Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

12 May 2013, 9:49 a.m.

Tips for New Summer Interns

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2013 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Three tips to help new Google Summer of Code applicants and interns, some of which all remote workers could stand to remember:

  1. Never let yourself get stuck on a technical question or problem for more than half an hour. Take a break, ask questions in IRC or a mailing list, find a technical book to read like The Architecture of Open Source Applications, look at some other codebase to see how they do it, eat a meal, or do something else, then come back to the problem.
  2. Never let yourself get stuck waiting for someone's reply for more than 2 business days (Monday through Friday). Escalate -- ask your mentor. If your mentor isn't helping, ask your org admin. If the org admin isn't helping, ask on the GSoC discussion forum, or email Carol Smith.
  3. Ask yourself at the start of every day: what did I accomplish yesterday? What will I try to do today? What are the obstacles I think I will run into? If you ask yourself those three questions and answer honestly -- especially if you let your mentor and team know the answers -- then you will prevent long delays and help keep your morale up.

Comments

Sindhu S
http://sindhus.bitbucket.org
16 May 2013, 11:15 a.m.

Hi, Sumana!

I wrote a similar post, please do glance at http://sindhus.bitbucket.org/asking-for-help-floss-communities.html

Thanks :)