GSoC 2019 - Feedback request

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Amir,

Nice to see you at MacPorts!

You should send your email to the macports development mailing list
and you would get the answer there. (I'm forwarding it to the mailing
list now, but you should subscribe for the future.)

On Sat, 6 Apr 2019 at 20:14, AmirAli Mashayekhi wrote:
>
> Dear Macports GSoC admins,
>
> I have uploaded my proposal draft on GSoC webpage. Unfortunately we at EPITA(mon École) got informed late about this years GSoC opportunity. But this doesn’t affect my true excitement about  participation, open source and contributing on them.

Late arrival of proposals is not a problem per se, it just means that
you have less time to improve your proposal and demonstrate your
skills compared to students who started early, so you need to excel
more to catch up.

My friendly suggestion would be to not try to write three proposals in
two days, as that will more likely decrease your chances of getting
selected, rather than increase them. Not because students applying to
other orgs would sound less serious, but because you hardly have
sufficient time to write one good proposal, let alone three.

> I appreciate if there is any feedbacks so I can enhance it before finalising my application.

You nicely answered the auxiliary questions (meant to help us
understand the student better), but the project proposal is completely
missing.

The proposal fails to show any effort to research and understand the
task. The description / plan is so vague that you could in theory
submit a three-line patch to an arbitrary outdated port (for the whole
summer) and claim that you have delivered what you promised. Not even
a single piece of software was named as an example of what you would
work with (after six years of using MacPorts you should at least be
able to name one single piece of software that you wanted to use, but
was too old or missing).

In any case we are asking all of our candidate students to create some
pull requests or small demo projects demonstrating their
problem-solving skills. This would be the perfect opportunity to
update & improve a couple of important outdated unmaintained ports of
your interest.

> My draft should be available on your dashboard by now, but I shared a link here in case of comments.
> My draft link : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RUmFN7PSPqbGzH4h8Hqq-qkTFgS3XJ_bIrsq7GhikYE/edit?usp=sharing
>
> Best Regards,
> Amir

Please note that this was meant as a constructive feedback.

Mojca