[ros-general] My intent to participate in Summer of Code 2006

[Michael DePaulo]

Hello,

 

I am sending this to let people know that I intend to participate in the
Google Summer of Code 2006 for ReactOS, and to see if anybody has any
suggestions for a beginner programmer like me.

 

Allow me to introduce myself for those of you who do not know me as
mikedep333 already. My name is Michael DePaulo, I am just finishing my 1st
year at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (US). I know
English and some Spanish. I consider this project to be a great idea and I
hope to see it do a lot better. So far I have been trying to help it out by
answering visitor questions on #reactos, entering info into the wiki, and
whatnot, but I intend to actually start coding for this project with such a
worthy vision.

 

Unfortunately I only have taken one introductory programming course, and it
was only in Java, although I have a relatively good understanding of the
components of Windows and how they work together. I also am pretty familiar
with GNU/linux and mingw. Therefore I need to determine what I would be
capable of doing with my limited experience and selecting the best part of
ROS to work on in time for the SoC application deadline (May 8th.) I was
thinking of working on an application bundled with ROS (which should work
with wine too) such as wordpad or imagesoft, (which is like MS paint), both
of which are being done by Ged Murphy at the moment. My friend suggested
writing a driver like for NICs since we already have the pcnet and ne2000
ones to act as templates and I'd just be working with an interface, but I
was under the impression that writing drivers in general requires a lot of
experience and you risk crashing the kernel a lot.

 

Even if I cannot complete a SoC project, I still intend to help code for
this project this summer. I will continue to help develop it onwards too.

 

If anyone has any advice or anything else to tell me, feel free to share it.
I can be found in #reactos usually and will be checking ros-general pretty
closely.

 

Also, I know that everyone around here uses the quotation style of using
only a portion of text above what you're about to say with the > next to it.
Until evolution or mozilla lightning works with my new palm, I will be using
Outlook 2003 primarily. Is there a way to easily quote using that method in
outlook?

 

Best Regards,

Mike DePaulo