Week 8: Midterm

GSoC Half-time for me (and all the others). Good time to look a bit back and forward. I tried that in the evaluation we were required to fill with some interesting and some strange questions.

I failed to make a copy of questions/answers as I thought Google wouldn't take it offline - I was wrong. 😕 Anyway, I remember still the tone of the strangest question: "How do you describe the quality of work you have produced so far?" [ ] Exceeds my personal expectations [ ] Meet my personal expectations [ ] Doesn't meet my personal expectations

Michael said that is a "german people" problem, so let me explain why I find that strange: The question is: "What I have expected?" - "I will write crap". Mhh okay, I "meet" my expectations… Hopefully not. I don't even want to imagine what "exceeds" in this context would mean. 😉 "I expect the best possible code" - "I made a few mistakes, so I doesn't meet it all time" mhh okay, nobody is perfect (my name is nobody) so I guess that is okay and I "meet" my expectations. Exceed is completely impossible by definition…

Other interesting questions were asked, most of them related to communication and interaction with the mentor. How often, how much and about what do we communicate? Do I hate him for that? Is he an idiot and will I stop working on the project better now than later? Just try to imagine what I answered to these questions (which were formulated a bit different obviously). 🙂

Beside that, I didn't do "much" as the multiarch conflict handling on providers were a bit hard to track down and a lot of talk was needed - with Michael as well as with the evaluation and stuff. Just in time to motivate me to do it was btw Cyril Brulebois's thank you mail on the xorg-upgrade stuff. I chose "communication" as the interesting as well as most demanding part of GSoC so that was a good example. 🙂 And while I haven't posted something to the discussions about "apt vs. aptitude" and "sense of priorities" so far I followed them closely. Maybe, depending on how they will evolve… We will see it in the next week. 🙂