[PLUG] About GSoC

[Dipen]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Dipen <dipench at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:52 AM, Ratnadeep <ratnadeepdeshmane at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am final year engineering student and this year i want to participate
>> for
>> Google Summer of Code.  Regarding this I need help for things like -
>>
>> - Selection of organization and project.
>> - Regarding application form such that there will be more chances for
>> getting selected.
>>
>> Is there any expert or mentor worked with GSoC or any past GSoC student in
>> Pune who can guide for GSoC.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> --
>> Ratnadeep Deshmane.
>> http://rtdp.blogspot.com
>> _______________________________________
>> Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
>>
>
>
> Ok My emails have been bouncing off coz of top posting  -
> http://idallen.com/topposting.html So here are my 3 e mails ...
>
> Hi Ratnadeep,
>
>  If you are interested in web programming and CMS's I would suggest you
> take a look at drupal and their ecosystem for GSOC. Every year drupal gets
> around 20-23 students approved by google to work on drupal, which is at par
> or i think even better than most of the popular open source projects. For
> example mysql got some 3-5 students approved only, google has some long
> standing relationship with drupal world and that can be seen when drupal
> gets so many students approved.
>
> You need to decide whats your passion when it comes to open source and what
> kind of OSS project you wanna contribute to. If you decide to look at drupal
> as an option and have skills there, i would be happy to help with your
> application and I think I will also apply to be a mentor this year.
>
> All the best
> Dipen
>
>
>
>
Going through your blog, I found that you have relatively heavy tag cloud
towards RoR, which is cool framework to be working on. RoR is on a important
transition upgrading itself to a major release change and I am sure project
can use some help. Things I would suggest as a way forward:

1> Spend as much time as you can in #rubyonrails or place where core
developers talk
2> Find out the pain points which align with your expertise or something you
wish to improve in RoR, most of the times students dont have such knack of
identifying pain points hence point 1, listen to the pro's talking about
it.
3> Write a non obtrusive 1 mail to few developers who actively blog and dont
freak out at social contact from anonymous. You can establish that dev's who
tweet often are often receptive. Do NOT nag or drain the developer by e
mailing many times. Ask them for same advice but with more information about
your background ( unlike this e mail )
4> Try to find developers from indian community in the project and contact
them as well. Since I am assuming its RoR for you, it wouldn't be a bad idea
to attend rubyconf and meet pratik naik (core developer of RoR) Also I think
Satish Talim is petty active in RoR.


All above will help you identify the topic or problem you will write
application again, its quite possible the people you contact and get
feedback from in first phase are the ones who will judge the applications,
so they have perspective of what u are trying to accomplish and if it has
their input as well then getting accepted is sure shot, given u prove the
skill part.

All in All to cut it short, getting Gsoc approval is all about how well u
are known in community and if u have existing contributions then great, but
if you dont then above steps can help you build that rapport.

I have couple of past Gsoc interns and I can connect you for the application
part of it, but before that you need to figure out what you wanna work on,
thats paramount.