[brlcad-devel] GSoC application deadline approaching and Patches

[Christopher S. M. <br...@ma...>]

GSoC Applicants,

As the deadline nears, I know many of you are still working furiously on your proposals or anxiously awaiting feedback.  Some will get feedback, some will not — feedback at this point will have little-to-no impact on your chances of getting selected.  Just make your proposal the best you can make it.

What will matter is a code patch.  No matter which org you are working with, you will greatly increase your chances of getting selected if you demonstrate competency towards making a useful change to your orgs existing code.   Correspondingly, anyone that does not submit a code patch will be at a disadvantage.

Note that this means modifying existing code that you did not write.  Showing your own projects where you wrote a million lines of code is not really useful.  The point of a patch is to demonstrate you’ve gone through the very basic effort of downloading sources, researched enough on your own to find something you could improve, having enough ability to modify/extend existing code in some useful and meaningful way, and then communicating that change properly back (via patch file submission and/or pull request).  It shows you know how to read code too, which is generally a much more difficult skill to become proficient/efficient/productive in.
   
Applicants have until Monday to submit patches.  If you do provide one, please include a URL to the patch / pull request in a Melange comment with your proposal (which you can do before or after the deadline).  See http://brlcad.org/wiki/Patches if you’ve never made a patch before, or see any of the thousands of tutorials around the web.  If you need some ideas, see our TODO and/or BUGS files in our source repository.

Cheers!
Sean