[cfe-dev] [GSoC] General Information

[Tobias Grosser via cfe-dev]

Dear LLVM summer of code students,

let me congratulate you to your successful application!

After your participation has been announced, its now time to start with 
community bounding as preparation of the actual project start on 23 May. 
To ensure your GSoC becomes a large success, I wrote down some general 
information that has proven important in previous years.

# GSoC and the LLVM community

Besides your individual project goals, the primary objective of your 
GSoC project is to establish yourself as a full and active member of the 
LLVM community. It is your job to get in touch with the LLVM community 
and to develop your project as part of the LLVM community. This means 
you are invited to discuss your ideas with the LLVM community, to submit 
your patches for public code review, and also to participate as 
code-reviewer for patches that fall in your area of expertise and match 
your level of knowledge. To ensure maximal community involvement, LLVM 
has a well established tradition of incremental development and you 
should follow this practice in your
GSoC project.

# The role of the mentor

You have been paired with one (or two) personal mentors, who will 
support you throughout your summer of code project. Your mentor is
your first point of contact in case of any questions regarding your GSoC 
project. His primary role is to ensure you are successfully integrated 
with the LLVM community by ensuring you understand how to discuss 
project ideas, how to obtain code reviews, and generally to help you to 
understand the informal best practices in the LLVM community. In many 
cases he will also provide reviews for your patches, but please keep in 
mind that he is not your proxy to the LLVM community, but you are 
expected to directly interact with the whole community. In the optimal 
case, you learn quickly how to obtain patch reviews yourself and how to 
discuss your ideas with the full LLVM community. Your mentor will likely 
also give feedback, but he is just one out of the many people in the 
community you will be working with.

Your mentor also evaluates your project and can change project milestone 
if this should become necessary. However, we again suggest
to discuss changes to your agenda in public.

# Media of communication

This email is on-purpose sent to you through the LLVM/cfe/safecode/Polly 
mailing lists. Mailing lists are the primary medium of communication for 
LLVM. Other means such as IRC, phone or personal meetings can complement 
email, but please ensure that all important discussions either take part 
via the mailing lists or are mirrored to the mailing lists by posting 
meeting reports or updates.

# Reporting / Status updates

To keep people informed about your work, we suggest each student to 
implement regular reporting habits. As email is our primary medium of 
communication, brief weekly status emails can be a nice way to get your 
information out. If you send them before the week-end, chances are
that some of your news show up in LLVM weekly.

Previous students also often set up a GSoC blog to irregularly post
larger status updates, performance results, architecture diagrams, ...

# GSoC administrative issues

Please use the public mailing lists for all (non-sensitive) 
administrative issues. You are likely not the only one who has similar 
questions/concerns. Having your questions (and the solutions) being
archived and available in search engines will save us time and be of
great help for all other students.

# Introducing yourself

To kick off your personal GSoC of code, we suggest to introduce yourself 
and your project on the relevant mailing list, invite people
to provide feedback to your project, and communicate your planned
timeline as well as the media/location and interval you will use to 
report your status.

# Project description on llvm.org

We will establish a website on llvm.org that lists all accepted LLVM 
projects. Please add yourself all relevant information about your GSoC 
project. This includes a link to your original project draft, reporting 
interval, blog, personal website, ...

# Community bounding period

Even though the community bounding period is not yet the actual project, 
it is of high importance to make your actual project a success. Within 
the next four weeks, you should make sure you get a good feeling how the 
LLVM community works and you should make your first steps towards 
becoming a member of the community. This means now is the time to start 
discussions about your work, but also to get a good feeling of the LLVM 
development practices. Some of you already contributed patches to LLVM. 
Whoever has not should make sure to contribute a (smaller) patch as soon 
as possible. We previously had some students who mostly skipped the 
community bounding period and they often had to spend time on 
administrative/infrastructure issues after the actual project phase 
started, which caused stress and delays throughout their GSoC. On day 
one of the project phase, you should be able to focus on writing code 
and pushing first patches through code reviews. Your coding environment 
should already be set up, you should have a solid understanding of all 
tools you are planning to use, you should know how patches need to be 
prepared for smooth review, and you should understand the patch 
submission and review habits of LLVM. Similarly, your development plan 
should have been discussed with the community, your reporting should be 
set up and announced, and the only thing missing is you going full in on 
your project. The community bounding period is the time where you get up 
to speed on these administrative/community issues.

# LLVM developer meeting

The LLVM Community has a large developer meeting on November 3-4 in San 
Jose, CA. We encourage you to present your work at the LLVM Developers’ 
Meeting. Presenting your work is a great way to get exposure and gives 
you the opportunity to meet many LLVM developers’ in person. There are 
many different ways to present your work: technical talk, poster, or 
lightning talk. Funding to attend the LLVM Developers’ Meeting may be 
available through the LLVM Foundation and more details on this will be 
available in the coming months. Travel to the meeting may require a 
passport or VISA, and we recommend investigating your travel document 
requirements well in advance.

Best,
Tobias (on behalf of the LLVM GSoC Mentors)