Announcing this year's GSoC students

[Aaron Meurer]

Hi everyone. As many of you may have noticed, Google has announced the results
for Google Summer of Code. I am proud to announce that seven students have
been accepted to work on SymPy this year. The following projects have been
accepted:

Student (Project): Mentors

Akash Vaish (Improving Probability and Random Processes): Francesco
Bonazzi, Kalevi Suominen

Ashish Kumar Gaurav (Completing RUBI Integrator): Abdullah Javed Nesar,
Arihant Parsoya, Francesco Bonazzi

Jashanpreet Singh (Create a Rich Beam Solving System): Arihant Parsoya,
Jason Moore

Nikhil Pappu (Autolev Parser (using ANTLR v4)): Ondřej Čertík, Jason Moore

Ravicharan Nudurupati (Group Theory): Aaron Meurer, Valeriia Gladkova,
Kalevi Suominen

Sidhant Nagpal (Transforms, Convolution & Linear Recurrence
Evaluation): Aaron Meurer, Kalevi Suominen

Yathartha Anirudh Joshi (Solvers): Completing Solveset: Amit Kumar

Join me in congratulating these students on their acceptance.

In case you don't know, Google Summer of Code is a program where Google pays
students to write code for open source projects. SymPy was accepted as a
mentoring organization this year. The goal of the program is to help the
students learn new skills, in particular in our case:

* contributing to opensource
* working with the community
* learn git, pull requests, reviews
* teach them how to review other's people patches
* do useful work for SymPy
* have fun, and encourage the students to stay around

To all the students who are accepted, you should be receiving an email from
your mentors soon to discuss how you will be communicating over the summer
about your project. You should meet with your mentors about once a week during
the summer to go over your progress. You should either meet on a public
channel (like Gitter), or else post minutes of your meeting in some public
channel, so that the whole community can see your progress too. Note that in
many cases you may interact with some mentors as your primary mentors, and
other mentors will be backup mentors. Please contact the backup mentors if you
are not able to get ahold of your primary mentor(s). If you cannot get ahold
of either, please let me and Ondřej Čertík (ond...@certik.us) know
immediately.

I would like all of us to strongly encourage students to submit pull requests
early and often. This will go a long ways towards making sure that you don't
end the summer with a ton of code written that never gets merged. Students
should help review pull requests by other students, so that we don't get
bogged down reviewing so much code.

We also require that all students keep a weekly blog of their work over the
summer. If you don't already have a blog, you should start one. I recommend
using either Wordpress, Blogger, or creating your own blog on GitHub pages. If
you are savvy enough to set it up, I recommend GitHub pages, but if you
aren't, both Wordpress and Blogger are good enough. The only requirement is
that it has an RSS feed, so we can put it on planet.sympy.org. Planet SymPy is
also aggregated on Twitter at https://twitter.com/planetsympy. I also
recommend that it have some kind of comments box, so that people can comment
on your work. Please send a pull request with your blog RSS feed to
https://github.com/sympy/planet-sympy.

Starting on the week of May 14 (when the GSoC period officially begins), we
will expect you to have at least one blog post a week, describing your
progress for that week, or something interesting about your project. If you
don't have a post by the beginning of the day on Saturday, your mentors or I
will email you to remind you about it. I encourage all community members to
follow and comment on the student blogs, so you can see their progress.

I would like to thank all the students who applied this year and everyone who
submitted a patch. I would also like to thank all the mentors for helping
review patches and proposals.

This summer is looking to be another very productive one for SymPy, and I look
forward to it!

Aaron Meurer

[Arihant Parsoya]

Congratulations everyone!

[Björn Dahlgren]

Congratulations on being accepted. And good luck everyone!