Re: My advice for GSoC applicants

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Mar 3, 2014, 16:32 UTC
Message-ID: <24D54C99D151474B9B6D7DC05405EC5E@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <53145D48.3040603@alum.mit.edu>

From: "Michael Haggerty" <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Cc: "Dmitry Dolzhenko" <dmitrys.dolzhenko@yandex.ru>; "Sun He"
<sunheehnus@gmail.com>; "Brian Gesiak" <modocache@gmail.com>; "Tanay
Abhra" <tanayabh@gmail.com>; "Kyriakos Georgiou"
<kyriakos.a.georgiou@gmail.com>; "Siddharth Goel"
<siddharth98391@gmail.com>; "Guanglin Xu" <mzguanglin@gmail.com>;
"Karthik Nayak" <karthik.188@gmail.com>; "Alberto Corona"
<albcoron@gmail.com>; "Jacopo Notarstefano"
<jacopo.notarstefano@gmail.com>

Show 19 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> Based on my experience so far as a first-time Google Summer of Code
> mentor, I just wrote a blog article containing some hopefully useful
> advice for students applying to the program.  Please note that this is
> my personal opinion only and doesn't necessarily reflect the views of
> the Git/libgit2 projects as a whole.
>
>    My secret tip for GSoC success
>
> http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-secret-tip-for-gsoc-success.html
>
> Michael
>
> -- 
> Michael Haggerty
> mhagger@alum.mit.edu
> http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/
> --

In particular I liked : " If the documentation is unclear, it is OK to ask for a clarification, but then _fix the documentation_ so that your mentor never has to answer the same question again."

So the rhetorical question(s) for students would be :-

- was the Git documentation useful - did you see the README?, did it
lead, easily, to the useful places [1]? How could the wording/layout be
improved for the first time reader?

- which points of clarification were most useful and are they in the
documentation? Where should they be included?

- which points needed repeating often, and why? Where was the
disconnect?

- what would a patch look like...

Philip Oakley

[1] README; INSTALL; Documentation/SubmittingPatches; Documentation/CodingGuidelines;