I will be working with UCLA‘s wonderful software engineering class again this year where they emphasize student projects. The class usually entails different companies (Google, IBM, etc…) or open source projects (Wine, Eclipse, etc…) coming in and presenting an overview of the project and some project ideas that the students can mull over. This allows the students to work on cool things and learn about software engineering at the same time!
Last year, the students didn’t listen to any of my suggestions (just like in real world software engineering projects!) and decided to go with a MIPS/SPIM IDE 🙂 This year, after I give the typical Eclipse schpiel, I want to entice them with some exciting (yet doable) project ideas. For the committers out there, do you have any tasks within your projects that students could do? For others, do you have any ideas that students relatively new to Eclipse can handle?
In anticipation of this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have started a wiki page to list some student project ideas. I encourage committers and community members to post ideas there 🙂
By the way, if anyone is in the LA area on January 10th and wants to discuss Eclipse / open-source over a couple of drinks, let me know 🙂