This is the personal website of Garthee, who believes it is the perspiration not the perception that brings the success
GSOC 2008 has begun
Google has officially announced GSOC 2008! This time more than 130 organizations and 1000 students are expected to be absorbed and funded.
Here is Drupal Timeline
Mentor tasks and due dates:
- March 12 (but ideally March 3): Write mentoring organization application.
- March 17: Post SoC project idea list.
- March 24: Finalize mentor list.
- March 24 - April 10: read/review/discuss/rank applications.
- April 14 - May 26: help new students get acclimated to community, get them setup with CVS access, etc.
- May 26 - August 18 SoC mentoring; help students on their projects.
- July 14: Mentor mid-term reports.
- August 11: Help students to put finishing touches on their projects.
- September 1: Mentor final reports due.
Program timeline for mentors:
- March 3 - 12: Accepting applications from mentoring organizations.
- March 17: List of accepted mentoring organizations posted.
- March 24 - 31: Student application period.
- April 14: Accepted students announced.
- May 26: SoC starts!
- July 7: SoC mid-term
- August 11: Suggested pencils-down date.
- August 18: SoC ends. :(
So why wait? So lets fold the sleeves and jump !
An excellent presentation of introduction
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| english_gsoc2008flyer.pdf | 63.88 KB |
Tumble Logs
When to ask questions..
Leslie or commonly known as LH replied to a post in the group on being inquisitive about GSOC, which I would like to share here.
Date: Thurs, Mar 6 2008 8:53 am
From: "Leslie Hawthorn"
On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Ian Bull wrote:
> I hate to say this Matt, but I think this is exactly what needs to be
> done. Each time someone posts here hoping to be spoon feed, we tell them
> "you should not do that", then we proceed to spoon feed them.
>
> I think posting a note saying everyone must read X,Y and Z doesn't really
> help, since people seem to be signing up for the list, not reading the FAQ,
> not reading any previous posts, and simply asking "how do I get started".
This note has been posted.
http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-discuss/browse_thre...
>
>
> Leslie, is the list like this every year in March?
Sort of? I'm used to seeing many posts like these, but it's a bit more
frequent this year. I don't want to send out harsh RTFM notes to this
list. It's not productive and it doesn't welcome people into our
community. However, in the past folks have been courteous enough to
actually browse the list archives and within a week or so all of the "please
tell me what to do" posts went away. I'm not seeing that trend repeated,
which is a shame in my book.
> The sad thing is that these people are likely to have a very hard time
> with open source software development. Open source software is much less
> about technology (it doesn't matter that you can make a O(N^2) algorithm run
> in O(N) time because you know some cool hack, or you know every Java byte
> code) and more about community, collaboration, communication and a real
> sense of self motivation. On many open source newsgroups you will likely
> never receive an answer if you don't demonstrate that you tried to solve the
> problem yourself, first.
+ 10
Exactly. Being self-motivated is the one trait I've seen *all* successful
open source developers share, and I hang out with communities as diverse as
kernel hackers to web developers. Without the passion, the love and the
drive to better oneself by being self-sufficient, you're just not going to
make it in open source.
I'd also like to add that it isn't that hard or that bad to do this. Don't
know the answer to a question? Look for it. Browse mailing list archives,
search the web, ask in IRC (after trying to look for help on the web) - if
that doesn't work, then go ahead and send mail. But if you haven't tried
these steps first, you are not going to get the respect of your would-be
fellow developers because you are not respecting their time.
> bigger issue here that I'm not sure how to solve. We need to address the
> uncertainty new students are feeling and not alienate them, but at the same
> time, we have to teach them to help themselves. This is a short program!
> *Please* do not go a project newsgroup / mailing list without first doing a
> bit of research or you will likely find GSoC very difficult.
>
I think it may be helpful to explain this matter in a different way, so here
goes:
Your future mentors are usually contributing to open source as volunteers.
Even if they get paid to work on open source as their 'day job,' they spend
many more hours helping their projects without getting paid and they
*certainly* will spend many hours of their personal time to mentor you.
That's an awful message to send period, but particularly in this case.
Think of all the great work being done by open source developers. Now ask
yourself what is more important - that you don't have to do twenty minutes
of research and reading or that code that can be useful and beneficial to
many, many, many people gets written. I think we can all agree the latter
is most important.
I don't want any of our would-be students to feel that we do not value them
and their potential to contribute. That's simply not the case. In fact, in
the open source world criticism is a wonderful thing - it means that someone
cares enough about you and what you have to say to actually respond with
feedback that you can use to improve yourself or your code. What we are
trying to do is teach you important lessons about open source culture and
how to be most successful in this milieu. Take it to heart and read the
manual, please.
Best,
LH
Leslie Hawthorn
Program Manager - Open Source
Google Inc.