Lessons Learned from GSoC 2008 (or in other words, the final post)

I learned a ton this summer during my GSoC project. Some of the more important things I learned were…

• People in the open-source community are always willing to help if they can.
• Make sure you figure out what the prerequisites of an API are before you use them.
• Hackystat
• If you have a specific GSoC project in mind, go with it but expect that a least one or more critical things you wanted to do in your project will get changed or entirely scraped. (Oh my poor easy auto installer)
• WRITE GOOD CODE AND DOCUMENTATION. There is tons of bad code out there and most of it is undocumented so refactor and compile those code documents.
• Making screencasts is easy but doing the voice-over is really hard.

Overall GSoC was a pretty awesome experience and I met a ton of cool people an learned alot of solid and useful things. My only reget is of course that my program was not as polished as it could have been.

Some techinicall stuff I learned was:

• Team Foundation Server!!!
• A better understanding of c# to say the least
• A bit about how SOAP and the REST API work
• Some web services stuff

Advertisement