Re: Questions on GSoC 2019 Ideas

From: Thomas Gummerer <t.gummerer@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 6, 2019, 23:17 UTC
Message-ID: <20190306231722.GA6085@hank.intra.tgummerer.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAHd-oW6rVptPnHn-aoeMTkp0p-TmoQ7fniftpQm9rw+tjukZ_w@mail.gmail.com>

On 03/05, Matheus Tavares Bernardino wrote:

Show 35 quoted lines

> First of all, I must apologize for not replying during these last
> days. I'm traveling and I rarely get a connection here. But I'll be
> back March 11th.
> 
> On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 4:18 AM Christian Couder
> <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 4:09 PM Thomas Gummerer <t.gummerer@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > I'm a bit wary of a too large proposal here, as we've historically
> > > overestimated what kind of project is achievable over a summer (I've
> > > been there myself, as my GSoC project was also more than I was able to
> > > do in a summer :)).  I'd rather have a project whose goal is rather
> > > small and can be expanded later, than having something that could
> > > potentially take more than 3 months, where the student (or their
> > > mentors) have to finish it after GSoC.
> >
> 
> I totally understand the concern.
> 
> > Yeah, I agree with your suggestion about a project that declares
> > removing the global variables as the main goal, and adding parallelism
> > as a potential bonus.
> >
> 
> Talking about a delimited scope for GSoC and a potential bonus after,
> a potential idea comes to my mind: I'm still trying to define the
> subject for my undergraduate thesis (which must be in HPC and/or
> parallelism on CPU/GPU). And the idea of bringing more parallelism to
> git seems to be too big for a GSoC project. So, perhaps, if we manage
> to identify wether parallelism would indeed bring a good performance
> gain to git, I could propose that to my advisor professor as my
> undergraduate thesis and I could work on that during this whole year.
> It is still an idea to be matured, but do you think it would be
> feasible?

I think this idea is generally fine, but your project proposal should only be about the parts that are going to be included in your GSoC project. Of course we love to see GSoC students that are still actively participating in the project after GSoC. However that should not be part of the sponsored program. Mentors may also be less available outside of the program, as mentoring can take quite some time commitment.

Another slight concern here is that the mentors may be less familiar with this project than others (I for one am not very familiar, and Christian mentioned similar concerns), so it may be harder to give you good advice.

All that said, if you are still excited about this project, think about how to address these concerns in your proposal. And feel free to discuss the proposal on the mailing list as well, before actually submitting it.