[Gsoc-students] Google Summer of Code

[dave fowler]

Hi all,

I hope you were all expecting a night before the deadline email :).
My friend James and I are both MSEE students at the University of
Minnesota.  We both have just one class to finish up this summer and
instead of taking our job offers or finishing our PhD's we've recently
decided to start a startup (a dot com!) together.  Checking around
Plone seems like the perfect platform for what we want to do.  It
seems to have a huge array of features, is easily expandable, and I
can't get enough of Python!  The google summer of code opportunity
sounds like a great way to meet the people involved in plone, begin
enhancing it, and even make a little money to support ourselves.

The application process appears fairly competitive and lengthy.  Does
anyone have experience with this and know otherwise?  Does anyone have
a proposal ready to go or even some suggestions on what types of
projects?  Again, James and I just ran into plone and only have a
basic knowledge of its features.

A little about ourselves...

I was lucky enough to have a software engineer as a mother and was
taught to program in 5th grade.  The skill won me many science fairs
and I've been doing projects ever since.  For the past 2 years I've
interned at IBM where I did validation on the tripple core processor
we made for the Xbox 360 and now I work writing and desiging rendering
methods for next generation (5-6 years from now) highly parallel
gaming hardware.  I'm fluent in many programming languages, my
favorite by far being Python.  I have a good deal of experience in web
apps.  I made my first web page in 1999 and since then have written my
own php/mysql blog and worked as a web developer at Gustavus Adolphus
College while a student there.  I've always wanted to get involved in
the open source movement but historically seem to have too much school
and work crammed into my time.  I hope that the intensive hours James
and I will put in to our start up will also help me get in on the open
source community and contribute to plone.

James received the 3M fellowship for research in molecular electronics
and graduated with Summa cum Laude for his bachelors.  He is finishing
his masters thesis based on characterizing database workloads using
statistical techniques.  His internship experience includes working
for Medtronic developing tools which create an interface to an XML
database for various EDA tools.  There he also created an app to run
automate code checks to ensure complience to code regulations.

If you have any interest in doing a project with us, ideas for a
project, or think its too late to get an app in let us know!

Thanks,

Dave Fowler
James Skarie