GSoC '20 Thanking the community!

Support
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Congratulations to naviji & anjulalk for getting selected in GSoC’20 all the best with your projects.

I would like to thank the community and everyone who I have interacted with here, I only have pleasant things to say about you all @rabeehrz @coderrsid @kowalskidev @xplosionmind @johano @nr458h @dpoulton @giteshsharma @CalebJohn

My project proposal was to incorporate inline-markdown-editor like typora in Joplin, which did not get selected, I do hope someone incorporates that in the future.

Maybe my proposal was a bit too ambitious for my own good.

I also made a rough implementation of it in two days time while I was drafting my proposal.
You can check it out here → https://rishgod.github.io/Joplin-proposal-draft/
I really thought I had something special here, working three months solely on this, maybe I could have made it very similarly to typora maybe better, I might make my own project about it this summer who knows?

Heres a link to my proposal if anyone interested in seeing it.

Obviously I’m very disappointed sad and heart-broken that I did not get in, but it totally fine, you win some you lose some in life. But on the contrary, I’m very motivated to learn, to improve myself, I seriously love the idea of open-source and I’ll keep contributing to it, especially to an open-source community where the mentor treats the people who want to help better.

What lies ahead for me in Joplin? I don’t know, I’ll just take a step back and reflect on these past 3 months, certainly right now it feels like I wasted my past three months, mostly because I did not get what I’ve been working my socks off for, In hindsight, I would have been better off learning data structure and algorithms that trying to improve Joplin because a majority of my Pull Request was not even acknowledged by the mentor, nor where they reviewed.

I hope they do take this feedback and treat applicants better next year because even though how much I can sugarcoat it, I did not really have a very good experience, far from it I felt dejected most of the time because the mentor did not respond back to any request, but I hope they do learn, & next year not treat people who are trying to help like they did this year.

Regards,
Rishabh

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Maybe there was a shortage of mentors.......

This may be so because about two weeks back I had received a request for more technical details on my project, which is Support for Profiles, which I did update but subsequently everything went quiet in the pm and my pull requests. (Although numerically I had far fewer PR's compared to @rishabh.malhotra :sweat_smile:. But then again I believe those coupled with the detailing in the proposal was enough to prove competence).

Thanks to everyone who had helped me out in these 3 months of working on Joplin!

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Yes @RedDocMD, acknowledging a PR and just saying that 'I'm a bit busy and will review in the coming days' goes a long way than just not doing anything and ignoring the post, and failing to reply to anything.

I was kind of angry when I wrote the above post :rofl:, now that I have processed the situation I'm indifferent to it,

oh well this wasn't meant to be; onto competitive programming in the summers :stuck_out_tongue:

Apparently not brother.

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It is a wonder to me that @PackElend is not a mentor. It seemed to me that he was coordinating this whole GSoC thing…

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I guess, I have never seen him reviewing any PR, but that’s besides the point.

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I'm on the coordination side mainly, it's not little work to keep all threads connected

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I’m sure it isn’t.

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No Wonder!

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And please don’t add project ideas which you don’t have any plan to incorporate in the first place, needless to say the communication and transparency between the applicant and the mentor is really poor.

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@rishabh.malhotra I’m not sure why your are talking about communication with mentors. A mentor will be assigned when someone is selected for a project. Not before. The info on the web site only mentioned who will most likely be a mentor for that idea.

But as you’ve noticed the number of PRs have exploded during the last 2 months. It’s not always easy to keep track of all comments. e.g. I’ve seen PRs where communication did not work at all. A change was requested, then silence. Nothing happened. I’m not saying that this was the case with you.
But have a look at all the comments for those since March. Some PRs have over 100 comments.

PRs that don’t fall into the GSoC category also stalled. There are some open which are 6 weeks old. What are those people supposed to say? They probably think along the lines “b/c of GSoC my PR is still not merged.”.

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Hi @rishabh.malhotra
as it sounds to me you are really disappointed about not being selected and fairness and recognition of your efforts are important to you,
I would like to add some thoughts in regards of your post.
Because it is an advice you didn't asked for, you can listen to it or just give it back :wink:

I'm an business Consultant and try to be as successful as possible with changing customers and I learned two things in this environment:

  1. People don't like it if you tell them what went wrong. There is no way to get a connection between you and the person you are blaming. I would try to describe what you observed and how you felt about it. Feelings are universal and you get a connection with the person you ask to change. (Maybe or maybe not but this is the freedom of each person)
  2. We aren't always that successful as we hoped. This happens to all of us. What makes you different is, if you focus on the areas you can control (you and what you can change) instead of what you can't control (others and what they do).

I hope this is somewhat helpful because there is nothing worse than a fail without a learning.

I want to conclude with some words from Marshall Rosenberg: failure show us (that and) where we can improve.

All the best and hope for future engagement
Michael

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Thank you, I was really angry and emotional when I wrote the post, it was really out of character, now that I have has time to process this, I fell different about how I felt yesterday.

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I agree with many of the points mentioned by @rishabh.malhotra

  • Not giving a reply at all specially at this post New Simple Joplin's UI and UX [UPDATED ON 25 APR] New Mockups
    Did you that it took me 7-8 days to create all of the Mock-ups? How much energy and time does it take? I know these designs are not perfect but still “Isn’t I was making the effort?”
    Post #55

    Screenshot (156)
    Screenshot (156)785×88 4.84 KB

  • Not discussing the Ideas mention in this post, no comment at all. Atleast anyone from Joplin’s team can mention why we aren’t discussing this. I think If I didn’t came from Gsoc then there are more chances to get answer on posts.
    Search, Full Screen and Focus Mode

  • This point is not me.
    You guys have 6-7 mentors, so you can easily select the 6-7 students but you guys choose only 2 but still other students was working like labors to fixing bugs. I think that accepting students for gsoc and giving them task that you want in Joplin to complete and this isn’t that big hard thing.

Although it is your choice as it is your god damn app.
BAN ME TOO, NO PROBLEM AT ALL

LAST POST - Good Bye

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I wanted to comment on something that caught my attention in your message. (I’d like to think that I’m being relatively unbiased as I’m not a mentor or a GSoC participant.)

It seems to me you’re seriously underestimating the amount of time and effort it takes to do a proper code review especially for a project your deeply care about (which I assume Laurent does given that Joplin is his project).
And that is on top of whatever other commitments he might have with his day job, family, etc.

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Sometimes more actually, at least in my experience.

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Despite what you seem to think, we spent a lot of time to review, install your changes (and those of other students) on our machines, test, find bugs, suggest changes, discuss them internally, etc. As a reminder, we received 136 pull requests for GSoC, and we processed 104 of them. Of the 32 that are still open, we reviewed and started commenting on about half of them. All of this is very time consuming, and in fact I probably spent more time than I should have, as it’s starting to affect my life.

It’s also a bit disheartening to give a lot of time to someone, to try to help them progress, and to get that in return. Thankfully the feedback we got from other students has mostly been positive and we’re grateful for that.

That being said, I’m not interested in continuing this discussion. Even though I wasn’t keen on having that drama spill in the forum, I’ve allowed it initially but now it’s getting annoying. You made your points very clear, we get it. Now if you have more to say, please use a different forum.

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