GSoC 2020

[Olly Betts]

Google are running their Summer of Code again this year.  If you're not
familiar with it, see:

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

Interested orgs can apply already up until February 6th (just over a
week away as I write).

We've taken part many times before, and it's resulted in both new
contributors and interesting new features - I think it's well worth
applying again.

We need some idea of how many potential mentors we have - it's a
question that's asked on the application, and we also need to make sure
that we aren't listing project ideas which nobody is actually wanting to
mentor this year.

So if you're interested in mentoring, please talk to James Aylett or me.
You certainly don't need to understand all of Xapian in detail to
usefully mentor - any questions you can't answer can be directed to
others, and a lot of it is helping students with learning more generic
skills - for example what a good commit looks like, automated testing,
etc.

I'd particularly encourage previous GSoC students to consider mentoring
- it's a great way to get more involved, and having already been through
the program from the other side is very helpful.  It's a good way to get
more involved with the project.

We also need to refresh the list of project ideas.  James has done some
initial clean up, but ideally we need a few new ideas for projects.
The better the breadth and depth of ideas we have, the more likely we
are to be selected:
 
https://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoCProjectIdeas

Ideas do *NOT* have to be for work on Xapian itself - projects
related to Xapian in other software are within scope (e.g.
integrating Xapian into a framework, or adding Xapian search to an
open source application).  You'll need to provide mentoring related to
the other software, but we can help out with Xapian-specific questions.

Ideas don't need to be fully planned out - we expect the students to
do some research, planning and to discuss the project as part of
getting from the project idea to their proposal.  But we do need to
clearly say what the aims are, give some pointers to useful
resources, and a list of required or beneficial skills.  And the
scope needs to be suitable for taking a student developer about 12
weeks of full time work to complete including suitable documentation
and automated tests, and getting the work reviewed and merged.

If you have a suitable idea, feel free to add it to the page, or
raise it for discussion here or on IRC.

This list is one of the key things the GSoC organisers look at when
reviewing org applications, so we want it to be in great shape by
February 6th.  You can still add or improve ideas after then, but
it's less likely to make a difference to us being selected.

If you are a student eligible for GSoC and interested in working on
Xapian, please feel free to get in touch.  You don't have to choose from
the ideas on the list - you're welcome to propose your own project
ideas.

If you want to discuss being a mentor or a student, or a project idea,
you can do so on the mailing list or on #xapian on freenode (if you
aren't already an IRC user, see https://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC_IRC for
details of how to connect).

There's also a general GSoC IRC channel - #gsoc on freenode.

Cheers,
    Olly