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 brion@wikimedia.org
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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