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Welcome, Google Summer of Code students!
We've been getting a lot of interest from people who are applying to Google's Summer of Code. Welcome! It's good to see new people poking around and looking at what we are doing here. Briefly, I want to share some information and links that will make things a little easier for you to get started with Dreamwidth as a possible mentoring organization for your summer.
If you have any questions, you are welcome to comment to this post (look for a link that says Reply or Leave a Comment). One of our community will get back to you as soon as we can, and hopefully the shared knowledge can help everybody out.
If you have any questions that you don't want to be public, you can email![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise and myself at summerofcode at-sign dreamwidth period org.
Since you're looking at this post, you've already done the very first step of contacting us and getting referred to here. Great! Your very first step, after that, if you haven't done it already, is to get a Dreamwidth account. It's a very easy thing to do -- if you send us an email at the above address, or comment to this post, we'll give you a URL you can use to create an account.
Once you've gotten your account created, your first step should be to explore what exactly you can do with your account. Look around the site!
* Customize your profile
* Write a post in your journal about what you're working on, what you've done
*![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_dev: Join this community
*dw_dev_training: Join this community
* See the latest posts on Dreamwidth
* Search the site for content you are interested in
Those are some great first steps. Get a feel for what the site does, how it works. You will not have to know how to do everything, but familiarity with the site is going to be very helpful to working on any projects with us.
With a little familiarity of what the site can do and how people use it, you should probably understand a bit more about our culture and the things we believe in. Dreamwidth is a site that is working hard to promote a healthy, diverse community. It is more important to us that we have a strong, vibrant community than we have the latest and greatest code. At the end of the day it's the people that matter, and we believe that.
First read our Guiding Principles to get an idea of whatdenise and I founded the site on. Then, read our Diversity Statement -- hands down the most important thing to read and understand if you're going to work on Dreamwidth as a project.
We believe in respect for people. No matter where you come from or who you are, we will do our best to respect you and give you the ability to contribute to this community and be a part of things. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and we expect the same from anybody who is going to participate in the community -- whether they come in on their own or through the Google Summer of Code program.
If you firmly believe in the meritocracy and think it's acceptable behavior to call someone stupid and belittle their efforts, you might have some difficulty here. Those are not acceptable in our community. We spend our time encouraging and building people up, not tearing them down.
If you have any questions, or you don't feel you understand this, please let us know. You can email me personally at mark at-sign dreamwidth period org if you want, too. I'm happy to discuss this as it's an important issue.
Okay, now that you've looked around the site, created your account, had some time to play with it, and thought about the meaning behind our Diversity Statement, it's actually time to get down and look at the code and start thinking about preparing your application to work with us this summer.
Your first step should be to get a Dreamhack account -- this is our development environment. It provides you with the ability to tinker with your own version of Dreamwidth without having to actually install it on your own machine. While you certainly can install it yourself, and doing so is actually a very useful experience for learning how things work, it's not something we expect people to do.
Request a Dreamhack.
Once the application is sent in, it will take a day or two for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophie to process it and get your access sorted. After you have access to the system, you should read through the Dreamhack Getting Started page for some tips and advice on what to do with it now that it's setup.
You should also look at our Programming Guidelines which talk about issues of style and how to write code for us.
Once you've gotten to this point you can start writing code! Don't worry if you have many questions, most people do. We'll cover that... about now!
It's going to seem a little overwhelming -- but learning how to contribute to a project you're new to, especially one so complex as a website such as ours, is going to take some time and effort. We're here to help you through the process, and we're really excited to see more people interested in helping out on Dreamwidth.
Your best bet for getting questions answered is to usedw_dev. You can either write a new post to this community (on the Update page, you can select to post to here instead of to your own journal) or you can comment to this post (look for a Reply or Leave a Comment link).
If you want real-time assistance, you can try joining us in #dreamwidth on irc.freenode.net. Keep in mind that we're still in the process of moving to Freenode, so things are a little slow until we have everybody over there. If you don't get an answer to your question, just wait a bit. We'll get to it!
If the above didn't really give you a good feel for the kind of things we're looking for, let me try to clear that up. Dreamwidth is a complex project with a lot of opportunities to code really interesting and challenging things. We have a lot of opportunities here for some really great coding and we will be looking for proposals that seem to have a good grasp of what they're trying to do and have the coding skills to pull it off.
That's not all we're looking for, however. Dreamwidth is a fairly unique project in the world of open source because of our strong stance on diversity and respect and how we run our culture. We're going to be prioritizing applicants that understand this and are similarly interested in what we're doing here.
So, in short, to maximize the odds you get accepted to work on Dreamwidth: write a good proposal (detailed, understand what you want to do), make sure you have explored the site, understand our Diversity Statement, and make sure this is all apparent on your application. It also wouldn't hurt to get involved in the community and show that you are interested. We've already had a few people coming by IRC and participating -- hanging out, talking, getting a Dreamhack setup, etc.
If you have any questions, let us know! Thanks for your interest in Dreamwidth. :)
Getting More Information
If you have any questions, you are welcome to comment to this post (look for a link that says Reply or Leave a Comment). One of our community will get back to you as soon as we can, and hopefully the shared knowledge can help everybody out.
