A computer science student would like to join the Octave development.

[Filip Mišún]

Hi dear GNU fellows.

My name is Filip and I study computer science at college for a second year. Now that I entered the second grade of the college, I was assigned to choose a project, on which I would work for the whole grade. The topic of the project is for me to choose (given it is somehow related to computer science).

For a longer time I have considered joining the development of some GNU project. Now, that I have to work on some project, I think this might be a great opportunity for me to make the first step. I visited the gnu website and looked at some projects the gnu community is currently working on. The Octave project immediately attracted me, since I also love mathematics.

So I decided to write this mail. I would like to write a piece of code, which would possibly become part of the octave at the end. My question on you therefore is, if there is something about octave, that would be great to do and would be suitable for me. Since it is supposed to be part of my school project, it should satisfy the following conditions:

1. The code that I write should be coherent. By that I mean, that it shouldn't be just some adjustments up and there or bug fixing. It should somehow "stay on it's own".
2. It should be challenging enough. Please realize, that I have a whole year to work on this one and if it's going to be good enough, it might even become my bachelor thesis the next year, so I will have another year to work on it.

I know these conditions are somehow vague, but I hope I made myself at least a little bit clear. I would prefer working on a code, that would do some numerical computations, since, as I said, I love mathematics (despite the fact I am definitely not an expert). But I would also gladly work on something else. I will be very grateful to anyone, who will share his idea with me.

I have experiences with programming mainly in C++ and Java, but I'm ready to learn something new. I have also about three months to make all the preparations that I need, before I start writing the code itself.

I'm also completely new to the free software community and have only a vague idea, how it works. So I'm sorry if I wrote something stupid in this post.

Best regards, Filip.