Friday, April 27, 2012

GSoC 2012 Results Announced

Google has announced the results for Google Summer of Code. I am proud to announce that we got six slots from Google. The following projects have been accepted:

(Project, Student, Mentor)
- Category Theory Module, Sergiu Ivanov, Tom Bachmann
- Density Operators for Quantum Module in sympy.physics.quantum, Guru Devanla, Brian Granger (co-mentor Sean Vig)
- Enhancements to sympy.physics.mechanics, Angadh Nanjangud, Gilbert Gede
- Group Theory, Aleksandar Makelov, David Joyner (co-mentor Aaron Meurer)
- Implicit Plotting Module, Bharath M R, Aaron Meurer
- Vector Analysis, Stefan Krastanov, Matthew Rocklin


Join me in congratulating these students on their acceptance.

In case you don't know, Google Summer of Code is a program where Google pays students to write code for open source projects. SymPy was accepted as a mentoring organization this year. The goal of the program is to help the students learn new skills, in particular in our case:

* contributing to opensource * working with the community * learn git, pull requests, reviews * teach them how to review other's people patches * do useful work for SymPy * have fun, and encourage the students to stay around

To all the students who are accepted, you should be receiving an email from your mentor soon to discuss how you will be communicating over the summer about your project. You should meet with your mentor about once a week during the summer to go over your progress. You should either meet on a public channel (like IRC), or else post minutes of your meeting in some public channel, so that the whole community can see your progress too.

Some of you may also be assigned a backup mentor or co-mentor. These people will also help out in mentoring your project. If you have two mentors and one is not available for something, or does not know the answer, you can ask your co-mentor.

I would like all of us to strongly encourage students this summer to submit pull requests early and often. This will go a long ways towards making sure that you don't end the summer with a ton of code written that never gets merged. Students should help review pull requests by other students, so that we don't get bogged down reviewing so much code.

We also require that all students keep a weekly blog of their work over the summer. If you don't already have a blog, you should start one. I recommend using either Wordpress or Blogger (I personally use and prefer Wordpress because it has a cleaner interface and lets you do $latex math$, but I recommend you test out both). You can also use some other service too if you like. The only requirement is that it has an RSS feed, so we can put it on planet.sympy.org. Once you have set up your blog, send me the url so I can add it there.

Starting on the week of May 21 (when the GSoC period officially begins), We will expect you to have at least one blog post a week, describing your progress for that week, or something interesting about your project. If you don't have a post by the beginning of the day on Saturday, your mentor or I will email you to remind you about it.

I invite other mentors who have blogs to blog as well. And I encourage all community members to follow the student blogs, so you can see their progress.

I would like to thank all the students who applied this year and everyone who submitted a patch. We received way more feedback this year than we ever have before. I would also like to thank all the mentors for helping review patches and proposals.

This summer is looking to be another very productive one for SymPy, and I look forward to it!