GSoC_2015_Applicant_Guide
If you want to participate in GSoC 2015 as a student, you should do your best to persuade us that you are the best candidate.
Hopefully, your involvement will continue after GSoC. Refer to GSoC 2015 After the Summer to see what could happen.
You are supposed to work the full summer on this project (this means twelve weeks of about forty hours per week). We are not going to accept you if you are not willing to dedicate this amount of time.
Also please check the GSoC 2015 timeline so that it won't collide much with your exams.
We accept only people who have already contributed some code to phpMyAdmin and are active on the phpmyadmin-devel mailing list. So you should get in touch with us as soon as possible, look at existing bug reports or feature requests and try to fix/implement some of them. Please do not submit code containing an implementation of what you intend to work on during the summer.
The preferred way to make a contribution is to fork our code on Github (see Git#Forking_on_Github), fix some bug or implement a feature, and open pull request. You will receive feedback on your code, most likely with suggestions for improvements and you can improve your knowledge of tools we use and our coding standards before GSoC starts.
In addition to the Google deadline for the submission of your project proposal/application, the deadline for submitting your patch(es) is a week later (see GSoC timeline below). We will evaluate student patches as part of our student ranking process.
More details about developing phpMyAdmin are available at https://www.phpmyadmin.net/contribute/. See also Tasks for junior developers.
Official GSoC information is available at https://www.google-melange.com/archive/. The timeline on the Google site mentions important dates, in particular:
- 2 March 2015, 19:00 UTC: List of accepted mentoring organizations published on the Google Summer of Code 2015 site
- 16 March 2015, 19:00 UTC: students start submitting their proposal for phpMyAdmin to the Google Melange site
- 27 March 2015, 19:00 UTC: is the deadline for student applications
- 3 April 2015, 19:00 UTC: (phpMyAdmin deadline) applicants should have submitted at least one patch (see "Get involved" above); this is mandatory for our team to evaluate the proposals
The proposal represents yourself, so take care and write a good one. Use our template (it should be automatically used in Google Summer of Code site), fill in all fields and describe the project as much as you can.
Choosing a good title and summary also helps a lot, as it makes your proposal easily recognizable among others.
The schedule and list of deliverables is also crucial, because it will be used for your evaluation during the project. If you fail to properly list those, your mentor might expect you to do more work and you will not pass the evaluation.
Don't be afraid of submitting multiple quality proposals, the most exposed ideas from our ideas list usually receive several proposals and we choose only one. So having a backup proposal is a good idea.
The only official way of sending a proposal is via the https://www.google-melange.com website, using your Google account.
If you submit your complete proposal early, you can benefit from comments which mentors will give you and update the proposal. You are recommended to subscribe to notifications on proposal page.
There is no need to email the phpmyadmin-devel mailing list or your potential mentor directly when you create or modify your proposal. The mentors receive notifications directly from the google-melange site about these events. If the mentors have a question, they will leave a comment on the site.
We use Git for managing source code, GitHub is our storage for the Git and used for pull requests and code review and SourceForge.net trackers for tracking bugs/feature requests. You're expected to use these during summer project, so you should know how to use them.
We also use Jenkins and Travis for Continuous Integration : running tests, checking coding style, ... It will be useful to get familiar with those tools and their reports as it will help you to write code that integrates well with the current codebase.
- GSoC 2015 Student Guide - what you will have to do if you are accepted
- GSoC 2015 Ideas List - ideas you might use to propose a project
- Summer of Code site
- The DOs and DON’Ts of Google Summer of Code: Student Edition - Some tips for students who want to take part in GSoC
Popular destinations:
- Team meetings
- GSoC home
- Developer guidelines
- How to install on Debian and Ubuntu
- Issue and pull-request management
User resources: