let's get ready for Google Summer of Code 2014

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 10:56 AM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday, February 10, 2014 16:21:34 Mark Gaiser wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in> wrote:
>> > On Monday, February 10, 2014 01:54:36 PM Mark Gaiser wrote:
>> >> Done:
>> >> http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2014/Ideas#Revive_KioFuse.2C_fuse_support_f
>> >> or
>> >> _KIO
>> >>
>> >> Lets hope a student comes by and picks that project
>> >> All we need then is someone to mentor that.
>> >
>> > Not you?
>>
>> No, certainly not. I know "a bit" about KIO, but others know _way_
>> more. And guiding a student requires someone with more in depth
>> knowledge then i have. (looking at David Faure ^_-)
>
> That's a misconception. What a mentor has to do is to show a developer the
> ropes, get him or her started, but the mentor doesn't have to be an absolute
> authority in a given domain (but has to realize that). As long as you can
> point the student towards finding a solution, or tell him/her where to find
> help, whom to ask, it's perfectly fine to mentor someone.
>
> Most of the work in guiding the student is in ... well ... guiding the
> student, and that's more related to processes such as where to find help, how
> to get the build set up. In my experience, it's mostly about processes than
> about absolute knowledge and expertise of a given piece of code.

That is all very well, but the fact is: we should NOT add project
suggestions without having a mentor for it, this gives a very wrong
signal, as students might be interested to work on something but will
not be able to do so without a mentor. So if you add a project, please
make sure you have a mentor for it.

And no, it is not enough to be able to guide, you also need people
available who can review code. I was able to mentor twice in the past
because I was around to help the student find solutions and nag them
to give the requested regular feedback and to make sure they respected
the deadlines and had somebody to talk to when there are problems, and
I had several people at hand who could do the code reviewing part,
something I definitely can't do myself. So if nobody is around to
review the code, then don't suggest a project, as it is a necessary
step in the process.


Regards, Myriam

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