The first phase of GSoC has ended and the two students who will be working with the Joplin community in summer have been selected! So congratulation to @naviji and @anjulalk ! We’re glad to have you on board, and looking forward for the improvements you’re going to make as part of your projects on, respectively, the search engine and the keyboard shortcut editor! We’ll be in touch to give you more info on what happens next.
On our side, this is our first GSoC and we learnt quite a bit in the process. We got feedback from the students and we’re definitely taking it on board. One key point is that we didn’t expect Joplin to get that much interest as this is a relatively new project, and as a result we had trouble managing the number of proposals and pull requests we got. We also quickly ran out of “Good first issues”, which means for students coming a bit late it wasn’t clear what you could work on.
So next year, we’ll restrict a bit the number and the type of pull requests each student can make. Ideally we’d prefer if you work on only one or two medium-sized pull requests, rather than several small ones, so that you can really focus on it and give your best work. Of course, that makes it also more manageable for us as there will be less pull requests to review. I wasn’t too happy with the way I was reviewing sometimes, giving short and not very helpful comments at time, as I was trying to get as many PRs done as possible. Instead it would be best to do less but do it better.
Another point is that we should make it clear how many slots we’re likely to get. We cannot know for sure, it’s up to Google, but we can at least give an estimate. That way, you can decide whether it makes sense to invest your time in the project, or if it would be best to pick a different, less busy project.
In any case, this is a learning process for all, and we aim to improve over time.
Also a quick update on the number of pull requests - so far we have reviewed and processed 104 pull requests for GSoC (59 of which were merged) and there are still 32 pull requests that need to be reviewed and merged. So that's a lot of improvements and bug fixes on Joplin in the coming weeks.
Many thanks to all the students who joined us this year! We definitely appreciate your time and contribution on this project, whether it’s with your pull requests or via your participation on the forum, and you’re of course welcome to give it another try next year, or to stay around in the community.
Also many thanks to our mentors @PackElend, @bedwardly-down, @mic704b, @tessus, @CalebJohn, @rullzer for their help coordinating all this, writing the documentation and reviewing pull request and proposals!