I often talk to students that want to contribute to open-source projects, but just don't have an idea what to work on.Here's a tip if you're in a similar situation (e.g. you want to apply for GSOC) :1 git clone repository_url_of_some_open_source_project target_directory2 grep -RIn TODO target_directory/*So, find the URL of the repository project you want to contribute to, checkout the repository using git/mercurial/svn and then find all the TODOs in the source code using grep.The -RIn flags will tell grep to do a recursive search (-R), skip binary files (-I) and include line numbers (-n) for r...

There are a lot of differences between programming, and programming professionally. The most notorious of which, is deadlines.DeadlinesWhen you're writing code for yourself, you can spend as much (or as little time) on it as you please--but when you're writing code for other people, you've got only a limited amount of time and resources to get the job done. In my experience, this typically leads to one of two situations:You've got to extend the deadline to finish the job properly.You've got to write some dirty hacks to finish the job.If you've ever done professional programming, you know what ...