On 16/03/15 18:32, Laura Ekstrand wrote:
That was basically my background (mechanical engineering + lots of OpenGL) when I started six months ago, but I have found the lack of mentoring to be a large roadblock. At that time, I wrote tests, but there were few people willing to review them and give timely feedback. I was advised to go ahead and push the tests after a month, but then others came back weeks later with lots of late reviews after the fact. They were highly critical and made me feel unwelcome in the community. I've had more success working directly on the Mesa driver.
Sorry to hear this... It is always difficult to start and people usually lack the time or patience to teach newcomers how they should interact and coding practices. We also often have strong opinions about how the code should look like and the opinions may differ between programmers. The GSoC is a good thing because a mentor is assigned to the student and should check what the student does. This first validation of the work in my opinion is very beneficial to the confidence of the student.
So I'm not sure we can attract and retain these types of students.
I guess Bruno is a good example of member coming from physics. Christoph Bumiller and Curro are also good examples of physics students getting involved and becoming highly productive.
As long as the passion is there, I do not think we should screen students from their education background, but rather on facts (previous projects and patches).
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