Re: how to bring in new people [was: forwarded message from Satish Athreya]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Mark Linimon wrote:

>> Unfortunately in my experience, emails like this usually end at
>> about this point.  You can reply or not, but whatever effort goes
>> into it is usually wasted [...] chances are that's the last you'll
>> hear of them.
>
>And here, in one paragraph, is why some people believe this
>project is in trouble.
>
>I won't deny for an instant that, in a volunteer world, the effort
>*is* usually wasted.  Fair enough.
[SNIP]
>Note: this is not meant as a personal flame.  It is very easy
>to get burned out after putting out the welcome mat hundreds
>of times -- I know.  I have done this.
>
>But in my book, the term for the thing that makes you keep putting
>it out time and time again is called "leadership".
>
>Think about it.  Please.

In many ways, this is one of the goals of the Xwin project.  To 
get these would-be developers together discussing potential 
projects and ideas, and perhaps take the more sane ideas and put 
them on the web in a "Things you might want to hack on" type of 
page.

- Cleaning up function prototypes
- Eliminating compiler warnings by cleaning up code
- Finding code duplication and moving it to a common place
- Doing code security audits and fixing problems that are found
- Profiling code and trying to improve performance (gprof, oprofile)
- Using valgrind and/or other such tools to analyze the server 
  and other software for memory leaks, double frees, and other 
  common programming bugs
- Testing as much video hardware in as many color depths as 
  possible, testing as many features as possible, trying 
  purposefully to find bugs, and to fix them and supply patches 
  and/or report them in bugzilla
- Improving documentation of _anything_

There are tonnes of things new developers can participate in 
while building skills, and also tonnes of things more skilled 
developers can work on too.  By itemizing some of these and 
making a public webpage of suggestions, it will encourage others 
to get involved and also give them some suggestions as to what to 
hack on or fiddle with.

No idea when we'll actually get a formal web page up though.  
It's on my mind though.

-- 
Mike A. Harris