DigitalMars' GSoC application has been rejected

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Thu Feb 27 10:47:18 PST 2014


On 2/27/14, 10:10 AM, Craig Dillabaugh wrote:
> On Thursday, 27 February 2014 at 02:34:53 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Unfortunately we won't participate in GSoC this year. The decision was
>> not surprising - our application has been rejected.
>>
>> Sadly there are lots of things we could have done better. Our
>> application has been a low-priority side job for Walter and myself and
>> as such its quality has suffered greatly.
>>
>> GSoC applications are a great example of things where one or more
>> community members can have a large impact on D's well being by
>> offloading a parallelizable work from the two of us.
>>
>> Please consider taking a leadership role for GSoC 2015.
>>
>>
>> Andrei
>
> How much time did you spend on the application this year?  How much time
> do you think would be needed to put together a good quality proposal?

Walter and I pleaded that the other completes the application, with me 
saying I don't have the time and him saying he's not suited for the job. 
In the end I "won" and he spent a couple of hours drafting a proposal, 
which was indeed bad. I spent maybe an hour a late evening trying to 
improve the proposal and that was about it. Made no page on dlang.org 
and did nothing on the wiki ideas page (which I think was weak as well).

But sheer time spent is not essential here as the availability of mental 
cycles. When I do something right I think of it in small quanta all the 
time - showering, walking, running, whatever. So by the time I sit down 
to work on it I have ideas and plans already formed. The GSoC was the 
exact opposite - unprepared "todo" work vying for attention at the 
periphery of an already overflowing plate. There's no way I could have 
done a good job at it.

For better or worse Walter and I are the bottlenecks on a lot of 
D-related stuff. (Just look at http://goo.gl/jGYzir which is developing 
a nice tenure as a tab in my web browser.) Kenji wrote me an email 
months ago asking for my take on DIP49, and has done a lot of legwork 
before I came back to him saying we need a radical simplification. No 
wonder he wouldn't answer my emails. Whenever anything comes, I need to 
act "managerial" - absorb context quickly, make a decision, delegate 
details, move on.

There's just too much important AND urgent stuff going on right now in 
D, which gives a whole other perspective on the people who advise us on 
how to do things better, to dissolve into the shrubs when a very 
concrete opportunity to do something. From that angle, every single 
little thing that's "parallelizable" and off our plate (such as build 
system, auto tester, release management, GSoC, and such) is a double 
improvement for the language as a whole: once because that part gets 
done better, and twice because it frees us to better focus on other 
things. Concretely: there wasn't much time to work on allocators lately...


Thanks,

Andrei



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