[Gsoc-students] Improved Commenting Infrastructure

dave fowler davefowler at gmail.com
Mon Mar 26 04:05:35 UTC 2007


I will be submitting this at noon tomorrow, but if the mentors or
others interested in this subject have comments or suggestions on the
write up I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,

Dave Fowler


Improved Commenting Infrastructure
David Fowler
University of Minnesota
davefowler at gmail.com

Proposal:

 Plone's current discussion framework is very simple and found to be
inadequate by many third party developers who chose to develop their
own solution.  These different commenting formats create unwanted
inconsistency across a plone site.  I propose an improved commenting
infrastructure for plone.  The issue solved is listed as #179 of the
Plone road map. The new infrastructure will need to be intuitive,
flexible and should work with any content type.  It will enhance both
the user and developer experience with Plone.

Credentials:

I am a Masters Student in Electrical Engineering at the University of
Minnesota.  Before that I received bachelors in EE and CompE from the
UofMN and a BA in Physics from Gustavus Adolphus College.  I'm lucky
enough to have a software engineer as a mother and was taught to
program in the 5th grade.  Since then I've developed many applications
and learned many languages, my favorite by far being Python.  I
currently intern at IBM 20+ hours a week while at school but will be
done in April.  At IBM I had the joy of working on the Xbox360 and now
work on confidential research into next gen. gaming technologies and
have received 7 patents on software methods (don't hate me).  I have a
great deal of programming and work experience, the most relevant to
Plone would be my web experience and python projects...

Web Experience:
- In HS I made my first HTML website for my old band in 1999!
- Developed my own blogging software in PHP/MySQL
- 1 year as a web developer for Gustavus Adolphus College (Cold Fusion!)

Python Only Projects:
- Jared.trader, a powerful web crawler and artificial intelligence for
the stock market (didn't make me rich)
- Jared.hockey, wrote the vision algorithms and intelligence of a
robot that plays air hockey against you.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-653278147591989118&hl=en
- POVRay parser – an extensive parser for POVRay syntax
- Many other quickapps for class, work and fun

For more information refer to my resume:
http://development.annabelledey.com/GSoC/resumeJan07.doc


Why Me:

This summer I will be starting a startup with James Skarie, also an
applicant to the Plone GSoC.  We've researched several platforms and
wish to use Plone as the base for our web application.  Other than the
one class I will be taking this summer I will be dedicating the
entirety of my time on plone.  The improved commenting infrastructure
will be a necessary utility for whatever application we decide to
build.  It will also be a great project to learn the layout of Plone,
and ensure that I get networked into the plone open source community
so that whatever James and I develop in our rampage of development for
our startup will not be wasted on just our application.  Additionally
my time working on Plone will be extended well beyond this summer
(until I make it big or go broke trying).  I hope to be an active
member of the community.




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