The deadline for students to apply has now passed (it was 19:00 UTC on March 25th). Many thanks you to all who applied. This year Xapian received 31 completed proposals (exactly the same total as when we last took part in 2014), plus another 2 we only had a draft version of. Two were total junk, proposing to implement something unrelated to Xapian and presumably submitted verbatim to several orgs. Another 9 were just a title and/or paste from our ideas list, usually with a generic biography. There was also a duplicate proposal from one student. So after a first pass to cull those we won't consider further, we are left with 19. The next step is that the mentors review these 19 proposals, and in about 2 weeks we need to tell Google how many we'd like to accept. They then give us a (hopefully equal) number we can accept and we mark that many as accepted, and talk to the other org in any cases where both us and them want the same student. Then Google announce the accepted students. The decisions as to who is accepted aren't final until that official announcement, and Google make it clear we shouldn't preempt that by discussing selection with students, so please understand that we can't do that. Meanwhile, if you've applied to us you shouldn't just sit and wait for the announcement. We select the students we think are likely to make a success of their projects, and you can improve the confidence we have in you by working on a patch (or if you're already working on a patch, by pushing through with it and getting it merged). Finding something directly connected with your project of a suitable scope often works well (a couple of examples from past years: one student had basic lua bindings prototyped, another implemented one of the simpler weighting schemes from their project). If you can't think of something, feel free to talk to us, or take a look at the list of smaller project ideas on the wiki - at least then we can see how well you can work with the Xapian code, and that you can build the code and produce a patch suitable for merging: https://trac.xapian.org/wiki/ProjectIdeas We may also want to discuss your proposal with you. Please do respond if we get in touch - there's not a lot of time to chase answers. Cheers, Olly P.S. This is also really the last chance for anyone interested in mentoring to step forward. I'd particularly encourage former GSoC students to consider it (so far we have 3 volunteering to mentor, but more are welcome). Our experience is that having been through GSoC as a student gives you useful insights for mentoring, and you don't need to know everything about Xapian to be useful. If you're interested but have concerns, feel free to come and talk to James or me.
On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:43:04AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:> Meanwhile, if you've applied to us you shouldn't just sit and wait for > the announcement. We select the students we think are likely to make > a success of their projects, and you can improve the confidence we have > in you by working on a patch (or if you're already working on a patch, > by pushing through with it and getting it merged).I'll just add briefly on this: it's vastly easier to push through a smaller patch than a larger one, which is why we recommend taking a bite-sized project (and, in GSoC itself, why we encourage students to complete and have reviewed sub-projects as they go rather than building up months of work). Don't worry about a patch being too small, either! If it fixes a bug, or makes a small improvement, then it's worth getting reviewed and merged. Almost every patch for every OSS project requires at least some changes, even with lots of experience, and we'll feed back and try to help you through the process in a way that means future contributions will be easier. There are some notes and tips in our draft developers guide which may help, particularly the section about contributing (https://xapian-developer-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/contributing/index.html). It's by no means perfect though, so please let me know if it's confusing, or if anything doesn't work for you. J -- James Aylett, occasional trouble-maker xapian.org
sir, My schedule is very hectic these days, I am working on 2 of my course project and the deadline is by 20th April. Moreover the exam are waiting after that, so I won't be able to give much time to GSoC project before 2 May. But yeah in the mean while if I find something to discuss with you, then I will. On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 4:23 PM, James Aylett <james-xapian at tartarus.org> wrote:> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:43:04AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote: > > > Meanwhile, if you've applied to us you shouldn't just sit and wait for > > the announcement. We select the students we think are likely to make > > a success of their projects, and you can improve the confidence we have > > in you by working on a patch (or if you're already working on a patch, > > by pushing through with it and getting it merged). > > I'll just add briefly on this: it's vastly easier to push through a > smaller patch than a larger one, which is why we recommend taking a > bite-sized project (and, in GSoC itself, why we encourage students to > complete and have reviewed sub-projects as they go rather than > building up months of work). > > Don't worry about a patch being too small, either! If it fixes a bug, > or makes a small improvement, then it's worth getting reviewed and > merged. Almost every patch for every OSS project requires at least > some changes, even with lots of experience, and we'll feed back and > try to help you through the process in a way that means future > contributions will be easier. > > There are some notes and tips in our draft developers guide which may > help, particularly the section about contributing > ( > https://xapian-developer-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/contributing/index.html > ). > It's by no means perfect though, so please let me know if it's > confusing, or if anything doesn't work for you. > > J > > -- > James Aylett, occasional trouble-maker > xapian.org > >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/attachments/20160330/cd30b905/attachment.html>