From: Patricia Shanahan on
Simon Brooke wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:44:58 -0700, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
>> the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
>> dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
>> doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my
>> skills.
>>
>> My main requirement is an active project, with a team that works
>> together, and multiple users outside the team. I am willing learn any
>> required programming languages or libraries, though I am currently most
>> fluent in Java.
>>
>> I have 32 years experience in the computer industry, including work on
>> compilers, operating systems, and multiprocessor computer architecture.
>> I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD last December, with a
>> 4.0 GPA on the coursework.
>>
>> I would contribute to a suitable project in whatever way would be most
>> useful, including programming and bug fixing, but the more technical
>> challenge the better.
>>
>> Any recommendations?
>
> Seriously, I think the interesting places for Java programmers to play at
> the moment are mostly on Android; that's where there is a ferment of
> rapidly developing new ideas, the way there was on server side web stuff
> ten years ago.

That's an interesting area to look at. My research was in the area of
ubiquitous computing, so there might be a tie in.

>
> Or go for fundamental utility stuff, like Apache Commons, which is used
> by a lot of other things (but there you're joining a well established
> team with established reputations and hierarchies).
>

If anything, a well established team is a positive, not a negative. My
attitude to technical leadership is "Been there, done that." I would
prefer a project where someone else is already dealing with the
organizational hassles, and I can just do some fun problem solving.

Patricia
From: Jeff Higgins on
On 6/21/2010 11:44 AM, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
> I'm looking for an open source project to join.
>
> Any recommendations?
>
Not a recommendation but a suggestion for a source of inspiration.
Google's Summer of Code archives.
No shortage of projects looking for contributors.
From: Alf P. Steinbach /Usenet on
* Patricia Shanahan, on 21.06.2010 21:22:
> Simon Brooke wrote:
>> On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:44:58 -0700, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
>>
>>> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
>>> the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
>>> dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
>>> doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my
>>> skills.
>>>
>>> My main requirement is an active project, with a team that works
>>> together, and multiple users outside the team. I am willing learn any
>>> required programming languages or libraries, though I am currently most
>>> fluent in Java.
>>>
>>> I have 32 years experience in the computer industry, including work on
>>> compilers, operating systems, and multiprocessor computer architecture.
>>> I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD last December, with a
>>> 4.0 GPA on the coursework.
>>>
>>> I would contribute to a suitable project in whatever way would be most
>>> useful, including programming and bug fixing, but the more technical
>>> challenge the better.
>>>
>>> Any recommendations?
>>
>> Seriously, I think the interesting places for Java programmers to play
>> at the moment are mostly on Android; that's where there is a ferment
>> of rapidly developing new ideas, the way there was on server side web
>> stuff ten years ago.
>
> That's an interesting area to look at. My research was in the area of
> ubiquitous computing, so there might be a tie in.
>
>>
>> Or go for fundamental utility stuff, like Apache Commons, which is
>> used by a lot of other things (but there you're joining a well
>> established team with established reputations and hierarchies).
>
> If anything, a well established team is a positive, not a negative. My
> attitude to technical leadership is "Been there, done that." I would
> prefer a project where someone else is already dealing with the
> organizational hassles, and I can just do some fun problem solving.

With Thunderbird 3.0 the Mozilla folks introduced a lot of undesirable
functionality, in particular messing up quoting. When you quote source code, and
the original message has "flowed" text format (this is where a space at the end
of line indicates a continuing paragraph), then the beast now collapses every
sequence of spaces to a single space, except indentation, which it removes
completely. It's merely Very Bad for quoting C++. It's completely unaccceptable
for quoting Python, where indentation is significant.

If you could join that team and fix (read: remove) this single, uh, "feature",
the World would be forever in your debt!

Not sure what languages they use. JavaScript and C, but possibly also others.


Cheers,

- Alf

--
blog at <url: http://alfps.wordpress.com>
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on
Patricia Shanahan <pats(a)acm.org> writes:

> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
> the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
> dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
> doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my skills.
>
> My main requirement is an active project, with a team that works
> together, and multiple users outside the team. I am willing learn any
> required programming languages or libraries, though I am currently most
> fluent in Java.
>
> I have 32 years experience in the computer industry, including work on
> compilers, operating systems, and multiprocessor computer architecture.
> I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD last December, with a
> 4.0 GPA on the coursework.
>
> I would contribute to a suitable project in whatever way would be most
> useful, including programming and bug fixing, but the more technical
> challenge the better.
>
> Any recommendations?

You could work on ABCL or CLforJava, two Common Lisp implementations
targetting the JVM.

http://abcl.sourceforge.net
http://clforjava.org/

Or even Clojure.

http://clojure.org/



For a more technical subject, applying the extensions of
http://www.managedruntime.org/ to other implementations than the JVM
would be interesting too (eg. SBCL, clisp, or even Python).

http://sbcl.sourceforge.net
http://clisp.cons.org
http://www.python.org

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
From: Arved Sandstrom on
Patricia Shanahan wrote:
> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
> the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
> dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
> doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my skills.
>
> My main requirement is an active project, with a team that works
> together, and multiple users outside the team. I am willing learn any
> required programming languages or libraries, though I am currently most
> fluent in Java.
>
> I have 32 years experience in the computer industry, including work on
> compilers, operating systems, and multiprocessor computer architecture.
> I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD last December, with a
> 4.0 GPA on the coursework.
>
> I would contribute to a suitable project in whatever way would be most
> useful, including programming and bug fixing, but the more technical
> challenge the better.
>
> Any recommendations?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Patricia

Considering the fact that you're learning Haskell, would you have a
preference for a project involving a functional language? I myself have
been picking up Haskell and F# for some time now, but seem to be
gravitating towards Scala - perhaps a Scala project would be to your liking?

I don't exactly have any specific projects in mind but I'm thinking if
you expressed a preference in this regard it might help other people out.

AHS

--
The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its
continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the
computer hardware industry.
-- Henry Petroski