Google Summer of Code
Flamenco is a Blender Foundation project, and is also part of Blender’s GSoC programme.
The most important tip: use your own brain. Show that you can think and find information yourself. This will greatly increase your chance of acceptance. So congratulations, you found this page! That’s a good start.
As an extension of the above: do not use ChatGPT or other AI. This goes for writing your proposal, the communication in the chat, as well as writing code yourself. If your English is not that good and you feel insecure about that, don’t worry. For most of the team, English is not their first language. Your mentor will want to communicate with you though, and not with some AI. Also the copyright status of AI-generated code is dubious, and you may not have permission to share the code and claim that you wrote it. As such, AI-generated code cannot be accepted.
Another way to increase your chances: don’t over-sell your skills. Using Flamenco once or twice is not enough to say you “know Flamenco”. If you don’t know all of the programming languages and techniques used in the project, that doesn’t have to be any problem. But discuss it. For example, saying “I’ve never used Go” is fine, but do make it explicit that this is the case, and also explain why you think it’s fine to still apply for joining this Go-based project.
When you link to your work to show off your skills, that’s great! But make sure that it is clear what was written by you, and what was written by somebody else. If the Git history only has commits in your name, and there is no description like “copied code from ${LOCATION} as a starting point”, then realise that the rest of the world will think this is your code. Be careful, this could be seen as plagiarism. Many Open Source licenses require you to credit the original authors.
And finally: be part of the community. Join the chat, use Flamenco, get involved. Communicate with your mentor. If you have questions, pop in the Flamenco chat channel and ask them (but please also scroll back a little to see if someone else already asked the same thing). Flamenco is an open project, and that also means discussing things openly. That way everybody can help you answer questions, and everybody can benefit from the answers you get.
There is a lot of documentation already on how to get started with GSoC:
- Flamenco’s Getting Started page.
- Blender’s GSoC: Getting Started page.
- Blender’s guidelines on contributing code also applies to Flamenco. Be sure to give it a read-through, as it has useful information and will make the whole process of getting your changes into Flamenco a more pleasant one.
- The Go documentation is pretty good. If you’re not familiar with the language, this is a great place to start learning about it.
- And finally, there’s a list of good first issues that should be relatively simple to resolve, and thus may be a nice way into the project.
Make sure you join the chat room to discuss your ideas, ask questions, or just to introduce yourself.