[psoc-2008] Welcome and next steps

[Eric Wilhelm]

Hi all,

Welcome students!

You should all have gotten the mail with contact details for your 
mentors, backups, and managers.

We'll be using this list for announcements, reminders, discussion, etc.

For example: "real soon now", we'll be deploying a webapp to track your 
progress and collect your weekly reports.  Instructions on that will 
arrive when they get here, but we're going to get you all plugged in to 
it before ~May 24th.  I know some of you planned to use your personal 
blogs -- we can work something out here, but we'll probably need to 
discuss it because I want to make sure that we end up with a full 
archive of the reports.

Your first report will be "Getting Started".  You should be getting your 
toolchains setup, making sure that you have a version control 
repository to push to, talking to your mentors and other people from 
your project, collecting your thoughts, etc.  Take notes!

Note that we need to be able to deliver "your code" to google when 
everything is done.  This might mean a tarball, or maybe a changeset.  
In either case, make sure that your work is going into a public 
repository, or being mirrored on a public site.

Figure out what will be the best day of the week for you to report and 
tell your mentor when it will be.  I want to see the reports on a 
regular basis, so the best thing is to commit to a day and stick with 
it.  As with anything: if you're going to be away on your report day, 
report early - not late.

You should also check with your mentor about schedules and know what 
times you can reach them via irc/im/phone/skype to discuss any troubles 
you're finding.  Perhaps schedule a brief weekly meeting the day after 
your report where you can look at the week ahead and regroup your 
thoughts if the plan needs adjusting.

When you decide things like report/meeting schedules, make sure to CC 
your backup and manager.  If possible, find a time when the backup can 
be available or at least a communication channel where they can stay in 
the loop.  If your mentor can't continue for whatever reason, you'll 
want your backup to know what was already discussed so you don't have 
to repeat yourself.

Your manager is in charge of knowing that everything is progressing 
nicely.  They will see the weekly reports, but if they don't hear 
anything from you about schedules and communication plans, they might 
get worried and start bugging you.  So, make sure to CC them on that 
sort of stuff.

If you have questions, ask.  You're probably not alone ... hey, I still 
have questions :-D

--Eric
-- 
software:  a hypothetical exercise which happens to compile.
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