Experiences from last year's GSOC

[Augie Fackler]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 7:26 AM, Martin Geisler wrote:

> 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?

On Adium, we didn't require people to already be on the mailing lists  
(part of the point of GSoC is, after all, to grow the community), but  
I don't think we ever took a student that didn't already use Adium.  
That, and we didn't ever have a successful student that wasn't already  
at least vaguely comfortable with Objective-C. The learning curve on  
Python is less, but I think it's probably fair to expect students  
applying for Mercurial to have Python experience. Being on the lists  
already, while nice, probably shouldn't (IMO) be a blocker to a  
student being accepted (that said, they should be on the lists once  
they start applying).


>> 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.

Meeting potential students in IRC in advance is always great - you  
usually end up with genuinely dedicated students that way in my  
experience.

Augie


> -- 
> 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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