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GSoC 2023 applicant guide

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Isaac Bennetch edited this page Apr 2, 2023 · 5 revisions

If you want to participate in GSoC as a contributor under the phpMyAdmin project, you should do your best to persuade us that you are the best candidate.

Hopefully, your involvement will continue after GSoC. Refer to GSoC after the summer to see what could happen.

Have time during summer

You are supposed to work on the project for a specific number of hours (approximately 17.5 hours per week for 10 weeks). This is reduced from previous years, and while we certainly understand that students have other coursework, jobs, or recreation, we expect contributors to fullfill the Google timeline. Please don't apply if you aren't going to be able to devote the required time.

Also please check the GSoC timeline so that it won't collide much with your exams.

Get involved with phpMyAdmin

You can begin by introducing yourself to us, either on the developers mailing list or our GSoC Gitter room. Tell us who you are and, if you'd like, where you're from — and what you hope to work on during the summer. This part is optional, but if we later see a pull request from you we can know that your intention is to participate in GSoC.

We accept only people who have already contributed some code to phpMyAdmin and are active on the developers mailing list. So you should get in touch with us as soon as possible, look at existing (unassigned) bug reports or feature requests and indicate in the corresponding issue your intention to work on one of them. Then try to fix/implement this issue. 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 a 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 Be familiar with the GSoC timeline below). We will evaluate contributor patches as part of our contributor ranking process.

More details about developing phpMyAdmin are available at https://www.phpmyadmin.net/contribute/. See also issues tagged as Good first issue or Help wanted.

Note that code should be written by the applicant; submissions should not be created using automated, machine–learning, or AI tools. Those tools have practical uses in the software development field, but their use goes against the purpose of GSoC and are not suitable for submission. The project team or mentorship group will gladly discuss exceptions in advance.

Be familiar with the GSoC timeline

Official GSoC information is available at https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline. The timeline on the Google site mentions important dates, in particular:

  • 22 February 2023: List of accepted mentoring organizations published
  • 20 March 2023: contributors start submitting their proposal for phpMyAdmin to the Google site
  • 4 April 2023: Google's deadline for contributor applications
  • 13 April 2023: (phpMyAdmin deadline) applicants should have submitted at least one patch (see "Get involved" above); this is mandatory for our team to evaluate the proposals (note that the code is not required to be merged, since we get some backlog on pull requests during this time).
  • 4 May 2023: Accepted contributor proposals announced

Write a good proposal

The proposal represents yourself, so take care and write a good one. Use our template (it should be automatically used in the 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.

Submit early and monitor comments to your proposal

The only official way of sending a proposal is via the https://summerofcode.withgoogle.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 developers mailing list or your potential mentor directly when you create or modify your proposal. The mentors receive notifications directly from the Google site about these events. If the mentors have a question, they will leave a comment on the site.

Learn the technologies we use

We use Git for managing source code, GitHub is our storage for the Git and used for pull requests, code review and issue trackers for tracking bugs/feature requests. You're expected to use these during summer project, so you should know how to use them. The tutorials provided by GitHub are quite good.

We also use GitHub Actions 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.

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