[GSoC] Gearing up for GSoC 2014

[Eric Talevich]

Hi all,

We're now in the community bonding period of GSoC 2014:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2014

This is a time when students can begin participating in the OBF developer
community in-depth, read necessary documentation, learn about the existing
processes for developing, reviewing and releasing code, etc. But most of
all, just get to know the folks you'll be working with this summer.

In particular, students should do the following before coding begins on
Monday, May 19:

- Make sure Google has your contact and payment information. You should
receive your welcome packages for the program sometime in mid- to late-May.
If there is a problem, please e-mail Google's program admin, Carol Smith (
carols at google.com).

- Get your version control system (e.g. Git) set up to point that you can
build the project, commit and push changes to the branch or fork chosen for
your GSoC work.

- Set up a blog to document your weekly progress and observations. If
you're using GitHub for your code, there is a simple mechanism for setting
up a project blog: https://pages.github.com/

Once coding begins, early each week you'll post on your project blog a
quick summary of what you did during the past week, what you plan to do in
the upcoming week (usually taken from the project timeline you wrote for
your application), and any questions, comments & concerns that you would
like to discuss. See the Biopython GSoC 2013 blogs for examples:
http://zruanweb.com/
http://www.yeyanbo.com/tag/gsoc.html

Then, e-mail the URL of your blog post and any highlights to the OBF GSoC
mailing list (this one, gsoc at lists.open-bio.org) and the relevant
developers mailing list (e.g. JSBML, BioRuby, Biopython -- ask your mentor
which one to use).

Mentors, you can take this time to read the GSoC mentoring guide if you
haven't already: http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoring/

Cheers & happy coding,
Eric
-- 

P.S. Google is hosting a supersized GSoC Mentor Summit / Student Reunion on
October 23--26 this year. Please save the date and let us know within the
next month or so if you'd like to attend! As a GSoC 2014 organization, we
can send two delegates to the summit at Google's expense. Google is also
inviting more mentors as well as students this year to attend at their own
expense -- I'll do this, since I already live nearby. So for anyone else,
we have 2 slots remaining to fly you out and pay for a hotel.  (More
details will be coming soon.)