[Soc-2008-dev] Summer of Code starts tomorrow!

[Chris Want]

Hi students,

I hope that you are getting ready for the start of the
Summer of Code tomorrow! I see some of you have been
active on IRC and have already been committing to your
branches -- that's great! I also hope you've started
interacting with your mentors (if you haven't already,
you should ASAP). If you have any obligations (like
exams or holidays) that might effect your progress
this summer, please send a mail to this list and let
us know.

There are a few things you should know about:

1) Most of you already have SVN branches. If you don't have
one yet, please talk to either your mentor, or to Martin
Poirier (theeth) for access to a branch. Be sure to ask
your mentor about merging, and be sure to merge your branch
often with the trunk revision.

2) There is a wiki page for this year's SoC:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SummerOfCode2008

Each of you should creat a link to your own page from there that
you can modify (please talk to Tom Musgrove, a.k.a LetterRip
on irc for wiki permissions). You can create that page and
describe your project goals and your project. If you would like to
see examples of what students from previous years have done,
checkout the links on these pages:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SummerOfCode2007
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SummerOfCode2006
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SummerOfCode2005

3) Our SoC 'Ideas page' had the following condition for
students: "You must be willing to submit weekly progress
reports and be available for weekly IRC meetings".

Every Friday, we require you to create an informal
weekly report, sent to this mailing list, outlining:

a) What you did in the previous week;
b) What you plan to do in the following week;
c) Describe any issues you are having that may
require extra attention;
d) Let us know whether you feel that you are on
schedule, ahead of schedule, or behind schedule. If
you are behind schedule, please let us know what we
can do together to get things back on track.

Part a) above is something you may also want to
put in your wiki page as a part of a developer's
log.

Our weekly IRC meetings are on Sundays (the only day
of the week that most of our developer base is able to
meet due to timezones). The channel is #blendercoders
and the time is 16:00 CET (you'll need to figure out
your local time from that).

4) Generally we have found that students who show a
pattern of unresponsive behavior will usually end up
having unsuccessful projects. So please, if we ask
something from you via email, such as "where is your
Friday report" please respond within a day. If a student
proves to be unresponsive on more that one occasion,
there is a good likelihood that we will ask Google not
to pay them. If it turns out that you have an emergency
that makes you unresponsive, it really only takes a few
seconds to email your mentor about it, and this is the
least we expect. It's a privilege to get paid to work on
an open source project for a summer, so please don't
waste this opportunity by being neglectful of a common
courtesy.


5) Okay, enough heavy stuff -- any questions or comments?
I have a nick (cwant) semi-permanently joined to
the #blendercoders IRC channel, so if you have any
questions feel free to join IRC and ask, and I will
answer when I become active (many other helpful
developers are active there too). I should note
that I am currently at a conference in Europe so my
response time for the next couple of weeks might be
a bit slower than usual.

Happy coding to all of you, and here's to a successful
Summer of Code!

Regards,
Chris