Thread: Request to be allotted a project or a feature in pipeline

On Sun, 2019-12-15 at 21:56 +0530, Utsav Parmar wrote:
> I'm Utsav Parmar, pursuing my B. Tech in Computer Engineering. I like to work on new technologies
> and am currently looking for open-source projects to contribute to.
> 
> As it may turn out, I've got a college project in my curriculum this semester under
> “Software Development Practice”, and I'd like to work upon a project and/or a feature
> in pipeline spanning over 3 months in PostgreSQL organization as a part of the same
> college project. My mentor cum professor has already agreed for the same, given that
> I get approval from one of the maintainers. So, if possible, will you please allot me
> something to work upon?
> 
> Thank you for your time. Looking forward to hearing from you.

One thing that we can never have enough of is reviewers, that is people who examine
patches in the commitfest and give feedback on them.
Look here for details: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Reviewing_a_Patch

Code review is definitely part of software development practice, and
reading and understanding the code of experienced developers can teach
you a lot.  Another nice aspect is that this is an activity that can easily
be adjusted to span three months; if you embark on a new feature, the
three months may pass without your patch getting accepted.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 03:09:51PM +0100, Laurenz Albe wrote:
> Code review is definitely part of software development practice, and
> reading and understanding the code of experienced developers can teach
> you a lot.  Another nice aspect is that this is an activity that can easily
> be adjusted to span three months; if you embark on a new feature, the
> three months may pass without your patch getting accepted.

Code review can be very challenging, but that's very fruitful in the
long-term as you gain experience reading other's code.  You will most
likely begin to dig into parts of the code you are not familiar of,
still there are a couple of areas which are more simple than others if
you want to get used to the Postgres code, like changes involving
in-core extensions or client binaries.  If you begin working on a
feature, I would recommend beginning with something small-ish.  And
even such things can sometimes get more complicated depending on the
reviews you get regarding issues you did not even imagine :)
--
Michael

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 6:12 AM Utsav Parmar <utsavp0213@gmail.com> wrote:
> As it may turn out, I've got a college project in my curriculum this semester under “Software Development Practice”,
andI'd like to work upon a project and/or a feature in pipeline spanning over 3 months in PostgreSQL organization as a
partof the same college project. My mentor cum professor has already agreed for the same, given that I get approval
fromone of the maintainers. So, if possible, will you please allot me something to work upon? 

It doesn't really work like that. We don't assign tasks to people;
people show up and work on topics that they find interesting. It's
very difficult to do actual task assignments because we all work for
different companies, and somebody at company A cannot tell somebody at
company B what to spend time on. Sometimes people are willing to help
newcomers with suggested projects and mentoring, but that's fairly
time-consuming for the mentor, so to a large extent we rely on people
to find their own projects.

This is maybe not great. It would be cool if the PostgreSQL community
had the resources to pay experienced developers just to mentor new
developers. It's not clear how to me how that could be made to work,
though.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

Greetings,

* Utsav Parmar (utsavp0213@gmail.com) wrote:
> I'm Utsav Parmar, pursuing my B. Tech in Computer Engineering. I like to
> work on new technologies and am currently looking for open-source projects
> to contribute to.

Neat!

> As it may turn out, I've got a college project in my curriculum this
> semester under “Software Development Practice”, and I'd like to work upon a
> project and/or a feature in pipeline spanning over 3 months in PostgreSQL
> organization as a part of the same college project. My mentor cum professor
> has already agreed for the same, given that I get approval from one of the
> maintainers. So, if possible, will you please allot me something to work
> upon?

What you're gearing up for actually sounds quite similar to what we do
with the GSoC each summer.  The projects there are intended to be about
3 months long and you can look at who has been interested in supporting
those projects in the past from a mentorship perspective.  Here's the
2019 list:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2019

Note that the individuals listed on that page as being willing to mentor
were specifically planning to help with GSoC 2019 over this past summer,
so they may or may not have time to be able to help you today, but
you'll also find that this mailing list and the other channels mentioned
on the high-level GSoC page:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC

That might even be a way for you to continue to contribute to PG (and be
paid by Google to do so) even after you're done with this semester,
assuming you meet the criteria for GSoC 2020.

Thanks!

Stephen