Final evaluations for Summer of Code are in full swing, and as the program winds down for the year we've been having some great discussions on the mentor's mailing list about lessons learned during the program. The majority of these conversations have been overwhelmingly positive, and we're looking forward to rolling the feedback from the mailing list and the program evaluations into useful how-to documentation for mentors.
That said, one of our mentors quite rightly pointed out that mentoring is hard work. Mentoring requires a wide variety of skills, most of them having nothing to do with the quality of code a mentor writes: good communication habits, providing encouragement, giving constructive criticism in an effective and useful manner, and proactively determining which points that seem glaringly obvious to folks involved with the project are non-intuitive for newcomers. Mentoring certainly requires a dialogue and level of social interaction that's not necessarily the standard 'procedure' for a particular open source project.
So, a great big thank you to all of our mentors. Your job is a difficult one, and we truly appreciate all your efforts to make your students and Summer of Code successful.
(Oh yeah, and don't forget to turn in your final evaluations.)
Google Summer of Code Blog
News on Google' s program to encourage
student participation in open source development.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Thanks to Our Mentors
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Hi Leslie,
I want to take the opportunity you give us in the comments of this blog to thank my mentor, Bob Tarling, from ArgoUML, his great patience and all his help during the SoC.
And obviously, I want to thank you the great work you do, and thank Google for the oportunity of being a SoCer.
Christian 'penyaskito' López E.
ArgoUML - Sequence Diagrams project
@ penyaskito: Thanks Christian, that's awesome.
Anyone else want to chime in?
Oops, accidentally posted above using my sister's account. I let her borrow my computer. ;)
> Anyone else want to chime in?
I'd like to thank Sigurd, Sean, and the whole SilverStripe Dev team for their help and very encouraging feedback!
I plan to stay involved in the SilverStripe community and hopefully apply to SilverStripe for the 2008 GSoC. :)
Thanks Leslie for all the hard work you've done to make GSoC a success! It was great to meet you at OSCON 2007.
I'll hopefully be around again next summer. ;)
Elijah Lofgren
SilverStripe CMS - Usability
You know that I've got nothing but love for the work you're doing over in Mountain View.
I would also like to thanks a lot to my mentor Donglnn Kim from OSCAR project, who was not only available almost all the time to answer my question but was very cool all the time, it was a honour to be mentored by you.
Once I was stuck at a one thing and he said u are on right path you are doing what any other OSCAR developer would do, and then in hours I was able to see core code as if it I have written it and was able to correct d problem.
I was with the Organization that I had loved for years, and I was fortunate to being on other side for the first time, from a user to developer, and I am highly committed to be with OSCAR from now on! thanks to my mentor to help me live my dream.
Thanks Donglnn, OSCAR developers, Google SoC, Lesie and Team.
@ elijah lofgren: It was my pleasure to meet you. Thanks for the kind words.
@ desmond elliott: Right back at you!
@ amit vyas: That's a great story, thanks for sharing it with all of us.
Elijah: Thanks for helping us out. You made an earth-shattering number (several hundred) SVN commits, and I am very much looking forward to the moment when your work hits our main release! We're really excited to hear you're sticking around and praise any moment you contribute to our project :)
Post a Comment