[Xapian-devel] GSoC - don't delay, submit today!

[Olly Betts]

The student deadline is fast approaching - it's 19:00UTC on 21st March.
If your brain copes with timezones as badly as mine, you can see how
long remains in the "PROGRAM TIMELINE" box on the right of the front
page of melange:

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2014

I've had or seen discussions with a number of students who've yet to
submit a proposal at http://google-melange.com/ - I'd encourage you
to get your proposals in soon.  The load on the website peaks as the
deadline gets close, and it's not uncommon to hit HTTP 500 errors in the
last few hours.  If you fail to submit because you've left it until just
before the deadline and got a server error, there's nothing we can do.
To quote Carol Smith (the GSoC organiser at Google):

    "Late proposals will not be accepted for any reason."

Another reason to submit soon is that we'll try to review proposals and
provide feedback to help you improve them - I can't speak for other
mentor's schedules, but I'll try to respond to anything up to about 12
hours before the deadline.

Proposals can be modified up until the deadline - after that you'll
still be able to respond to questions in comments.

The proposal review period is longer this year, so you can work on
patches and responding to comments after March 21st, but we'll probably
start sorting through proposals over the weekend, so think of this as a
chance to turn your good proposal into a great one.

Please keep an eye out for comments on your proposals - if we ask a
question and it goes unanswered, that doesn't look good.  You should
get email notifications for comments, but they haven't been working at
times recently, so I'd recommend you check on your proposal in melange
periodically.

Cheers,
    Olly