Re: Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC13)

Florian Achleitner [off-list ref] writes:

For a student one aspect of  GSOC is also quite important: It is a cool and 
demanding summer job during the holidays, but it has to ramp down when the new 
semester starts.

Thanks for sharing.

I think an important lesson is that mentors and reviewers need to
think really hard to limit the initial scope of the assignment to be
not too ambitious.  Starting with an ambitious goal and achieving
only small first steps of them _can_ still be a good end result, but
if a mentor wants to go that route, the decision to cut down the
scope of an ambitous assignment needs to be made early enough to
leave sufficient time to wrap up the half-done assignment in a good
shape. Finishing with implementation of only the initial 30% of an
unproven design, that by itself is not useful, does not help our
project at all, and it does not give satisfaction to the student,
either.