[haiku] Re: [GSoC]: who is willing to mentor this year?

  • From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 13:27:33 -0400

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Salvatore Benedetto <emitrax@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> +1 for making a status report every 20 days or so a requirements.

Oh, WAY more often than that. I say every week at least.

I have been a mentor for GSoC for 3 years, and while I still feel I
have stuff to learn, one thing I have learned is that GSoC needs to be
treated like a job, not just a fun summer project. While I hope there
would be some fun in it, the student needs to treat it very seriously.

I have personally had enough of students taking the Google money and
just putting in a few hours here and there and producing something
that barely fulfills the goals of their project. I am not saying every
previous GSoC student was like that, but a lot were.

In addition being a mentor should also be taken pretty seriously. I
have not done a very good job in the past in my opinion. I was not
proactive enough, did not push the students enough, and was overly
nice in some cases. While I am not advocating being military strict or
making your student hate you and his project, I do think you need to
be more than just a buddy the student occasionally talks to. You need
to push them, make sure they put good work in EVERY WEEK, and that
they don't slack off too much. I should know because I myself can be a
slacker at times and I respond when people ask more of me (like asking
where that WebKit stuff is ;)

Anyhow, back to the topic of this thread: I will put myself more in
the willing to mentor category, especially for the WebKit project. I
am also still interested in Zeroconf, and have even had ideas for uses
of that technology lately (though I didn't see it on the Wiki page of
ideas.) I could probably also mentor other porting efforts.

Regards,
Ryan

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