Re: [Haskell-cafe] Open-source projects for beginning Haskell students?

Hey Chris, I'm up for working on pg simple a bit, partly for my own ends. Email me off list and I'll elaborate further, but one thing I'd really like to do is flesh out the geometry/gis bits. -- Carter Tazio Schonwald On Friday, March 16, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Christopher Done wrote:

On 16 March 2012 21:28, Brent Yorgey wrote:

...

So I'd like to do it again this time around, and am looking for particular projects I can suggest to them. Do you have an open-source project with a few well-specified tasks that a relative beginner (see below) could reasonably make a contribution towards in the space of about four weeks? I'm aware that most tasks don't fit that profile, but even complex projects usually have a few "simple-ish" tasks that haven't yet been done just because "no one has gotten around to it yet".

I have a bunch of small Haskell projects and I would enjoy helping someone contribute to them. The problem would be finding projects that are actually interesting to a student. The only ones I can think of, that are trivial to work on, are:

* https://github.com/chrisdone/freenect Requires a Kinect device (your students have X-Box right?). This is my Kinect interface. Who doesn't love devices with video and depth perception? Currently it only supports depth perception, as that's all I wanted from it, but one could fairly straight-forwardly add video support. This would require some mentoring and helping along as it requires not only Haskell knowledge, but it needs some C code and using the FFI. It took me a weekend to figure out and write the depth perception part, with help a newbie could tackle video within four weeks. Alternatively -- there's also the opportunity to write some simple motion detection stuff with the existing code.

* https://github.com/chrisdone/stepeval This is benmachine's project to evaluate Haskell in steps. It's currently on hpaste.org, but it's rather incomplete. Fleshing this out to support more syntax would be nice. Not sure if this is actually interesting to anyone else. But it's a good way to solidify your understanding of Haskell's evaluation model and syntax, maybe.

* https://github.com/chrisdone/css Making this very trivial CSS library well-typed could be easy and useful.

* https://github.com/chrisdone/wordnik A little interface to the Wordnik online dictionary service. I kinda started this but didn't finish it. Once done though we can send it to Wordnik and they'll for sure stick it on their libraries page.

* https://github.com/chrisdone/amelie (hpaste.org) The only one that is relevant to the Haskell community, but I don't have any features that need doing on it, as far as I'm aware. I think the code is fairly easy to grok, though. Could be an opportunity for adding some feature, and it'll be used by a fair chunk of the Haskell community.

* https://github.com/chrisdone/pgsql-simple The PostgreSQL library that amelie uses, it's a raw tcp/ip socket interface to the server, fairly trivial and yet interesting (to me) and useful. Needs more authentication methods, and I have some opportunities for optimizing some things. Tests and benchmarks for it would be good too, and probably easy to write.

* https://github.com/chrisdone/hulk My IRC server that we use at work could do with a better logging mechanism than a file full of JSON. Probably a DB backend. I don't know if any student would care at all about such a project.

Yeah… I don't really work on interesting projects, I won't bother listing the rest. Nor are they a big deal for the community. I'm sure the Hackage2 guys can do with some help. The ecosystem of Yesod, Happstack and Snap always has a bunch of libraries that could do with some fleshing out, I'd estimate. Another idea might be hacking on Leksah, which can always have more features.

Ciao!

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