It’s time for this blog to come out of hibernation. I will hopefully be mentoring some people this summer so I will write down here questions/things that I would like people applying to my ideas to answer in their applications. Probably doesn’t hurt people applying for other ideas either. This is in addition to the general stuff in:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/soc/applying.xml

Projects that I will mentor or at least be strongly involved with if they make it to our slots:

* libbash

* Gentoo Council web application

* Gentoo/Java IDE integration

* java-config cleanup and redesign

Questions and commentary:

* What is your opinion/experience on TDD?

* What is your opinion/experience with agile development methods?

Basically don’t only tell us what you will deliver but also how you will do it. You don’t need to write on essay on software processes. I will work with my students during the Community Bonding to come up with something that works best for both parties.

* What tools/libraries will you use?

It’s important that you justify your choices. This shows that you are familiar with the tools related to the subject and have done some research. For example in the council web application will you use rails/django, will you use rails 2.3 / 3beta etc.

* How will you take long term maintenance into consideration?

Our hope of course is that you will stay with Gentoo for the long term and continue to improve your code after GSoC but the reality is that even then you will eventually want to find new challenges. Because of this in order for your project to be truly a success it needs to be something else than spaghetti code that only you can read.

* Your time zone?

My time zone is EEST (UTC+3) in the summer. If your time zone is wildly different from mine then please say how you will take this into consideration. This might for example mean committing having meetings very early or very late during the day. I am not going to adjust my daily rhythm to match yours but will can make time during reasonable hours in my time zone.