Hey everyone,
I’m glad to announce that we want to participate in this years Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with Nix/Nixpkgs/NixOS!
This means we are now looking for experienced community members keen on sharing their knowledge with open source newcomers and mentoring them.
As a GSoC mentor you are expected to take a few hours every week to meet and chat with your potential mentee. This will probably be more time at the start and should progressively get less over the northern-hemisphere summer. In those meetings you will introduce the mentee to our community and help them work on a pre-defined project.
You might ask what’s in it for you:
Mentoring someone is not just a great learning experience for them but also for yourself. You get to improve your own teaching ability, which is a great skill in almost any life situation while also refreshing yourself on all the Nix fundamentals.
And being able to say you participated as a mentor in a program like GSoC also looks great on any CV.
I hope this post sparked your interest.
Please leave a message here if you are interested in becoming a GSoC mentor, or message me on matrix (@janik0:matrix.org) or via email (gsoc.janik@aq0.de).
If you want to become a mentor but are unsure if you would be good at it, that means you have the self-awareness to become a good mentor All that’s missing is some practice.
nice, then we are already at three interested people (including myself), I’ll message you once we have the org application stuff figured out. You can already think about a potential project for mentees.
I don’t have any previous experience with with GSoC or mentoring formally but I do have experience with teaching Nix to new people. Nevertheless, I am interested in mentoring.
Great to see all the people interested in Mentoring!
I dm’d everyone asking for a email to add them to the GSoC org.
We are currently working on GitHub - NixOS/GSoC
And it would be great to collect some ideas, the Mentor Guide says a bare minimum of 4 solid ideas is required. There is some notes about what makes a good idea in the git repo. So I have to ask for every Mentor to try to submit at least one idea with in the GSoC org application deadline which is the 06.02.2024
We now have a official matrix room where anyone interested in nixos and google summer in code can join
I don’t want to pressure too much, but we really need some idea submissions, we will be declined if we don’t reach the bare minimum and we should probably strive for more then that. I’ll probably write a call for gsoc ideas later today or tomorrow some people who don’t have time or don’t want to mentor can give some inspiration.
I saw the earlier discussion about only allowing projects from mentors, but I would like to put myself out there as a “potential mentor if someone has a great idea” in addition to the ideas I’m submitting myself.
Assuming we get enough ideas, accepted and have mentees pick up the projects, could we possibly do a group session with those @zimbatm and @domenkozar (and others for that matter) to go through lessons learned from past sessions, things to focus up, potential pitfalls and so on so that us virgins don’t have to reinvent the wheel but most importantly give the mentees the best chances of succeeding?
Just submit a idea proposal as pr in GitHub - NixOS/GSoC until February 21 18:00 UTC (the earlier the better). I think not having prior mentoring experience is fine as long as you know when to ask other mentors for help and are careful not to hurt your potential mentee through for example too harsh feedback. IIRC you are a driving force behind the nix cuda team, maybe there is some task there you could submit as idea, so I imagine this might be difficult because of potential nvidia hardware requirements?
Not really, potential mentees are already sending draft applications for review and the official review starts in ~5 days, but if you are interested in helping we could probably use a hand (or a few more) when sorting through the applications.
You can still submit ideas and if you are lucky someone might apply for it otherwise I’m planning to organize GSoC again next year.
All that’s missing is some practice.