Re: Novice Developer

[Jérémie Koenig]

Hi Daphne,

(I'm a CS student as well and an occasional Hurd contributor)

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Daphne Goodwin <dgoodwin@cs.dal.ca> wrote:
> I would like to start developing in some aspect of the Hurd OS.

Great !

Here's how I started (more or less): I installed Hurd [1,2], read
about how it worked [3], played with it for some time. Then I forgot
about it for a couple of years (you may want to skip this step :-),
but I had found the experience interesting so after some time I
decided to give it a try again. I re-installed it, found a couple of
bugs (which made Xorg crash on my hardware), and tried to fix them
with some help from the people on this mailing list and the IRC
channel [4].

I ended up working on debian-installer as a Google Summer of Code
[5,6] student and I have been contributing on and off for the last two
years. Although I didn't always have the time/discipline to do as much
as I would have liked, it has been a great experience --- I have
learned a lot and met some fine people.

[1] http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/installer/cdimage/
[2] http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/README
[3] http://www.bddebian.com/~hurd-web/hurd/documentation/
[4] http://www.bddebian.com/~hurd-web/irc/
[5] http://code.google.com/soc/
[6] http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/gsoc.html

> I am a 4th year computer science student at Dalhousie University, and even
> though I have long wanted to do this, I only now have the nascent skills to
> start

If you would like us to give you some pointers about the kind of work
you might find interesting, maybe you could tell us a bit more about
your background, for instance:
  - how did you hear about Hurd, what got you interested,
  - are there any subjects you're particularly interested in,
university courses you really liked? (computer science is a broad
discipline and Hurd is a project with many different aspects.)

Some random links:

If you've never contributed to free software before, you may want
check out the OpenHatch training missions:
    http://openhatch.org/missions/

Also, there is a "contributing" page on the Hurd wiki:
    http://www.bddebian.com/~hurd-web/contributing/

-- 
Jérémie Koenig <jk@jk.fr.eu.org>
http://jk.fr.eu.org/