Gail Banaszkiewicz wrote:

Jeff wrote:

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You have -- we should be making a more official announcement shortly, but since you already have a project idea I would suggest you go ahead and pursue it. If it's anything like last year the application process is highly competitive -- the best applications really went above and beyond. I think some of those might be on the web somewhere. Thanks for the encouragement! I read over the report on last year's edition of SoC and indeed it looked very competitive. I did not see any of the proposals themselves, but if they are online, I will definitely have to take a look,

I believe you might have missed the post from one of last years students: Giovanni Deretta. You can find some (some aren't complete) of last years proposals here on the Google site: http://code.google.com/soc/boost/about.html But truth be told, the best proposals escaped from the confines of the Google tool and were setup on there own website. For example: Giovanni was able to impress with this work done prior to SoC: http://libstream.sourceforge.net/index_c.html And Matt Calabrese had these -- again as part of the initial proposal: http://2006.planet-soc.com/node/201 http://members.gamedev.net/Rivorus/surge/html/index.html And Matias Capeletto with this entry which he didn't start until after the SoC announcement. http://h1.ripway.com/mcape/boost/libs/misc/index.html As you can see, these folks had some fairly advanced ideas about what they wanted to attack. Some of the student proposals used 'quickbook' -- a boost derived Wiki-syntax like C++ library documentation tool that feeds BoostBook/DocBook: http://www.boost-consulting.com/boost/tools/quickbook/doc/html/index.html I'll warn you that quickbook can be a bit tricky to get setup -- actually I believe a couple of last year's students helped improved the getting started docs. Anyway, students that went this extra mile during the proposal showed that they were capable of independently handling basic environmental setups needed for boost. I"ll also say that at least one of the projects from last year was significantly revised during the evaluation process. The consensus of the mentors was that the student was very capable, but that the project was just too ambitious. John Maddock made some suggestions of a similar direction and the student rewrote the entire proposal in a day -- it was a rather impressive demonstration of skill and he wound up with a Boost SoC project.

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There project has not been pursued yet, so it would likely be a good choice for this year. Our biggest problem might be finding a mentor, but we'll work something out. I will keep my options open in case this topic does not work out; however, I'm sure I'd be able to also draw from the knowledge of the group at school as well as from a mentor on your end, which certainly can't hurt.

Yes, that's helpful. Jeff