Sakai GSoC recruiting - feedback please!

[aewp2]

Hi everyone,

I'm keen to make sure Sakai is up there with the best of them in the
GSoC recruiting stakes. Have you drawn any comparisons having looked
at a bunch of orgs? Is there anything you're finding great or
terrible, or just slightly neat or marginally troublesme? Did you
want more information, less, more help getting started, coding
challenges, patching 101s? Your feedback as applicants would be
appreciated.

Don't worry, I totally expect you to have looked at other orgs. Not
any more now you've found us though, obviously ;)

Amyas

[Aadish Kotwal]

Hello Amyas,

Thanks very much for giving us (the applicants) a chance to give our feedback. I have been through 3-4 organizations before deciding on Sakai as the most suitable organization for me. Based on my experience I would like to state the following points:

What Sakai has the best:

1. The thing I appreciate the most here is that developers and mentors have been extremely helpful. I am working on the project idea 'Sakai OAE Column Storage Driver' and the proposed mentor for this project (Dr. Ian Boston) has been very generous in helping me get ahead with things. He has guided me at times when I needed help and I very much look forward to working with such a great community.

2. Things are very organized with a great documentation. It took me very less time and effort to get started with things here.

3. Sakai uses some of the best technologies (ex. NoSQL databases which I plan to work on) and seems to have a great, challenging but flexible development environment.

What I would like to see ahead:

1. Initially I started with some bugs but stumbled upon some tough ones. Hence I decided to skip them for that time and directly start with working on the software and with project brainstorming. I would love to see some introductory bugs specially for new developers, so that we can start with easy ones, get familiar with everything, and progress to tough ones (my apologies if it already exists and I have missed it).

2. Coding challenges would also be great in form of something which would test us on the knowledge level and the passion we have for the project we are applying for.


Thanks and Regards,
Aadish

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Aadish Kotwal

[Avinash Parida]

Hi,

I am quite pleased to see Sakai is taking great measures and
improvement in the GSoc recruiting. In my feedback i would like to
mention few things.

On the positive aspect , the resources are well provided to get
started along with the documentations on the Confluence and wiki sites
which are very informative.

The Sakai-Dev community is very active in helping and giving immediate
help/feedback or replies which is a Big plus !
Also I found Sakai using other opensource tools which makes the name
well spread and informed. I was really happy to see Sakai working
closely with the Fluid Team.

Mentor Steve Swinsberg has been organizing things very well for the
project with tips on collaborating with other students interested in
the same project , really keeps me interested.

On things I would like to see would be Initial Assignments/ coding
challenges on the project we apply so that it keeps us on track for
the pre-project initiation period.
I understand that mentors have full-time jobs and others works aswell
and really appreciate the time spent on discussing our issues on the
IRC.

Thanks,
Avinash
(IRC nick Avipar)

[Nandana Mihindukulasooriya]

Dear Amyas,

Thank you very much for all your efforts to make it easy for the students apply and perform a successful GSoC project with the Sakai foundation. 

I also agree with the positive points that Aadish and Avinash have mentioned. I think the active and friendly mentors who are very responsive to prospective students' inquiries and the well organised project ideas page with all the relevant links are the two key factors which makes Sakai stand up as one of the best GSoC recruiting organisations. I mainly contacted Seth Theriault, the proposed mentor for the "Improve Sakai CLE WebDAV support" project and I always got an informative reply to all my inquiries within 12 hours which was very helpful to move forward.

On the improvements, as both Aadish and Avinash have mentioned the hardest part of most of the GSoC projects is to getting started with the big codebases like Sakai. And some other projects might not need to understand the existing code in deep but they might have other challenges associated with them. So I think if each of the selected candidates (after being accepted) can put a blog post on how they managed that challenge, it will be helpful to the future GSoC 2012 candidates to get started. Some thing similar to the project weekly posts of Sakai GSoC blog but about pre-selection time where selected students can include information on how they got started, and other helpful practical tips and tricks from a student point of view. 

Just my 2 cents. 

Best Regards,
Nandana

[Kasun Lakpriya]

Hi Amyas,

Yes I am also agree with all the others. As many of the organizations participated in GSoC Sakai also has the same goal to help students to get into the projects. In my case at the very beginning when I looked at the GSoC getting started guide I got almost a overall idea of how this works. About the mentors and the community, yes I can remember once I contacted Steve first, he directed me to you and asked to discuss in the google group at that time it was really helpful for me to get in to the track. After that Steve helps me a lot to come up with this proposal I posted few days back. One more thing once I asked a question in IRC and got a very clear answer for that. So Sakai community is very much helpful and encouraged to work on the project. 

Improvements and Ideas:

- One idea I have in my mind is if we can include some related Jira issues with the project idea itself it will really helpful student to get an idea about what they are going to do.  

- patching also would be a good point from the organization's point of view to identify if a particular student is capable of completing the project with in the three months

Other than that every thing is fine for me.

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 6:53 PM, aewp2 <amyas.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Thanks and Regards,

Kasun

[aewp2]

Thanks everyone for the positive feedback and suggestions!

I particularly like the ideas about including associated Jiras,
posting 'getting started' experiences on the blog, and having Initial
Assignments for the application and socialisation periods - that's a
neat and constructive way of having a coding challenge element.

Amyas