[Soc-2009-dev] Summer of Code starts today!

Chris Want cwant at ualberta.ca
Sat May 23 17:06:30 CEST 2009


Hi students,

I hope that you are all ready for the start of
Summer of Code! 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/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2009

Each of you should creat a link to your own page from there that
you can modify (please talk to Martin (theeth) or Ton (kaito) 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/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2008
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2007
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2006
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2005

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.

I should note that I get a bit cranky when reports
are late so be sure to send them to the list on
Friday!

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). Usually Ton will ask you
for a brief summary of how the week went, and other
developers may ask questions about your project.
I know this is a bit redundant since the information
will already be in your Friday report, but we
find it a useful way to ensure that students have
some good "face-to-face" time with the Blender
development community. We of course encourage you
to spend time in the channel whenever you would
like to discuss your project, coding, or Blender.

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 (this has happened in the past). 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 (however, I am away in Chicago
this week until May 25th), 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,
so whenever possible you can freely ask questions in that
channel).

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

Regards,
Chris



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