The second month passed by and with it the mid-term evaluation. I guess this has been the first time in my life I have had to evaluate someone, so I’ve read a lot about the experience of other mentors in previous years, which are the ‘minimum requirements’ to pass someone, etc. and finally, besides I knew very well both students, I decided to be as objective as I could in the evaluation.
Unfortunately, being objective, I could not pass both of them. Failing a student is always bad news but as someone said once: “a lesson lived is a lesson learned”. When failing someone it’s important for the student to know exactly the reasons, and for the mentor, think about what he/she could have done to help the student. I’ve also talked with org admins to try to find paths to avoid that situation next years.
I’m sure all of us (mentor, student and org admins) have learned something useful 🙂 and I have to thank him for applying. Finally I hope I could mentor him in future years.
On the other hand the gvSIG Mini GPE project is going on very well. The student has finished the support of GPE events and during the second part of the program is planned to develop some Android related tasks: building UI to list features and show details of a single feature. Also we have gained a GPE developer as he is ready to send a patch to the gvSIG tracker, so I’m very happy with this situation.
As for me, I’m taking advantage of this GSoC to refactor the architecture of gvSIG Mini. I’m mavenizing the Android projects and uploading to Maven central some artifacts, so it would be easier building a workspace and manage the different gvSIG Mini based applications.
Finally I’m also trying to refactor the core of gvSIG Mini, as the Android UI and Map components were a bit coupled. That is indeed a big refactor that I’m hoping to have finished by the end of the year.
