Experiences from last year's GSOC

[Martin Geisler]

Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab at web.de> writes:

> Am Dienstag 17 Februar 2009 10:14:18 schrieb Martin Geisler:
>> I hope we can improve the success rate by thinking about this when
>> selecting projects and students.
>
> Since there weren't any answers yet, I want to provide some input: 
>
> The Hurd project had a questionaire to select only students who were
> already knowledgeable. It had four students of which all were
> successful (and even one additional student who did the work outside
> the formal GSoC and still completed it): -
> http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/gsoc/student_application_form.html

Thank you for that link, that is exactly the kind of questions that I
think we should ask any future students. At least something like:

* What is your experience with Mercurial?

  - How long have you been using it?

  - Which features do you use (mq, pbranch, others?)

  - Do you read any of the mailing lists?

  - Are you on the IRC channel?

* What much experience do you have with Python and/or C?

  - Have you written any extensions for Mercurial?

> Also they required students to play with the system and meet up in IRC
> before being accepted.

Good idea. I would also expect the students to be Mercurial users
already -- more so than last year since the number of Mercurial users
has grown.

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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