[tahoe-dev] GSoC Project Advice

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

We'll only consider mentoring students who get complete proposals
written up and submitted by the official GSoC deadline of April 9 at
19:00 UTC.

I know school work can be very demanding. Next time you'll have to
start earlier!

By the way, if you don't get sponsored by Google to work on any open
source project this summer, you might consider contributing to open
source on your own time. That's how all the rest of us do it, after
all. :-) That's actually how Kevan Carstensen became a core
contributor to Tahoe-LAFS. He applied for Google Summer of Code last
summer, got rejected by Google, and then went ahead and became a core
contributor to Tahoe-LAFS in his spare time.

So, if you don't get Google sponsorship this summer, by all means
start tinkering with JavaScript on Tahoe-LAFS, or with some other
tools, and inventing things that you think are cool. That's the way
free software happens.

Regards,

Zooko

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Jacob Lyles <jacob.lyles at gmail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately my school work load in the surrounding 24 hours has prevented
> me from completing a thorough proposal by the deadline. However I will be
> able to dive into the source code and write out a proposed timeline for the
> project over the weekend. Would this be useful? Would you be able to take
> this timeline into consideration when deciding on my project proposal?
>
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 7:29 PM, Zooko O'Whielacronx <zookog at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
>