Summer of Code: Official Start of Coding

[Olly Betts]

Today (+/- timezone) is May 14th, which is the official start of coding
date for GSoC this year.

To celebrate this, I've added pages to track progress to the wiki:

https://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC2018

I think all our students this year have already made a start, but
it's particularly important we keep track of progress during the
official coding period, as that's what Google tell us to base
evaluations on.

There's a page for each project, which complements the (limited) public
information about your project in the GSoC website (which mostly just
lists the title and summary).

I've filled in some details, but please correct them if I've got them
wrong - the IRC nick, timezone and work hours are important if a mentor
wants to talk to you on IRC.  And please replace "REPO LINK" with a link
to your code repository, and create a wiki sub-page for "Project plan"
with a your current project plan and timeline (those sections from your
proposal plus any updates we've discussed since).

I've created a template "journal" sub-page (except for Guruprasad who
has already started keeping a project diary elsewhere).  We've found
it's very helpful for students to maintain a project journal with
notes and thoughts; among other things it means when you turn to a
mentor for advice, they can catch up quickly on what you've already
tried and have been working on, even if up to then other mentors have
been helping you out).  It can also be useful if you want to see what
you had in mind weeks earlier when you made some design choice.  I'd aim
to make at least one note each day you're working.

You're most welcome to create more sub-pages if you want - for example,
in previous years some students have kept a list of links to useful
resources relevant to their project, notes about points to revisit
later, etc.

As ever, if you have questions about code, API design, project
planning and so forth, please ask them in public on the mailing lists,
or on our #xapian IRC channel. Although each project has at least one
official mentor listed, they won't always be the best person to help you
with a particular problem, and by bringing it to the whole project
everyone should be able to help where they can.  It's also much harder
for someone to help if relevant previous discussion wasn't public.

Finally, I'd like to thank those from our community who are acting as
mentors and/or admins this year: Ama, Ayush P, Ayush T, Guarav, James
and Vivek.  (I only just noticed that everyone except James was
previously a GSoC student with Xapian - it's great to see you all
continue your involvement in the project!)

Cheers,
    Olly