Getting more specific...

Last week we chose to contribute to the Sugar Labs project, but that is like giving your address as North America.  There are tons of things to choose from, and we have all decided to work on the Math4 project.  This is still general because within Math4 there are a lot of projects.  We've narrowed that down to three, presently, and they all seem really cool.  All of them are math-centered video games with very simplistic graphics (all of them are 2-d games).  It's exciting because I think that we will all do well to contribute.  We've signed up for the mailing list, but now we need to contact the people from the individual projects.  All of their emails are on the wiki, so it should not be hard.  They all also have very welcoming words on the wiki that makes anyone feel comfortable contacting them to help contribute to the game: they are not just asking for senior software engineers.  I'm really excited for this project, I think presently "PacMath" would be my favorite project... I always like the original PacMan game, so I think that would be fun.  They have lots of specific tasks that need to be accomplished. 

I read in more detail "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."  I think that this is going to be a helpful resource, not just in this class, but also in Operating Systems where we are going to need to use Linux extensively.  At present, I am pretty "anti-Linux," but this made me feel a little more interested in getting to learn it better.  I am hoping however that we will be able to work on our Sugar Labs Project in our "native" operating systems.  Here are some interesting quotes that I found from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" that might be useful to me now or in the future:

"If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource."

"Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around."

"To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you."

"Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging."

"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)."

"When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor."