The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Join the development!

I was interested to see if any of you is familiar with any collaborative projects that one can join in on.

I'm looking to join a group to develop something interesting and pick up some skills and experience in the process. All of this on an "as time permits” basis. And to make the selection even slimmer all done in/for a windows environment.

Any one know of such a place or website?

Eager to Code
Monday, February 9, 2004

If you go to SourceForge, you can find lists of projects that are looking for help.

Fred
Monday, February 9, 2004

You could also try the .NET Workspaces at http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/workspaces/

Kevin Sanders
Monday, February 9, 2004

What he said. SourceForge actually seems to have a pretty good active/mature projects/dead projects list.

www.MarkTAW.com
Monday, February 9, 2004

active/mature projects to dead projects ratio.

www.MarkTAW.com
Monday, February 9, 2004

Check out GotDotNet Workspaces for .NET projects -
http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/workspaces/

Krish
Monday, February 9, 2004

Am I missing something, or is there a better way to search on projects looking for developers at SourceForge? When I go there, I just see a couple of different ways to narrow down your search. For instance, if you choose a software topic, then there's no way to drill down to projects that are actively looking for developers.
888

anon
Monday, February 9, 2004

anon:

Somewhere on SourceForge is a list of projects seeking help. I can't remember where it is right now, but I'm sure it's still on there somewhere.

Fred
Monday, February 9, 2004

· Project Help Wanted

on the left side under "SF.net Resources"

www.MarkTAW.com
Monday, February 9, 2004

Eager, there are thousands of projects at source forge. What sorts of things do you like to do or you think would be cool to work on? Kernel development? Drivers? Game engines? Music? Bloggers? Search engines? Natural Language parsing?

You should pick a project that gives you experience in a field you are interested in. Name some of your hobbies and some of us here can point you in the direction of our favorite pet projects.

Also, what programming languages are you comfortable with.

Dennis Atkins
Monday, February 9, 2004

Natural Language parsing is of particular interest to me, if anyone knows of cool projects.

Thing that worries me though, is my education only includes one undergraduate AI course, a compiler course, and a intro to language theory course. Will I need more specialized knowledge, or can I "get my foot in the door", and learn by doing?

anon
Monday, February 9, 2004

I have mostly dedicated myself to web development, but I want to get myself down to a lower level of programming.
I really can't tell you if I'd like anything else like drivers or gaming engines, but I am always uo to challenges. Maybe something science oriented would be cool. Most of the languages I know are for the web (ASP, VBS,JScript,SQL, etc.) but I have learned some .Net (Both VB.Net and C#) and I can also program in C++. What do you thin k might be best?

Eager to Code
Monday, February 9, 2004

> Natural Language parsing is of particular interest to me, if anyone knows of cool projects.

Parsing text, or speech? Searching sourceforge for "voice" turns up a VoiceXML project.

> Will I need more specialized knowledge, or can I "get my foot in the door", and learn by doing?

If you know any programming you might learn (including learning more specialized knowledge) by doing; I'd think there's no way to learn WITHOUT doing ...

Christopher Wells
Monday, February 9, 2004

anon, if you enjoy AI, join the development of spam filtering software. As far as learning goes, there're a lot of relevant resources online. Amzi Prolog hooked with WordNet makes the best educational playground, IMO.

Egor Shipovalov
Monday, February 9, 2004

Paraphrase: "Skills is not good enough..."

Just DO.

Start small, obviously -- do not overpromise. However, just DO.

T.J.
Monday, February 9, 2004

Thanks for the help.

anon
Monday, February 9, 2004

As far as getting involved in open source software: just do it. Don't start by saying 'can I help'. Start by saying 'here\'s a patch that adds XYZ'. You pretty much always get positive responses (even if they don't apply the patch). And you can get involved in huge projects like that: I've contributed some very small things to large projects myself.

And feature requests that come with patches get priority service :)

Mike Swieton
Monday, February 9, 2004

Eager,

Sourceforge and most collaborative projects seem very C and C++ oriented, I was just curious to make sure you felt comfortable there.

You mentioned science as the first thing - that's your answer. Actually, if you want to work on science stuff, you might be able to find stuff for pay and not just as a hobby. Supercomputing centers and the like often have a need for people who are interested in the unique challenges that come with gene sequencing, chaos math and other fun things.

Here's a wild idea thrown out - would intelligent robots be in your field? Up to the challenges of programming embedded microcontrollers in C and assembly? Why not join forces with someone with mechanical engineering experience and build a fighting robot and go on one of those robot wars TV shows? Most of those cobots seem pretty dumb. I bet some clever engineering could get to the finals and maybe even win one of the big payoffs. Also, there's a lot of fun interacting with othes, you get to be an ubergeek, and of course the groupies...

Dennis Atkins
Monday, February 9, 2004

By dumb I don't mean a waste of time, I mean dumb as in not much AI in its behavior.

Dennis Atkins
Monday, February 9, 2004