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

[Ian Romanick]

On 03/19/2015 12:28 AM, Martin Peres wrote:
> 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.

Yeah... Laura's experience really underscores the need for a clearly
assigned mentor.  I think everyone assumed that someone else was
explaining processes to her and showing her the ropes, but, in the end,
nobody really did.

>> 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).
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