GSoC Advice

[Harsh Gupta]

Hi,

I was asked for advice on having a successful summer as a GSoC student. So
here I am. The main thing to keep in mind is that GSoC is much more than the
summer and every other else follows. It is pretty easy to do just enough work
to get passed but your aim should be do work which lives beyond the summer and
it helps someone which is not just you.

The first step in doing this is to communicate. Communicate with your mentors,
so that you can learn from them. Communicate your work with community and the
world outside so that they can make use of work and ideas. For GSoC this means
frequently writing blog posts and discussing ideas on the mailing list or the
gitter channel. Write good readable code so that the code communicates itself
to your future self and other fellow developers who will work on it.
Communicate to your user by writing documentation.

If you are waiting to figure out the perfect way to do something, you might
wait forever. For code first commit, then improve upon it later. For other
forms of communication you shouldn't worry much about saying something stupid.

Then it is important that you stay around even after the summer is over. In my
case my code wasn't merged in the master, till December months after the GSoC
project got over. Just letting the code stay in the PR doesn't get it merged,
sometimes you have to fight for it and I'm glad I did that. That is the minimum
you should do and ideally you should stay around till the time you find someone
else to work on it. Of course you can stay around forever, some people have
build carries around the work they did in GSoC and it is equally good if you
move on and try other things out. But in any case you should try to make sure
work lives on beyond the summer.


--
Harsh
Sent from a GNU/Linux

[Shekhar Prasad Rajak]

+1

--

Shekhar