Summer of Code/Application review notes

Thank you to everyone who applied for GSoC this year. Here are some comments:

• Please try to watch your application's talk page, as well as the comments in google's web app, and respond as quickly as possible. If language is a barrier, it is better to respond in Spanish than not at all, although English is preferred.

Don't reinvent the wheel

When working in open source, the idea is to get as much done with as little work as possible. That means you need the ability to find, evaluate, and adapt existing code to your purposes. Some (not all) of your applications do not give adequate attention to this issue. If we send you a link here, please respond by:

• Searching (in places like sourceforge and google code) for existing tools which do something similar to what you propose

• Evaluating their usefulness, including the health of the code, the approximate size of dependencies they would add to Sugar, and their adaptability for your purpose.

• Figuring out, as specifically as possible in the time you have, how they'd fit into sugar, and where you'd have to change the tool or sugar itself to make that happen.

Tell us something about what you find in each step. Even "I found project xxx but it's defunct, and yyy but it doesn't fit at all because zzz" is useful to us to see that you can do this work.