While I wrote my rant about last year’s SoC I started to think of some advises for both students and mentors of Google Summer of Code.

I have to say first off that I didn’t partecipate actively as a mentor in 2006 (I was backup), and I didn’t partecipate last year at all, so you have to take these suggestions as an outsider’s suggestion, but, I think, a quite experienced outsider, by now.

• Work in advance. Don’t wait till your application is accepted. Plan ahead, if you intend to partecipate, start working already! Find an interesting idea, and start fleshing out details. How are you going to work on it? Can you already prepare a few use case diagrams? Can you design an interface already? This is an investment, even if you don’t get accepted, the goal of SoC is to put you into a real-world environment, and doing this work is the first step. Think of it like trying to sell an idea to your superior, or a new company you want to work for. Also, it should give you quite an edge, showing you care about the experience more than the money (which in turn should mean you might actually continue working on the thing afterward).
• Ask around! An important task for any developer, not limited to Free Software developers, is to be able to ask the right questions. If you’re a free software developer, you most likely have to ask one day to people who worked on similar issues than your own, colleagues and similar, so that you don’t have to re-implement the wheel every time. Searching documentation is cool, but it’s not always going to cut it as you might not find any reference to what you want to know. If you need information, you have to ask not only your mentor, but whoever has the information you need. Your mentor is supposed to know more about the project which you’re working on than you, but if that is not the case you has to find someone to give you the information. Trying to work without knowing the conventions and similar is not going to produce good results.
• If you’re working on a testable project (a library, or a non-interactive tool), write testcases: doing so will make sure that your mentor can tell your work is proceeding correctly. And will give you a way to make sure you don’t end up breaking what you wrote a week before. In addition, I’d suggest you to write one test each time you do find an error in the behaviour, even if that means you end up with hundreds of tests!
• Profile your code. Profiling is an important task for making sure of the quality of the code; while in most universities you’re done with writing a working solution, or a working not over-complex solutions, in real world you have to write code that doesn’t suck. And that means it has to run in a timely fashion and not abusing memory. Try looking around in my blog about memory usage and cowstats for instance. You need to learn how to use tools like that, smem, valgrind, and so on. This is the best time!

Mentors should look at these points above, and see what they can do to facilitate their students. Be around to answer their questions, point them to the right person to ask if you can’t answer them. Make sure you know how the testsuites work in the language of choice of your student, this way you can judge if he’s doing them right or if he’s just testing the behaviour that is known to work; also, try to figure out patterns that are not yet tested for, and ask the student to test those.

Up to now the suggestions refer to any organisation and project involved in Summer of Code, not just Gentoo. So feel free to link this post (or quote it, please still reference my blog though) to your students.

As it might be that not all the developers writing up as mentors will have time to do all of the above, I’m at least going to help by trying to stay around for the students. This means that if you have any question, especially related to C or Linux programming (ELF files, memory usage, compiled code analysis – both static and dynamic), feel free to contact me. In the worst case I’ll have to answer you “ask me again tomorrow, I’m busy” or “sorry this I don’t know, it’s not my area of expertise”. It’s worth a try :)

(Joshua, Alec, whoever, feel free to link this blog in the SoC page).