Re: [gnome-love] Reporting for duty :)

[Elijah Newren <newren math utah edu>]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Erling Matthiesen wrote:

> Ive been hanging arround in some of the gnome-irc channels for a while
> now. It  seems that developing gnome is great fun - please let me join :)

You expect to work for free without paying some kind of massive entrance
fees?!?  Oh, alright.  We'll cut you some slack since you asked nicely...
:-)

> Im a 9th semester student in distributed real time systems (network
> engineering). I mainly work with c-programming or shell-scripting to
> evaluate logfiles from simulations but think doing something graphical
> could be exciting. Are there any "easy" projects I could help out?

Gnome-keyring-manager was a project set up specifically for gnome-love in
order to get new contributors working on a project.  That is one that you
might be able to join; you can learn more about it at
http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GNOME%20Keyring%20Manager%20Wiki.
Fernando and Mariano are the ones running that project; they could
tell you more if you are interested (they're both on this list; you
can also find them in irc under the nicks fer and mariano).

We also have a tasklist at
http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GNOMELove that may have a job that
you find interesting.

Hopefully you'll find a project there, but if you don't, feel free to
email the list again with more about the type of project you might be
interesting in working on.

Let me just take a minute to give a word of advice as someone who was
getting started not all that long ago.  Sometimes alpha-quality
software is much easier to work on as a beginner than software that is
older and more stable.  I fumbled several times trying to figure out how
to fix various bugs or add various features to evolution, nautilus,
metacity and others.  I eventually succeeded (on Metacity; the smallest
of those listed), but I think it was kind of slow going.  And one of the
things that seemed to make things go much faster was when I decided to
work on a project called PartitionMorpher.  At that time, the author
considered it a project he had just barely started and had left to sit
for a while so that he could work on some of his other projects; but he
was willing to help others get started and work on it.  At that time,
most of the program wasn't functional, but a couple things were and many
other things were close.  Because the project wasn't too big, and because
there were many bugs, some missing dialogs, and so forth, it was pretty
easy and rewarding to make little improvements here and there.  I think
it was a pretty ideal starting project that I learned a lot on.
(Unfortunately, it may still be, because I got interested in other things
after a month or so and I know that Alex concentrates much more on his
other projects.  I really should work on it a little bit more sometime.)
So, the basic idea is that some of the big projects (i.e. the ones that
you probably recognize the names of) may not be the best starting points;
sometimes working on something obscure--even if you don't help the
project get to a finished or releasable state and and you only do it for
the experience--can be a good way to start.  This is probably one of the
reasons we have so many IM clients hanging around...

> Hope there is somewhere where I fit in.... :)

I'm sure there are many such places.  Welcome to the group.  :-)


Cheers,
Elijah