I usually just lurk on the mailing lists and am nowhere near experienced enough in Haskell to consider applying for GSOC, but just wanted to say how impressed I am at the Haskell community for seeing someone from a major project encouraging to mentor someone on the beginner mailing list. It's really important to feeling like those projects are accessible. On 12/23/14 11:51 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:

On 12/22/2014 03:03 PM, Njagi Mwaniki wrote:

...

Which books or resources or libraries should one read to get ready for the Google summer of code? Also which projects would be easiest to work on for beginners?

Anything that would make one ready for Google summer of code and complete their project with ease.

I'm currently taking cs194 from upenn online http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/lectures.html _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

What matters the most[†] is the project you pick (in respect of how useful to the Haskell community it is), what you promise to do with it and how likely it is that you can fulfill your promise. Notably, GSOC is not a project that aims to teach you (Haskell|C|Python|LISP|pick your poison). For this reason your question about books to read on beginners mailing list seems slightly misguided to me. I do not think you are expecting there to be a ‘How to prepare for GSOC’ book ;). By no means do I hope to discourage you somehow of course but if you hope to have a serious chance at having an idea accepted, you need to start gaining some expertise in the area ASAP. I commend you on sending out your e-mail before 2015!

It is of course best to find a project you are interested in: you probably don't want to dive into linear algebra package for GSOC if you have 0 interest or previous exposure to the topic.

It is also unlikely that a brand new project will be accepted unless it offers great benefits and is likely to do great things after GSOC is over. It seems difficult to imagine, especially for a beginner.

My advice is that you should start looking at existing projects *now* and see if you can't start committing straight away while having a grander scheme in mind: you are much more likely to get accepted if your proposal says ‘I have already been committing to this project for past 3 months’ than ‘I will spend first two weeks familiarising myself with the codebase’. It's favourable if you already have some rough idea how you would go about hacking your project rather than having to investigate once the project starts.

The project you will work on has to somehow benefit Haskell community. ‘I will write a game and people will have fun hour playing it’ is probably not good. ‘I will improve Hackage/cabal/Haddock/GHC’ is much more likely to make it through. You are meant to have a pretty good idea of what you will doing: ‘I will fix whatever issues I can for 3 months’ is probably not good but ‘I will fix X, Y, Z tickets which currently hinder the community/will allow the community to become a better place because ABC’ seems much more likely to be accepted. The project has to be reasonable for your skillset: do not try to promise to do work which is obviously out of your ability (Haskell or otherwise) or one that you can do but will simply take too long.

Your proposal and subsequent 3 months of work need a mentor: this is most likely going to be someone involved with the project already. If you have an idea of what project you would like to help out, you should by all means seek out people involved earlier than later. They can most likely advise you on your proposal, say how viable your ideas are and probably mentor it.

Lastly, remember that you are competing with other people. I believe there were some ~30 proposals submitted last year for only 15 or so slots.

I recommend you try to find past proposals. There is usually a template you are asked to fill out and the questions there should help you form the idea of what you're expected to write down.

Hopefully this helps somehow. There is #haskell-gsoc on Freenode where a few people are idling and it gets much busier closer to the proposal deadlines.

PS: Shameless plug time! Haddock is a pretty core tool and we could always use some helpers! If you end up looking at Haddock as one of the possible projects, I could advise you and probably mentor it. A weaker candidate is the Yi text editor: it's not exactly a core tool but there is quite a bit of interest in it. I hear that it has very nearly made it into GSOC last year! I could probably also mentor this if need be. I don't know if I'm eligible to take part myself this year or if I will even have time so if you're interested in either of these you should let me know sooner than later.

†: In my opinion, based on having taken part, including one successful completion and one failure to get in.