[tahoe-dev] GSoC Project Advice

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Jacob Lyles <jacob.lyles at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the advice. I am also interested in the distributed wiki or blog
> apps using Caja and Tahoe. Is one of these projects preferred to the other
> by the Tahoe team? Should I submit applications for both?

The limiting factor at this point is likely to be your ability to
finish a good thorough Proposal before the deadline, which is coming
up about sixteen hours after I write this [1]. (By the way, the Google
Summer of Code folks are absolutely merciless about deadlines. I have
yet to see them give anyone the slightest lenience on a deadline. A
good strategy is to upload a barebones Proposal to the GSoC site and
then iteratively improve it in-place.)

So you should choose whichever thing you are the most interested in
and write a thorough Proposal for that first. In fact, yeah there is
no point in writing a Proposal to do the other one. Just concentrate
on your favorite.

I'm glad you are interested in those projects! I really hope to see
some good cloud apps built on top of Tahoe-LAFS this summer. By the
way if there is something that catches your fancy more than a wiki or
a blog then by all means write that up. Multiplayer game? Social
networking software? There are probably a lot of things that would
make good cloud apps that nobody has thought of yet. Josip Lisec had
the idea of a music player [2], which sounded to me kind of crazy
and/or kind of an ill fit for Tahoe-LAFS at first, but he went ahead
and wrote up a very detailed proposal with mock-ups of the user
interface and everything and it is sounding better and better.

Good luck writing a thorough Proposal with detailed functionality, a
basic timeline, and how we and you can evaluate progress at different
points in the summer (e.g. if there are some kind of tests that we can
run which demonstrate that the code written so far does what it is
supposed to do).

See the recent thread on this mailing list for an example of what a
detailed Proposal looks like:

http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-April/004232.html

Feel free to look up the Tahoe-LAFS mentors on irc.freenode.net #tahoe-lafs .

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/faqs#timeline
[2] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-March/004208.html