[GSoC 2019] FAQs - Please read before starting a new Thread

[mr.matthias.mueller]

Dear all,

We're happy and honored to be part of this year's GSoC again as a mentor-organization! :)

From previous years we know that you all have many questions and we want to help you as good as possible!

However, since we're all volunteers too, time and resources are limited... therefore we decided to provide some FAQs that might help you!

Q: What are the first steps to contribute to Catrobat?
A: First of all we would recommend visiting our special developer’s website http://developer.catrobat.org, where you can find all information about the project and how to be part of it. Furthermore you should get our free app “Pocket Code” (http://catrob.at/pc on Android or http://catrob.at/PCios on iOS) and create your own programs or games with it.

To get to know our code please look up http://github.com/catrobat and follow our issue tracking system https://jira.catrob.at 

Q: Where can I find the ideas page?
A: Here you go: developer.catrobat.org/gsoc_2019_ideas_page.html . If you have other ideas which would be cool for Pocket Code don’t hesitate to write us! However, please note that we will not accept ideas that have nothing in common with Catrobat or are just very peripherally connected to our work - e.g. personal projects that should be mentored or projects from total different domains.

Q: Can I contact the mentors directly?
A: Unfortunately our mentors would get overwhelmed with messages if we would to it that way. Furthermore most questions can also be answered by other mentors and/or are of general interest. So please use this mailing list as communication channel. Thanks! Please also note that requests on social media just can get answered slowly and the answer will probably refer to this group - so you're fine here ;)

Q: Is there a special template for the proposal?
A: For your proposal please use the template provided on our organization page on https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com and follow the instructions there . Please do not request access to the document - just copy and paste it into a new one that you use for your proposal. Please note that we more or less require you to use this template, since from experience we know that many points that are important to us will else be missing in the individual proposals.

Q: Can I submit my proposal to you directly e.g. via E-Mail?
A: No. Please be aware of the official GSoC Timeline and rules. All proposals have to be submitted via the official timeline during the Student Application Period. Further information on: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/faq . We will not and can not accept or regard any applications that get mailed to us not via the official website.


Q: What do I have to keep in mind for my proposal?
A: Please take a closer look on our template and answer all questions. We also ask you to get familiar with some principles (like test driven development or extreme programming) and do some research on it. It's not an examination, we just want to see if you understand how we're working and what contributing to Catrobat would look like ;)

Q: What skills do I need to contribute?
A: Actually this is depending on the project you want to work on. Most projects are in some kind Android related, but there are also pure Pocke Code and iOS projects. So we prefer if students have previous and advanced experience in this field and can show us some projects they’ve already worked on (nevertheless, this is not a must-have, we also take other aspects into consideration for choosing students for GSoC). 


Q: Do you prefer any projects for GSoC?
A: No. Since we suggest them on our ideas page we like all of them. Choose one you feel comfortable with!


Q: Do you require students to have contributed to Catrobat before?
A: Of course it's a benefit, especially for you since you get to know what the project is about. But since GSoC is about getting students into FOSS projects we do not require any previous contribution (but we're happy if you want to contribute on to FOSS projects after GSoC!). If you understand what our project is about, what our vision is and you have programming experience (in some related fields) we're totally happy with it. If you contributed before or have created great Pocket Code programs please share it with us within your proposal!

Q: If I'm interested in several projects/ideas - how many proposals should I submit?
A: Just one. Mention in this one in which ideas/fields you're interested in and we will consider all projects you reference there.

Q: How should I submit the proposal and coding examples?
A: Please only submit your proposal on the official GSoC website! Provide references or examples there (e.g. Copy-Paste or a link to Github, etc.). Due to the organizational overhead (and we want that all our mentors can see every proposal) we won't consider/review any documents, examples or proposals that we receive via E-mail or other channels! We just want to see if you know what you're doing and you do have some coding experience/knowledge - that's what this question is about.

Q: Will you give feedback to proposals?
A: Please be aware that we usually receive many proposals at the same time. So it's hard for us to review proposals before the student application deadline (also since we would have to re-review them every time they change). If you use our template and follow the instructions you're totally fine. We want to get to know you and your work, so it wouldn't make any sense to propose you any answers either ;)

Q: How the proposals will be reviewed and how students get selected?
A: Our team of mentors, Org admins and senior contributors will take a look on the proposals and review them. We take several aspects into consideration - e.g. skills, interest in FOSS, understanding our vision/project, passion and so on. It's more of a feeling how a certain student will do on a project and how passionate (s)he will be within our org.  

Q: When/How the selected students will get notified

A:   Students will get notified as stated on the official timeline. We will not give any information to you before this date stated on the website (so even if you ask as via mail we can't say anything ;) ). You will get notified via Mail and the GSoC website. We're sorry that we can't provide personal explanations about possible acceptance or rejection, since many aspects are taken into account for our decisions.

Q: How to contribute to get prepared for GSoC?
A: We would prefer if the suggested ideas get implemented during the coding period by one student (since the tasks are mostly connected to each other) and not as part of the preparation. We highly recommend to fork our development branch and create an own personal branch on your GitHub repository. Implement features or other stuff, you think Pocket Code needs, there and share it with as your code example in the application. Be aware that Pocket Code is released on Google Play, so Pull Requests get checked manually for Quality, Issues and project policies (clean code, all features tested,...) - so it takes some time to review Pull Requests by our Senior members. We cannot guarantee that they will be reviewed during the application period. So once again: we highly recommend to fork them into your local repo and submit that as code example.

Q: What skills to you require from GSoC students?
A: We do not require you to be an expert developer (that's not what FOSS is about). However, we require that you have basic skills in the programming language you'll be working in (e.g. Java,..) - mentoring is not about teaching how to code, it's more about advising how to design a solution that fits to the existing code. 

Furthermore, we would like to see that you're passionate about FOSS and especially that you can work independently (of course there is mentoring, however, we want you to work on the idea, not the mentor - he's just backing you ;) ).

Q: How to work with tickets on Jira? What's the workflow?

Once again: Please look up the question "How to contribute to get prepared for GSoC?" 

We appreciate if you want to actively contribute on from the beginning. But since we're developing an app that is published on Google Play and we just have releases every couple of weeks to it, we want to keep high quality standards and have strong project-related policies. So before working on real tasks we recommend to work locally on implement some basic features (e.g. a new brick, missing tests,....) -> that's also how the selected students will start in the coding period ;)

Anyway, if you still choose to work on tickets, let me quote Annemarie therefore:

You should only take issues which are "ready for development", not issues which are in any other state of the workflow. Move them to "in development" and then to "ready for code review" when you are done, and create a pull request.

Only issues in "ready for development" are selected to be implemented and defined well enough so you can work on ist. If you don't follow these procedure you are probably implementing something we don't need or not the way we want it to be implemented and therefore you code will probably not merged.

Also please only take one issue after another. Once your PR is reviewed you will probably have to make some changes before it can be merged. If you have too many open issues you will have a hard time to keep track of everything.

Q: Do I have to work on tickets as Code example?

We're aware that not all "Ready for development" tickets will fit your personal interests. However, please follow the workflow as mentioned above!

For the code example or your proposal in general we do not request solved tickets - keep it in mind!. It's totally ok if you work locally on our code, get to know it and add some features (e.g. copy it into your proposal).

However, if you want to contribute to our repo you have to follow the workflow and to use tickets (as stated in the workflow). Locally you can do and prove us whatever you want ;)

Another good resource for information are previous postings here - so it's worth to look them up ;)

We will also update this thread if there are recurring questions.

Have fun with our project and we're looking forward to your proposals!

Best,

Matthias

- Catrobat Org Admin