On 03/19/2015 12:28 AM, Martin Peres wrote: > 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.
Yeah... Laura's experience really underscores the need for a clearly assigned mentor. I think everyone assumed that someone else was explaining processes to her and showing her the ropes, but, in the end, nobody really did. >> 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). > _______________________________________________ > mesa-dev mailing list > mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev _______________________________________________ mesa-dev mailing list mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
