[IPython-dev] Google Summer of Code

[Fernando Perez]

Hi Thomas,

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> If we're interested in participating in Google Summer of Code this
> year, we need to be thinking about it. We have a list of projects
> people can have a go at here:
> http://wiki.ipython.org/Potential_projects
>
> In particular, I think these projects might be suitable:
> - A curses/urwid frontend, perhaps using code from bpython.
> - Flexible readline replacement (though I think we'd need to have a
> clearer idea ourselves of how this would work first).
>
> I imagine there are also things that could be done with the notebook.
>
> **9th March** is the deadline for organisations to apply.

The real question is: how much *mentor* bandwidth do we have?  I'm
unfortunately out of the loop, unless the mentee were to be already
someone very plugged into our development process, because I'm already
maxed out on ipython work for this summer.  The DoD grant on
parallel/notebook integration will consume my available bandwidth this
summer, and whatever's left is not enough for the kind of dedicated
mentoring expected of the GSoC program.

So of the potential mentors, who is available and interested in
mentoring a student?  It's also important to note that I would want
any student coming in to have already proven to some extent their
ability to contribute actively to the codebase in its current state.
We're simply too small a team right now to do 'from scratch' mentoring
at this point.

As the codebase gets cleaner, I hope well be able (perhaps for next
year) to have a much easier 'on-ramp' for the project with
well-isolated tasks for beginners to get moving.  But we're not there
yet: the code is *much* cleaner and more modular than before, but it's
still a relatively complex project to jump into right now.

I do think that creating those 'easy on-ramps' is both feasible and
important, we just haven't done it, and it won't happen in the next 9
days for sure.

Cheers

f