if
> > we plan to host students this year.
> > It's not about having "xx minutes available a day for my student",
> > it's more of being able to set up in advance regular IRC meetings so
> > that his (her?) questions can be answered in real-time: being stuck on
> > your code when it seems like you won't get your questions answered in
> > a long time particularly sucks; especially when it seems to you that
> > answers are really simple.
> >
> > And it's not only about mentors, but also about having some
> > "awareness" from devs that students are going to hang around on IRC,
> > asking for directions, and also sometimes asking (very) naive
> > questions: let's try not to bite them! =)
>
> Total agreement... I want to make sure that we're able to make students
> feel welcome and comfortable with the dev community -- not necessarily
> just talking to the official mentor but feeling like they can ask
> anybody anything just like they've been 'part of the team' for ages.
>
> > So yes, let's move, let's get involved into GSoC again! This is really
> > a great project, and I'm really looking forward to seeing new faces
> > around, bringing in new ideas, as naive as they may sound =)
>
> :D
>
> -- brion
>
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