On 16 March 2012 21:28, Brent Yorgey <byorgey@seas.upenn.edu> 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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