UpdatedGeneral Advice to Students thinking of applying to GSoC 2015 with CiviCRM

[JoeMurray]

Here are some ideas that I shared with a student earlier today around how they can optimize their chances of being selected (note new points quoted at bottom of post):

Some candidates last year did poorly on some tests about PHP usage and git usage, so you may want to ensure you review your work there.

Have you got an account on the forums at http://forum.civicrm.org/? You might want to participate some there during the evaluation period, as well as on irc #civicrm channel at irc.freenode.net.

If you have made contributions to open source projects or created your own (like a WordPress plugin or Drupal module), it would be quite valuable to see links to that work in your application.

New this year in our community is an effort to move our help forums (most but not all of them) over to StackExchange (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77367/civicrm). In order to help us understand your programming skills better, it would be great if you could create an account for yourself on a programming related stackexchange site, eg http://stackoverflow.com/, http://dba.stackexchange.com/, http://drupal.stackexchange.com/, http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/, or http://joomla.stackexchange.com/. Then try answering questions to get to 200 reputation on a single one of those sites, as well as committing to support the CiviCRM proposal mentioned above. Doing so isn't a requirement, but it would be a good way for us to evaluate your strengths as a developer for these projects. The Ubuntu and computer science ones are not quite as close to the needs of most GSoC projects, but those and other sites could provide us with useful insight into your strengths as well as help CiviCRM more generally in launching its StackExchange site.

For many projects you need to learn our community practices as well get to know parts of the codebase.

If you want to improve your chances of being selected, I would encourage you to try to contribute a few pull requests (ie PRs). I would recommend very simple ones to start, where you are demonstrating that you can set up your developer environment, search the code base, and submit a PR. For example, https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-11369, or perhaps https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15976. If students are into this or other possible mentors think this is a reasonable ask, then we can put together a list of tagged issues. (Maybe we could use the Sprint tag?)

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Additional points as you put together your proposals are drawn from our proposal to GSoC (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Application+draft+2015):

- All students are expected to log into #civicrm on irc.freenode.net AT LEAST once a week and encourage them to be online most of the time they work on the project
- require a daily "scrum meeting" in a forum thread reserved for their project to provide brief updates of what they have achieved the day before, the goal for the day and if they have any outstanding issues/roadblocks they require assistance with
- All students participating in a development-focused project will be expected to have their development environment ready during the preparation phase (ie. before their project start). civicrm-buildkit will help them this year to be ready to contribute more quickly.
- All students participating in development of CiviCRM extensions will be given access to a repo on github and expected to commit their Civix framework within 2 weeks of starting the project .
- Students working on core improvements will be expected to fork core into their own Github repo and file a basic Pull Request within 2 weeks of starting their project.
- Weekly check-ins are required via email or ~Skype (mentor and student should connect using Skype or other real time audio/video solution twice a month or more often when necessary, ie a student who is struggling may require weekly or sometimes daily check ins at the discretion of the mentor).
- Students should blog about their progress monthly on civicrm.org.
- All students should publicize their blog post on #civicrm on irc.freenode.net and ask for feedback from the community in IRC.
- Before be given a passing Midterm evaluation, students must create a screencast of their project (in whatever state it is in) requesting community feedback beyond that of their mentor, co-mentor, and cohort.  In some cases there may not be a UI to demo at that point.  In that case, the student should present any wireframes, mock ups, diagrams, schemas, documentation etc in a conference session style presentation explaining what they will be delivering during the second half of the term.

[xavier]

Awesome suggestions, and we'll definitely use existing code, accounts on stackexchange as a way to gauge students skills.

Like last year, we'll verify that students are able to work with git (commit/PR), and we'll expect them to be able to install a development version of civicrm (civicrm-buildkit) before the start of the project.

Obviously, we don't expect students to be experts on everything, but being able to communicate with the community efficiently and be active members is something key. I personally consider that a student being able to know when they don't know, ask the right questionw the right way and be sure to get help when they need it a more important skill than pure knowledge and experience.

[JoeMurray]

I personally consider that a student being able to know when they don't know, ask the right questionw the right way and be sure to get help when they need it a more important skill than pure knowledge and experience.

+1

[natnael2012]

Thanks for the suggestions, very helpful. I have one question on the IRC channel, when I go to http://irc.freenode.net/ it shows blank white page. But I was able to access through https://webchat.freenode.net/ , is it similar?

Thanks.

[NithinM]

@natnael2012 that is because irc.freenode.net is the irc network and you are trying to access it using http while it should be accessed using a similar application layer protocol "irc://" for which your native browser don't support as such. the webchat.freenode.net is an irc client ( web gateway implementation ) which helps you connect to the irc network. for example, if you are using an irc client like irssi, you can use irc.freenode.net as server address for connecting to freenode.

hope i clarified your doubt 

[natnael2012]

Thanks NithinM. Very clear now.