[Mesa-dev] Summer of Code ideas (maybe just an idea wishlist?)

[Martin Peres]

On 16/03/15 18:32, Laura Ekstrand wrote:
> That was basically my background (mechanical engineering + lots of 
> OpenGL) when I started six months ago, but I have found the lack of 
> mentoring to be a large roadblock.  At that time, I wrote tests, but 
> there were few people willing to review them and give timely 
> feedback.  I was advised to go ahead and push the tests after a month, 
> but then others came back weeks later with lots of late reviews after 
> the fact. They were highly critical and made me feel unwelcome in the 
> community.  I've had more success working directly on the Mesa driver.

Sorry to hear this... It is always difficult to start and people usually 
lack the time or patience to teach newcomers how they should interact 
and coding practices. We also often have strong opinions about how the 
code should look like and the opinions may differ between programmers. 
The GSoC is a good thing because a mentor is assigned to the student and 
should check what the student does. This first validation of the work in 
my opinion is very beneficial to the confidence of the student.

>
> So I'm not sure we can attract and retain these types of students.

I guess Bruno is a good example of member coming from physics. Christoph 
Bumiller and Curro are also good examples of physics students getting 
involved and becoming highly productive.

As long as the passion is there, I do not think we should screen 
students from their education background, but rather on facts (previous 
projects and patches).