That's pretty impressive are you currently contributing to open source? If so how did you get start? Right now I am trying to do OS but it's really hard to find a project to do.
[To preface this, I'm assuming you're in or about to enter college]
If you're really motivated, I would recommend looking through previous years' lists of participating organizations for Google Summer of Code [0]. These organizations post lists of project ideas for GSoC, but of course you don't have to participate in GSoC to actually do them. In fact, I would guess that a lot of the project ideas are never even worked on at all. Go ahead and search through the projects for something that interests you and then shoot someone an email or hang out in their IRC (if they have one). Most people would be happy to have you on board.
IMHO, OS stuff is really tough. I just recently graduated college, and I wouldn't dare bother with the time commitment required to get involved in OS development (I'm looking at you, linux kernel). It's just not for me. Maybe you'll like it though. :)
Not really. I've never really jumped onto an open source project before. I've had pull requests of mine accepted into projects before but I've never been a serial contributor. That said, I feel like I'm coming into a phase where that may be something I want to do in the future. These projects that I listed here were just things I did by myself for fun when I Was younger. I had probably 10s or 100s more but most were variations of hacks and stuff that I've lost over the years, sadly.
Some thoughts off the top of my head (hopefully accurate):
- Do you use Vim? I believe it's written in C
- Apache web server - written in C (I believe)
- Mozilla Firefox - written in C++
These above would have the advantage that they might be programs you are already using, and thus somewhat familiar with.
For something smaller:
- Aspell is a clone of ispell that is written in C++
I believe they were looking for a new maintainer of
the Windows port a while back.
- Also, mongrel2 (by Zed Shaw) is a new web server written
in C that seems well thought out. And since it is new,
it may be more understandable than some of the larger
programs above. Also, the ZeroMQ infrastructure that
it uses seems interesting and useful to know about.
How do I go about understanding the internals of Fire fox or GNU emacs? Do I need to understand the entire thing to contribute? If not what should I do?
Realistically would any programmer want a novice to contribute other than documentation? Edit: I have already been doing the things you are saying (learning from everyone) but I feel I am not progressing fast enough.
On just about any project basic bug fixes would be good. You know the easy noncritical stuff that tends to get overlooked. Fix up the slapdash UIs open source apps tend to have. Tests, beat on a library's interface in a way that someone too close to the code base might not think of. Depending on the app, data import\export might be a good place to start. It rather depends on one's area of interest.
I want to focus on deliberate practice by choosing projects that is relevent to my weakness. Right now I want to master C. Do you know a good projects for this?
Open source projects written in C. That is like shooting fish in a barrel made out of fish, on a floor made out of fish, with a gun made out of fish, with big fish for bullets.
You might try Redis, MongoDb, the Linux kernel, One of the BSD's kernels, Python, mongrel 2....
Yes. Working on the same problem space for a long time can get boring, and a fresh face willing to take it on makes it worth the time investing in code reviews and mentoring to provide continuity for users. Professionally at least, I would happily pair program with an intern for 6 months nonstop to bump the bus number on all my responsibilities.
Nothing wrong with documentation. I would do it just not the only thing I want to be doing. Do you know a good road map to make substantial contributions?
Do you feel the program is flawed since it only has 3 programming courses before an OS course? I think the major reason is that students don't do well is because of lack of practice.
That could be true, or it could not be. I had more courses before my OS class, but strictly speaking, I didn't necessarily need to take them in that order.
Either way, it seems that the thing to do would be to get more practice independently. If you're really worried about that particular course, see if you can read up on some of the material beforehand. If the assignments are published somewhere publicly, you could even start on them early.
Also, dropping the course and re-taking it isn't really a dirty trick - they just took some more time to learn the material. You could do the same by getting a head start practicing it. If they finished with a 96% the second time, there's a good chance they learned more from it than someone who got through with a 50% and never touched the material again.
