DigitalMars' GSoC application has been rejected

[Craig Dillabaugh]

On Thursday, 27 February 2014 at 18:47:37 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> 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

One more question. Do you feel this is a job that someone who 
isn't necessarily well versed in the various technologies could 
take on (in a sort of manager role), or would you need someone 
who has the expertise to evaluate various proposals.