Re: Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC13)

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 25, 2013, 17:44 UTC
Message-ID: <7vd2voz3tr.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <453931856.Va6j4WpQCl@flomedio>

Florian Achleitner <florian.achleitner2.6.31@gmail.com> writes:

> For a student one aspect of  GSOC is also quite important: It is a cool and 
> demanding summer job during the holidays, but it has to ramp down when the new 
> semester starts.

Thanks for sharing.

I think an important lesson is that mentors and reviewers need to think really hard to limit the initial scope of the assignment to be not too ambitious. Starting with an ambitious goal and achieving only small first steps of them _can_ still be a good end result, but if a mentor wants to go that route, the decision to cut down the scope of an ambitous assignment needs to be made early enough to leave sufficient time to wrap up the half-done assignment in a good shape. Finishing with implementation of only the initial 30% of an unproven design, that by itself is not useful, does not help our project at all, and it does not give satisfaction to the student, either.