GSoC leaderboard

[Seb]

On Tuesday, 19 March 2019 at 12:12:55 UTC, lagfra wrote:
> On Tuesday, 19 March 2019 at 09:59:48 UTC, Seb wrote:
>> tl;dr: The Rocket community is using this leaderboard [1, 2] 
>> for GSoC contributions from their students.
>>
>> I am not sure yet whether it's a good idea as not all pull 
>> requests are equal, but I like the idea of gamifying the 
>> contribution experience.
>
> In my opinion is not just a matter of PRs but of projects. A 
> practical example related to SAoC:
>
> 1. vibe-http and HTTP/2: I opened around 15 PRs of variable 
> length. My project required writing a consistent amount of 
> code, so quite often I had to discuss and then replicate / 
> split / rebase my changes. For this reason, most of my work was 
> done through Github.
>
> 2. Concurrent GC: FraMecca's work consisted in writing less 
> than 300 lines of code, but required a lot of debugging and 
> many exchanges with his mentor, mainly using emails. All of his 
> work is going to end with one (or possibly two) PRs to DRuntime.
>
> If one had to compare our work following the approach of the 
> Rocket community, there would be a huge gap between us two, 
> even though we worked a similar amount of time and both 
> provided hopefully valid results.

Yep, I absolutely understand this and it could definitely lead to 
"dummy PRs", but I think the idea of this leaderboard was just to 
track contributions of students before the actual GSoC. Or in 
other words: motivate new students to get involved before GSoC.

If we make it a requirement for them to be on to be on the 
leaderboard (i.e. one open PR) this could lead to the effect that 
they see all the other students who are trying to apply and try 
even harder to fix bugs. At least that's what I think this 
gamification approach is trying to go for.