Apprehensive about GSoC

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Rana Singh

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Mar 20, 2008, 8:10:14 AM3/20/08
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Hey techieez out there................i am very apprehensive about
participating in GSoC .........i urge the mentors to plz hep me out
here............when i went through the project ideas i found that i
lack in the skill set required...........it seems so difficult to even
think this big project ideas............i mean for students in india
its very difficult to participate.........i therefore urge
organisations to hold some developer dayhs in india too so that we
don't lack behind in participating in open source development.....also
i would like u ppl to guide me about the studying procedure for being
competitive in OPen Source Development........I am a student from a
college in Sangli,Maharashtra,India.........in final year of
Engineering (Computer Science and Engineering)

Plz Help ME...........thanks in advance..............

Matthew Wilkes

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Mar 20, 2008, 8:20:41 AM3/20/08
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On Heisei 0020-03-20, at 121014GMT, Rana Singh wrote:

> Hey techieez out there................i am very apprehensive about
> participating in GSoC .........i urge the mentors to plz hep me out
> here............when i went through the project ideas i found that i
> lack in the skill set required

The reason mentors are there is to help you learn more, this isn't
just free work for open source, you get something out of it too.

> ...........it seems so difficult to even
> think this big project ideas............

Maybe you're just not used to such large projects, again, this is
something SoC tries to remedy.

> i mean for students in india
> its very difficult to participate.........

I don't accept this, I've spoken to more students from India about
participating than any other country. What makes it difficult for
india? The impression I have is that India is quite good for high-
tech education.

> i therefore urge
> organisations to hold some developer dayhs in india too so that we
> don't lack behind in participating in open source development.....

Again, why? What is it about india that you need hand-holding?

> also


> i would like u ppl to guide me about the studying procedure for being
> competitive in OPen Source Development........

You won't be a successful SoC participant if you aren't able to learn
on your own. Open source is very friendly, if you make some effort to
get involved you'll find people will help you out.

> I am a student from a
> college in Sangli,Maharashtra,India.........in final year of
> Engineering (Computer Science and Engineering)

So surely you have done large projects before?


Matt
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Ross Gardler

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Mar 20, 2008, 8:27:29 AM3/20/08
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Rana Singh wrote:
> i am very apprehensive about
> participating in GSoC .........i urge the mentors to plz hep me out
> here............when i went through the project ideas i found that i
> lack in the skill set required

The programme is aimed at students. By definition this means that you
will not know everything. Actually, none of us knows everything. That's
one of the nice things about open source, we share and learn from one
another. You may not recognise it yet but the mentors have things to
learn from you too.

However, you have to take the initiative. There is loads of really good
info on the GSoC web site, there are also lots of resources from past
participants out on the web.

My recommendation is to start learning by actively seeking things to
learn from (start with the GSoC FAQs [1]). When you think you understand
how GSoC works find a few projects that interest you and engage with the
community around that project.

If all goes well you'll find you get on well with one or more
communities and feel confident enough to make an application.

As for learning about how to excel in open source, that's what this is
all for, you should be looking for a community who can help you do that.

Don't be apprehensive, seize the opportunity. What's the worst that can
happen? You get a "sorry, maybe next year" message.

Ross

[1] http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2008/faqs.html

Mohammed Gamal

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Mar 20, 2008, 8:56:33 AM3/20/08
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Despite of the very good replies to the original sender. The thread
points out a major problem i see in many academic institutions, namely
in CS, CE, and EE majors.

I've spoken to many of my colleagues about participating in GSoC, and
many of them were also very apprehensive about it.

In my very personal experience, some academic institutions offering
CS/CE/EE majors have a very theoretical approach in teaching their
subjects, add to this the time-consuming nature studying in college,
so some students decide to sacrifice academic excellence for technical
ability and some other take the opposite path, only a few find the
time to excel in both worlds and the result is often that there is a
gap between the academic knowledge gained through college and the
real-life experience required to do real software development (and
participate in FOSS projects as well) with both being inversely
proportional to each other, this is not a rule at all, but just my
mere observation.

Even in academic subjects that are related to real-life applications,
the students are often required to write proof-of-concept code that
only simulates, and hardly relates to real-life examples of the code.
For example, in an OS course you'll write a program that simulates
process scheduling, yet you miss on many aspects that'd be imposed on
you due to factors such as computer architecture, parallelism, memory
architecture ...etc.

So I think that GSoC participating orgs need to offer ideas for
students who didn't have any exposure to their codebase, so that they
take their time to learn. This doesn't mean that students shouldn't o
their homework and work hard, but this is merely to help the ones with
less experience to be more experienced.

I'm sorry if this deviates from the main point of the post, so I
apologize for any in advance for filling your inbox with this long
message :)

Regards,
Mohammed

Dirk Haun

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Mar 20, 2008, 9:29:36 AM3/20/08
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On Mar 20, 1:56 pm, "Mohammed Gamal" <m.gamal...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So I think that GSoC participating orgs need to offer ideas for
> students who didn't have any exposure to their codebase

Hmm, I don't think the organizations expect you to be familiar with
their codebase beforehand. We certainly factor "getting to know the
codebase" into our estimates. This is all part of the GSoC learning
experience - how to find your way around in an existing codebase.

