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GSoC Contributor Manual

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Manu edited this page May 4, 2023 · 2 revisions

This manual is to help accepted GSoC contributors to better plan their time and get started quickly.

Your Primary Mentor

  • You will have a primary mentor to discuss and plan high level tasks and for admin questions.
  • For code questions and reviews, anyone is allowed to give feedback, including all other mentors and contributors.

Main Task

Naturally your main task will be to work on the proposed features and improvements. To cover all projects, we may get in touch to slightly adjust those tasks and their priorities. This already happened.

Whenever you code something, you should make it public when you're done. E.g. as draft PR. This will help us keep track of progress and see if someone is stuck. Adding a short comment or screenshots after a day's work makes this more efficient.

We also want you to avoid getting stuck on a very open-ended task. So we will start with well-defined tasks, before getting to "creative" tasks. If you hit a blocking problem, try to solve it yourself. If you can't solve it within a few hours, tell your primary mentor or the owner of this code right away and ask for help.

Other Regular Tasks

And open source project is not just coding. We recommend to spend some time each day on the following:

  • Look at new pull requests. Can you add a comment or do a full review to improve it? Even just testing it locally and sharing your impression is helpful.
  • Look at new issues and discussions. Some may be questions or support requests that can be answered quickly. Others may be duplicates of existing issues and should be marked as such.
  • Look at old issues. Some may have good ideas, but have become stale. Can you revive them by adding new information?

Misc

  • AI-generated code: Using common AI tools to generate code is OK and encouraged, if it helps you write better code. As an open source contributor you can often get free access to Copilot for example. Just be aware that this generated code needs very close examination and you shouldn't spam PRs with large amounts of nonsensical code. I.e. you still need to understand and take responsibility for what's generated.
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