Hi,

as student from last year's Google Summer of Code I just wanted to try
and relay some of the positive things that came out of my participation.

I had always been a 'spectator' of open source projects but had never
really been involved in any serious way, other than sending the odd
patch here and there for relatively small bugs. The SoC seemed like a
fantastic opportunity to be given a helping hand with interacting and
helping out an open source project. I could not have been more right.

Last year I worked on extending and enhancing the Python debugger
(Pdb, available in the Python Standard Library) to incorporate some
of the features of GDB

	- Remote debugging
	- Thread debugging
	- The ability to attach to and debug processes

I had a basic idea about how I was going to implement this (I'd done
about a month's worth of reading prior to submission of my proposal) but
like most projects, you tend to underestimate them.

I'll just go on record and say that the amount of things I learnt  
over the
summer, blew my mind! It is better than any work experience I could
possibly have done. I _choose_ where I wanted to put my time and energy
and because of that, I never felt like I was forcing myself to learn  
anything.
It was all just fun. That probably sounds so cliche, but it's true! I  
learnt how
to work with other people, how to listen to other people's ideas, how to
convey my ideas clearly so that they have a better chance of being
accepted. I also learnt how to have my ideas rejected. This is  
inevitable
and something I always had trouble with before, it's a good skill to
acquire.

Those 3 months will just fly by and at the end, you should have a  
project
where you can say "Yes, _I_ did that". It's a great conversation to have
during job interviews, trust me. Not only will you have learnt so much
over the summer, but afterwards you'll feel more confident about  
discussing
things on mailing lists, you'll have learnt how to interact properly  
with open
source communities. You'll also meet some really interesting and smart
people along the way.

So if you're thinking about applying for a NetBSD project for this  
year's
SoC, in the words of Nike, Just Do It! You won't regret it. There are  
some
project ideas on http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/soc-projects.html but you
are free to propose your own ideas if you have some! The deadline is has
been extended to Monday, March 26th at 5:00 PM Pacific time
(12:00 AM UTC March 27, 2007).

--mjf