GSoC 2018 Welcome and Rules

Hello everyone, welcome to GSoC 2018. This year was particularly tough so for those of you who got accepted, please give yourself a pat on the back for already achieving one goal! However, your accomplishment means you’ve just been given a project, so you have work to do! The period between April 23rd and May 14th is known as the community bonding period. During this time we would like to establish a few ground rules.

  1. Everyone should introduce themselves in the Discourse introduction post. GSoC 2018 Students Announced . Please tell us about yourself and your project, what you want to achieve and what challenges you need to overcome.

  2. Every GSoC student should join the #jsoc channel on the Julialang Slack. To get an invite, please go to https://slackinvite.julialang.org/ . Lots of the day-to-day moderation and help will take place on the Slack and therefore it will be essential to your success.

  3. During the community bonding period, we hope you will get engaged in the community. Please join the relevant Slack channels for your project, along with getting acquainted with the appropriate Discourse and Github communities.

  4. While you may feel more comfortable working in private messages with your mentor, we encourage every student to discuss the relevant open source development parts of their project in these open channels. The Julialang community is a large group of people working towards a common goal. By discussing in open channels, it gives others in the community the opportunity to help you achieve your goals. These connections can be extremely helpful for your (long-term career) success.

  5. please join the #jsoc-standup channel. We will be asking for daily standups during the coding period. A standup is a quick update on what you’re doing. Every workday (M-F) we would just like a quick “Yesterday I did …, today I will be doing …” (and you can say more or ask for help here as well). This is to keep everyone in touch. Remember, GSoC is considered a full time job over the summer. The day/time of work is flexible, but we need to stay in touch.

  6. I want to emphasize that deadlines matter. If you miss a deadline, we have no way to reverse the evaluation decision. The project will be immediately failed and please do not complain to the admins because it is impossible to override Google’s systems (we’ve tried). This means that MENTORS AND STUDENTS should stay on top of every evaluation deadline. Our official policy is that all evaluations are due the day before the Google deadline. Due to time zone issues, there are always mistakes that happen so do not wait until the last moment.

  7. NumFOCUS requires a blog post every two weeks. The blog posts are not supposed to take a lot of time, the vast majority of time should be coding. We recommend using a Github IO site for quickly/easily setting up a personal site + blog if you do not already have one. If you have an update you would like to disseminate to the wider programming community, please contact the admins and we can discuss having the post broadcasted through the Julialang blog.

  8. The admins this year are Chris Rackauckas (@ChrisRackauckas), Mike Innes (@MikeInnes ), and Alex Arslan (@ararslan). For anything that doesn’t need to be private, we ask that you ask for help in the #jsoc channel.

  9. You may have noticed that I (Chris Rackauckas) am a mentor on your project. I am listed as a mentor on every Julialang project. Please feel free to contact me at any time you need assistance with administrative matters (the quickest way to get in contact with me is a ping/PM on Slack to @ChrisRackauckas). Please do not feel obligated to include me in every project discussion as this is for administrative matters (except for the 6 DiffEq-related projects, you know who you are).

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