GSoC final thoughts for Hedgewars
What an exciting summer!
This was our first participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative and we manage to survive to the end!
The fun began when we were accepted and had to provide the ideas list to be discussed with the students: as a silly statistic, I do remember that people joining our IRC channel increased by 20% during that time.
We indeed didn't expect so much interest, and my best guess is that it was because it's always fun to code for a game and Hedgewars in particular offered a lot uncommon initiatives, like programming with FreePascal or experimenting with SDL-1.3.
The only silver lining of our experience lies in the fact that of the limited slots we were given (2), one wasn't carried out at all and the AI implementation had to be called off. Perhaps a more experienced organization might have noticed subtle hints from the student and avoided this situation, but what counts is that we learned our lesson and will be able to scrutinize our students better in the future.
On the other hand, we've had an outstanding success in our second project, Hedgewars on Android: the student was able to fulfill the task requirements and implement a few optional features in the time allocated. Also he documented his code (rarity!) and interacted with developers of our dependencies. What I particularly liked was the fact that also all our active developers helped in this project with testing and suggestions.
So I feel like we've all had our share of fun, gathering ideas from the community, sorting out students' proposals, managing students' work and achieving results. Our mentored student is sticking around finishing and maintaining his project and is about to join our development team, so my guess is that he as well enjoyed his time with our GSoC.
Finally, with our repo full of new code and our bag full of experience, we look forward next year GSoC where we plan to have as much fun and success (and hopefully even more).
Thanks to all the people involved, mentors, students and, why not, admins, and see you next year!
- Koda's blog
- Login or register to post comments
RandomName
It's a fun thing to look back at something new that's been tried and to smile to oneself and say "Yup, that worked out very well".
I'm glad that Xeli made so much progress on the Android port (particularly since I have an Android device) and am happy to see that he will stick around for the foreseeable future.
Just a minor nitpicking note: "silver lining" is generally used in the opposite sense. The idiom in its entirety is: "Every cloud has a silver lining" meaning that even things that appear bad on the surface turn out to not be so bad.
So I would have used the phrase: "The only downside..." or something similar.
On the other hand, having mentioned that tarnished penny of a student, the silver lining from THAT experience is that next time you'll be more selective.