If you have any questions that you don't want to be public, you can email
denise and myself at summerofcode at-sign dreamwidth period org.What First?
Since you're looking at this post, you've already done the very first step of contacting us and getting referred to here. Great! Your very first step, after that, if you haven't done it already, is to get a Dreamwidth account. It's a very easy thing to do -- if you send us an email at the above address, or comment to this post, we'll give you a URL you can use to create an account.
Once you've gotten your account created, your first step should be to explore what exactly you can do with your account. Look around the site!
* Customize your profile
* Write a post in your journal about what you're working on, what you've done
*
dw_dev: Join this community*
dw_dev_training: Join this community* See the latest posts on Dreamwidth
* Search the site for content you are interested in
Those are some great first steps. Get a feel for what the site does, how it works. You will not have to know how to do everything, but familiarity with the site is going to be very helpful to working on any projects with us.
Next Steps
With a little familiarity of what the site can do and how people use it, you should probably understand a bit more about our culture and the things we believe in. Dreamwidth is a site that is working hard to promote a healthy, diverse community. It is more important to us that we have a strong, vibrant community than we have the latest and greatest code. At the end of the day it's the people that matter, and we believe that.
First read our Guiding Principles to get an idea of what
denise and I founded the site on. Then, read our Diversity Statement -- hands down the most important thing to read and understand if you're going to work on Dreamwidth as a project.We believe in respect for people. No matter where you come from or who you are, we will do our best to respect you and give you the ability to contribute to this community and be a part of things. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and we expect the same from anybody who is going to participate in the community -- whether they come in on their own or through the Google Summer of Code program.
If you firmly believe in the meritocracy and think it's acceptable behavior to call someone stupid and belittle their efforts, you might have some difficulty here. Those are not acceptable in our community. We spend our time encouraging and building people up, not tearing them down.
If you have any questions, or you don't feel you understand this, please let us know. You can email me personally at mark at-sign dreamwidth period org if you want, too. I'm happy to discuss this as it's an important issue.
Going Deeper
Okay, now that you've looked around the site, created your account, had some time to play with it, and thought about the meaning behind our Diversity Statement, it's actually time to get down and look at the code and start thinking about preparing your application to work with us this summer.
Your first step should be to get a Dreamhack account -- this is our development environment. It provides you with the ability to tinker with your own version of Dreamwidth without having to actually install it on your own machine. While you certainly can install it yourself, and doing so is actually a very useful experience for learning how things work, it's not something we expect people to do.
Request a Dreamhack.
Once the application is sent in, it will take a day or two for
sophie to process it and get your access sorted. After you have access to the system, you should read through the Dreamhack Getting Started page for some tips and advice on what to do with it now that it's setup.You should also look at our Programming Guidelines which talk about issues of style and how to write code for us.
Once you've gotten to this point you can start writing code! Don't worry if you have many questions, most people do. We'll cover that... about now!
Oh my, help!
It's going to seem a little overwhelming -- but learning how to contribute to a project you're new to, especially one so complex as a website such as ours, is going to take some time and effort. We're here to help you through the process, and we're really excited to see more people interested in helping out on Dreamwidth.
Your best bet for getting questions answered is to use
dw_dev. You can either write a new post to this community (on the Update page, you can select to post to here instead of to your own journal) or you can comment to this post (look for a Reply or Leave a Comment link).If you want real-time assistance, you can try joining us in #dreamwidth on irc.freenode.net. Keep in mind that we're still in the process of moving to Freenode, so things are a little slow until we have everybody over there. If you don't get an answer to your question, just wait a bit. We'll get to it!
Summer of Code Application Tips
If the above didn't really give you a good feel for the kind of things we're looking for, let me try to clear that up. Dreamwidth is a complex project with a lot of opportunities to code really interesting and challenging things. We have a lot of opportunities here for some really great coding and we will be looking for proposals that seem to have a good grasp of what they're trying to do and have the coding skills to pull it off.
That's not all we're looking for, however. Dreamwidth is a fairly unique project in the world of open source because of our strong stance on diversity and respect and how we run our culture. We're going to be prioritizing applicants that understand this and are similarly interested in what we're doing here.
So, in short, to maximize the odds you get accepted to work on Dreamwidth: write a good proposal (detailed, understand what you want to do), make sure you have explored the site, understand our Diversity Statement, and make sure this is all apparent on your application. It also wouldn't hurt to get involved in the community and show that you are interested. We've already had a few people coming by IRC and participating -- hanging out, talking, getting a Dreamhack setup, etc.
If you have any questions, let us know! Thanks for your interest in Dreamwidth. :)
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(I consider my grammar/spelling/etc to be above average, but I'm always interested in fixing bad habits and learning better ways of doing things. Feel free to point things out if you ever want to!)
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:P
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A possible GSOC applicant who desires an account
I'd like to be able to create a Dreamwidth account.
Would you please provide me with the URL mentioned in the post with which to create an account?
Re: A possible GSOC applicant who desires an account
Re: A possible GSOC applicant who desires an account
Thanks:)
Thank you.
Re: Thanks:)
no subject
http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/46521.html
http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/47525.html