Advice For GSoC’s Students, Stage One: Before Google Announce the Mentoring Organizations
February 21, 2009
I’m proud to join GSoC 2008. GSoC was a great experience for me and it really changed my life. I’m writing this post to give the new GSoCer some tips that I hope it will be useful for them. In this series I will give different tips for all the stages of Google Summer of Code™.
Google Summer of Code™ 2009 Logo
Stage One: Before Google Announce the Mentoring Organizations (from now to March 13)
- Look at the previous GSoC mentoring organizations, most of them has already published this year ideas list. You might try using Google search engine to search for ‘Google Summer of Code 2009 Ideas’.
- Try thinking of those ideas, see what might interest you. I would remind you that GSoC is about three to four months you don’t have much time for big projects. Also, being ambitious is good but remember you have to be realistic about your project don’t over take projects that are over your capabilities. In GSoC you’re going to learn a lot of things and you mostly you will not have all the knowledge and experience to do the project. But you should got the basics and you have all the summer to learn and work. So, the best thing is to try to balance between what you already have and between what you’re going to learn.
- Make short list about 5 to 7 projects from different organizations. You free to select more, but big list will distract you. Also, try to select projects that have similarities on your advantage, like all the project on your list use PHP and you have PHP experience.
- Start walking around on the mailing lists and IRC channels for these projects.
- It will rise your chance to be accepted if you send patches for those projects, but if you don’t it’s OK.
- If you feel that those projects on the short list is hard and over your capabilities don’t panic. Try thinking again on that project sometimes project look very hard at the first time but when you think of it or discuss it with your friends you will see how easy it is. If you think of the project one time after another and you still find it very hard it’s OK, try looking for other projects.
- Note: not all organizations that apply for GSoC will be accepted. It’s also competitive for the mentoring organizations, so be sure that your short list contain projects from at least three diffrent mentoring organizations.
“It will rise your chance to be accepted if you send patches for those projects, but if you don’t it’s OK.”
What do you mean by patches here?
I mean software patch; in general a patch is a small piece of code that fix a bug or add small feature or improve performance you can read more formal definition about it on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(computing)
or more technical details on
http://www.kegel.com/academy/opensource.html#patches
your site is cool and very easy to be understood. very simple introductions among complicated.
keep writing.good job
Good advice, though I’m finding it difficult to go through old mailing lists and such, let alone for 3+ other companies. Simple bug fixes are something I hadn’t thought of though. Thanks for the advice!
Of course I didn’t mean to read ALL the threads on the mailing list, but it’s better to take a look at it. By this way you “get in the mode” by that I mean you will have an idea about what the developers of the project are thinking of and test your self if you can follow them. Also, you might find more information about the project you are going to apply in GSoC because most organizations discuss GSoC ideas on the mailing list before publishing it.
Hey, Thank you very much for the timely advices given here, It’s so simple & clean the way you present that. Keep up the great work.
useful advices
Thanks very much.
please do publish what to do just after march 13 too.
of course I will do
Hi All;
Sorry for the mistake on the dates. This stage is from now till *March 18th* not 13. This stages ends when Google announce the official mentoring organizations list. Google will start accepting mentoring organization applications on March 9th and it stop accepting new applications on March 13th but it will announce the final list on March 18.
[...] started yet From March 18th to March 23rd First sorry about my mistake on the date for the first stage, the first stage ends on March 18th not March 13th. On March 18th, Google will announce [...]