Official Welcome to the 2014 Mifos Google Summer of Code

[Ed Cable]

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the Mifos Community officially as a Google Summer of Code intern. Once again on behalf of all the mentors, we've been thoroughly impressed with your work thus far. We want to get the most from this community bonding period so you can be prepared to code away as soon as May 19 arrives. 

Apart from the next steps Carol has provided from Google's end, here are some things to do to get acquainted with your mentor and plan out your summer: 

1) Fill out our Summer of Code introduction questionnaire (http://goo.gl/4qBiw)- if you haven't done this yet, please send me your replies by mid-week.

2) Fill out your profile in MifosForge - this is what we're using as the primary form of identity in the community. Within MifosForgePlease also create a personal space and add some of your details there - Anuruddha's page is a great example - https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/~apremalal

3) Introduce yourself to the community again (if you haven't already done so) via the mailing list.

4) Join our gsoc-2014 Google Group Mailing List (separate invitation coming). While most of your communications will occur publicly on the mailing lists - this internal mailing list will contain all our interns and mentors. We'll also use it or our daily email check-ins which I'll email separately about. 

5) Get to know your mentor: if they haven't already done so, please reach out to say hello and schedule some time to get to know each other personally - mentor assignment is near final so please continue going by what's listed on the 2014 Google Summer of Code page. 

6) Update and Refine your Project Plan/Proposal - your mentors and other community members will soon be reaching out to schedule calls to discuss the scope of your projects but based on your current knowledge of the project please start creating your Project Plan page on our wiki. You can use this template found in the Projects workspace (or if that link doesn't work, click Create and you'll see the GSOC Project Plan Page template as a blueprint). Good examples can be found in the completed projects listing from last year. 

7) Try to attend an upcoming User Meetup or Developer Meeting - these occur every Thursday rotating each week. This upcoming Thursday May 1 at 330pm GMT we'll have our User Meetup - then subsequently every other Thursday.  Next Thursday, May 8, we'll have our next Developer Meeting at 13:00GMT - then every other Thursday. 

8) Log into IRC each morning - that way we'll be able to find you or you can find us if you need some help.

9) Don't be afraid to ask for help! We don't want you to be blocked. Prepare to be communicating often - mentors will be checking in with you daily when the coding season starts. We'll also have some quick weekly meetings where all the students and mentors can briefly come together.

9) Get social. Follow us on Twitter - @mifos, Like us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/mifos and join on Google+https://plus.google.com/108007392717781607878 and https://plus.google.com/communities/117459001560725673646

10) Share a link to your personal blog where you'll be documenting your Summer of Code experiences. If you don't have a blog, please do set one up - Blogspot, Wordpress,com, Tumblr or even the blog functionality in Confluence are places to start. This is a great way to share your progress and experiences with the community - hopefully we'll be able to get Google to repost some posts on their OS blog. Past GSOC intern blogs: Anuruddha, Yanna, Avik

11) Continue following the same conventions and protocol you have been using Git and grabbing issues in JIRA. We will provide a refresher on our branching/releasing strategy and coding conventions during one of our meetings.  

Best,

Ed and Nayan