Re: Need a mentor, and a project.

Albe & Joshua, thanks for the advice. I am in the process of deciding what to work on and am looking at the TODO list. I definitely do not intend to work in a vacuum :-) I am really excited about this and look forward to being challenged and learning a lot.

Regards
Ashish

On Mon, 7 Dec 2009, Joshua Tolley wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 09:53:32AM +0100, Albe Laurenz wrote:
>> abindra wrote:
>>> Next quarter I am planning to do an Independent Study course
>>> where the main objective would be to allow me to get familiar
>>> with the internals of Postgres by working on a project(s). I
>>> would like to work on something that could possibly be
>>> accepted as a patch.
>>>
>>> This is (I think) somewhat similar to what students do during
>>> google summer and I was hoping to get some help here in terms of:
>>> 1. A good project to work on for a newbie.
>>> 2. Would someone be willing to be a mentor? It would be nice
>>> to be able to get some guidance on a one-to-one basis.
>>
>> I would start with the TODO list: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo
>> These are things for which there is a consensus that it would be
>> a good idea to implement them. Pick things that look interesting to
>> you, and try to read the discussions in the archives that lead
>> to the TODO items.
>
> I agree the TODO list is a good place to start. Other good sources include the
> -hackers list and comments in the code. I was surprised when I began taking an
> interest in PostgreSQL how rarely interesting projects mentioned on -hackers
> made it into the TODO list; I've come to realize that the TODO contains, in
> general, very non-controversial items everyone is pretty sure we could use,
> whereas -hackers ranges freely over other topics which are still very
> interesting but often more controversial or less obviously necessary.
> Committed patches both large and small address TODO list items fairly rarely,
> so don't get too hung up on finding something from the TODO list alone.
>
>> Bring the topic up in the hackers list, say that you would like
>> to work on this or that TODO item, present your ideas of how you
>> want to do it. Ask about things where you feel insecure.
>> If you get some support, proceed to write a patch. Ask for
>> directions, post half-baked patches and ask for comments.
>>
>> That is because you will probably receive a good amount of
>> critizism and maybe rejection, and if you invest a couple of
>> months into working on something that nobody knows about *and*
>> your work gets rejected, that is much worse than drawing fire
>> right away.
>
> +1. Especially when developing a complex patch, and especially when you're new
> to the community, you need to avoid working in a vacuum, for social as well as
> technical reasons. The more complex a patch, the more consensus you'll
> eventually need to achieve before getting it committed, in general, and it
> helps to gain that consensus early on, rather than after you've written a lot
> of code. The keyword "proposal" might be a useful search term when digging in
> the -hackers archives for historical examples.
>
> --
> Joshua Tolley / eggyknap
> End Point Corporation
> http://www.endpoint.com
>