We began work on the project ideas page and the instructions for prospective students here.
Please use this thread to discuss any project ideas, if you’d like to be a mentor on a project, of if you’d like to apply as a student. Everybody’s welcome to join us and participate.
The deadline for organization applications is February 19. Until then, we will meet every Tuesday (February 9 and 16) at 3 PM Eastern Time, and working on the application and project ideas offline.
How about starting to add difficulty labels to the issue trackers at fortran-lang? Maybe having easy, medium and difficult labels on almost all issues instead of the few good-first-issue and help-wanted labels makes it easier to pick a good starting point.
Personally, I find these two projects less suitable for GSoC students. While very important for the future growth of the projects, I think they demand less Fortran knowledge and more skills in GitHub, web scripting, software development practices, etc
At least from an outside perspective, I always though GSoC projects were supposed to engage students with an applied problem and help them become proficient in a programming language. The OS integration, subprocesses, and fpm compile flags belong in this area.
Of course I might be wrong, and we - the Fortran community - could benefit a lot from a student proficient in versioning, or with previous experience in registries, databases and related projects.
Infrastructure/Automation : These projects are the code that your organization uses to get its development work done; for example, projects that improve the automation of releases, regression tests and automated builds. This is a category in which a GSoC student can be really helpful, doing work that the development team has been putting off while they focus on core development.
Whether they’re interesting or rewarding for a specific student is a different question. But I know people who are very much into this kind of stuff.
Many thanks for all your work populating the ideas page so far @awvwgk, it is looking really promising!
I think it would be good to assign such difficulty labels to the issue trackers; do you have an idea of some criteria for categorising the issues? Perhaps based on size of changes required, familiarity with the codebase and general implementation complexity?
Another thing to consider is that any project ideas that require specification decisions will need to be highlighted as such (we already have a specification tag in fpm, thanks @awvwgk). Importantly we can’t allow specification decisions to bottleneck a student coding project and hence should aim to complete these decisions before start of code (June 7). This is well-suited for students to engage with the community during the ‘Bonding period’, however addressing specification earlier would be preferable IMO.
Implementation complexity sounds like a good starting point, a roughly estimated workload in time and coding might be a useful criteria as well. This assessment can be preferably done by project maintainers or prior contributors familiar with the code base.
I would suggest the following rough guidance:
easy is everything that estimates less than a whole day of work by a project maintainer
difficult is everything even the project maintainer can’t put a time estimate on
medium is (almost) everything else
I already created some difficulty labels in all the repos, but haven’t started labeling yet, so everybody feel free to start labeling as you visit your favourite issues.
I am working on the application, I started the application at https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ and now I am extracting the questions into the wiki, so that we can collaboratively work on it.
I filled in some questions, I will be busy until our call. Please help fill in the answers before our call as much as you can, so that we have some draft to start from during our call.
Application Instructions: this is part of the first bullet point, this should probably be another wiki page I think. It should contain instructions what students have to do to be considered: introduce themselves at Discourse, we will discuss and help with their application, they should draft it, discuss with us, and submit. We agreed to do a patch requirement, so also submit a patch.
Label more issues with “easy to fix” labels.
Ondrej will contact other orgs to see if they would vouch for us
We will meet next Tuesday in the same time slot to finalize the application and submit
We’ll meet again tomorrow to discuss and hopefully finalize our GSoC application. I will aim to have a complete draft of the application form answers by then. Zoom info below:
Topic: Fortran-lang + GSoC
Time: Feb 16, 2021 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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Please review it by our meeting tomorrow and think about how it could be improved. If you edit it, please note the character limit. Most of the answers are tight within limit already.
Welcome to the Discourse @marshallward and thanks for sharing your flint project, it looks very promising as a useful tool for the community! I think it is a good candidate for GSoC to push it forward.
I notice it doesn’t have a LICENSE file currently — is the project open source? If yes, then I don’t see any reason why we cannot list it on our GSoC ideas page; are able to provide one or more flint project ideas for the ideas page? Please do also join us for our Fortran-Lang GSoC meeting today to discuss if you’re able.