Christopher writes:
I am not a student, but I am working as a software engineer full time (10-6 on weekdays). I would like to start contributing to open source projects and stumbled upon GSoC which I thought it's a great opportunity to get started. If I am able to churn out 14.5 hours of work per week (by working on the weekends) across 12 weeks (summing up to 175 hours), do I stand a chance to be accepted as a GSoC participant?
You stand a chance, yes. I don't know if we have specific preference for students, I'll have to discuss it with Abhilash, but we're not going to rule you out because you're working already. At present you're the only person who's expressed interest, too. :-) (That doesn't mean nobody's downloading code and looking for easy patches, though.)
In a later post you mention the "REST Callbacks" task. I think that was Abhilash's idea, I'll see if I can get him to flesh it out a little. But the basic idea is exactly as stated in the ideas page:
Request Request
+------+ 1 +-----------+ 2 +------+
| |---->| |---->| |
| User | | Postorius | | Core |
| |<----| |<----| |
+------+ 4 +-----------+ 3 +------+
Response ResponseSo this means that, for example, Postorius can't present a real-time dashboard for moderators that shows whether a list has held posts that the moderator needs to check and approve or reject. The system needs to start with a request at 1, pass it on to 2, then core responds at 3, and finally Postorius passes it back to the user at 4. What we'd like to be able to do is register a callback with core so that when it receives and holds a post, it tells Postorius without needing a request, and then Postorius would update the dashboard.
The dashboard (Postorius <--> User interaction) is not part of this project. At present we don't have such a real-time interaction between Postorius and the user. But for that to be most useful, rather than have Postorius continuously polling core with "are there held message? are there held messages? are there held messages? ...", we want to use such a callback mechanism. The REST API callbacks are a first step in that direction.
Steve