Christopher Sean Morrison

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Mar 20, 2008, 2:02:24 PM3/20/08
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Yeah, I highly concur. That's what the months leading up to the
summer are for and (at the mentor org's discretion) any time scheduled
into the student's development timeline. Most orgs know that there's
a learning curve for becoming familiar with the code.

Many orgs have source code counts in the hundreds of thousands or
millions -- I believe we're at roughly 1.2M sloc for BRL-CAD right
now, for example -- and especially with the high sloc counts, there's
really just no way a student is going to get up to speed even in all
the 'necessary' portions of the code base in time (imho). So the
student is expected to account for that in their schedule (and
mitigate disaster by learning as much as possible before it's time to
code).

Cheers!
Sean

Swanand

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Mar 21, 2008, 7:46:45 AM3/21/08
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Hi!
I am a student from India who sucessfully participated in GSoC'07.
Let me tell you from my own experience that if you, on your own; take
the initiative and start to learn things; you will have great time
doing GSoC. Regarding the studying procedure, there is rarely anything
in open source world, which you cannot learn online. Be open, embrace
open source and let GSoC be your first pitstop :)

Thanks and regards,
Swanand

On Mar 20, 11:02 pm, Christopher Sean Morrison <brl...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Mohammed Gamal

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Mar 21, 2008, 8:01:31 AM3/21/08
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I agree with you and the mentors, we can learn anything online. All I
wanted to say there are some students who might not have any
experience in larger projects. So my point is that mentor orgs need to
put forth ideas for the 'completely total newbie' among their ideas,
so that the apprehensive among us can start in a project with enough
confidence. The whole point of GSoC is to give a students experience
in software development in the real world, and to benefit themselves
and everyone else by contributing to OSS. And as I said before, this
is not an excuse for those who want to participate in GSoC to not do
their own part of the game, which is to be self-motivated,
self-learning, and open-minded.

Leslie Hawthorn

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Mar 21, 2008, 12:15:30 PM3/21/08
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I wrote this up last year when similar concerns were raised.  Hope it's useful:

http://www.hawthornlandings.org/2007/03/pep-talk.html

Cheers,
LH

Mohammed Gamal

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Mar 21, 2008, 12:20:20 PM3/21/08
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Thanks for that post Leslie, it so relieving :)

Leslie Hawthorn

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Mar 21, 2008, 12:22:51 PM3/21/08
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On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Mohammed Gamal <m.gam...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Leslie Hawthorn <lhaw...@google.com> wrote:
> I wrote this up last year when similar concerns were raised.  Hope it's
> useful:
>
> http://www.hawthornlandings.org/2007/03/pep-talk.html

Thanks for that post Leslie, it so relieving :)

Yay for useful!  You are most welcome.

Cheers,
LH


--
Leslie Hawthorn
Program Manager - Open Source
Google Inc.

http://code.google.com/opensource/

I blog here:

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com - http://www.hawthornlandings.org

Rana Singh

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Mar 25, 2008, 12:38:14 PM3/25/08
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Thank you so much for all the encouraging Things you ppl told me
about...............i am now prepared to work on open source and get
through this GSoC...........thanks ...regards---------Rana Vishal Singh

hve...@astound.net

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Mar 25, 2008, 4:50:41 PM3/25/08
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\To add to this, These projects cover a range of skill/education
levels from very basic to highly advanced. I know that my
organization has several project ideas listed that require post
graduate level skills but we also have some projects that are well
suited to lower division undergraduate level students (Ie. CS major in
first two years of school) and lots of stuff in between. What you
should do id figure out what mentor organizations you are interested
in and contact them. They will be more than happy to suggest which
projects are a good fit for your education/skill level.

Abhishek Padmanabh

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Apr 5, 2008, 8:40:08 AM4/5/08
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So, you just wanted some encouragement and you had started
generalizing to a country. There are more people there than just you
and you cribbing in your OP could be just plain humiliation to them.

Leaving that, one more important thing is skill alignment between what
you know and what you want to know in future (the path that you want
to choose). It is quite important to browse through the projects and
decide to go ahead with something that you would "like" yourself to
do, things that you would be "interested" to do. And not just that you
want to do something, anything. All this needs time and research. No
one knows everything for sure as already mentioned above. What matters
is just your willingness. It cannot get any more simpler than that.

Good luck with GSoC and no, its not the end of the world. You can
participate in the open source projects outside of the GSoC as well,
directly. There are many sources of learning for free!

krish

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Apr 6, 2008, 6:00:34 AM4/6/08
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LH: I dont see much scope for your leave. You are destined to be one
of the busiest people for GSoC. :)

Rana:
There are many students in India who are contributing to FOSS.
Regarding Developer Days, you've got to look around. We do have fair
share of events like foss.in, fossconf, mukt.in,etc.,
Please cut out the multiple period syndrome (........)

I hope by now you'd have been talking to mentors of your interest
project at IRC/via mails.

All the best.

--
krish

On Apr 5, 5:40 pm, Abhishek Padmanabh <abhishek.padman...@gmail.com>
wrote:
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