GSoC 2018 deadline

[Olly Betts]

Just to remind students working on GSoC proposals for Xapian this year
that the deadline is now less than 2 days away - it's March 27th at
16:00 UTC.  You can see that localised to your own timezone by
looking at the text to the right of "Student Application Period" on the
timeline here:

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/how-it-works/#timeline

Currently we only have 3 proposals in the GSoC website system, and only
one of those has a "final" proposal (and without a final proposal
submitted you aren't eligible - Google's rules, not ours, and there
are no exceptions no matter how inventive your excuse), but we're aware
of rather more students who seem to be working on proposals.

There's no good reason to delay uploading a "final" proposal[1].  You
can reupload it as many times as you want up until the deadline, and it
doesn't affect visibility of the draft version, so it's a good idea to
file your current draft as a final now.  You wouldn't want to miss the
deadline because of internet connectivity problems.

We're happy to try to review draft proposals and give feedback, but
the later you leave it, the less likely we are to be able to review in
time for you to be able to usefully address our comments.

The most common feedback point (probably relevant to the majority of
proposals we get) is that the timeline granularity is too coarse.
The template says that the parts should be AT MOST a week long or else
you won't be able to realistically judge how long they might take (and
that even a week is too long really) but we still get a lot of proposals
with timelines with tasks taking two weeks or even more.  Break down
larger tasks into sub-tasks.

Cheers,
    Olly

[1] Actually, there's one good reason - you can't register until you
turn 18, so if your 18th birthday is between now and the deadline you
do have to wait to submit.  Also, Happy Birthday!