[openstack-dev] Suggestions for students final year project

Anita Kuno anteaya at anteaya.info
Tue Oct 7 21:41:19 UTC 2014


On 10/07/2014 05:21 PM, Patricia Ellis wrote:
> Thank you all for your attention,
> 
> In answer to Anita, in a way my goal is to get a good mark as I have been
> getting good marks so far.
Great. Thanks for getting back to us.

Out of the replies thus far Duncan seems to have the most experience
(that has been mentioned) in getting a good mark. He tends to hang out
in the #openstack-cinder channel and, lucky you, is in your timezone. I
would suggest having a follow up conversation with him to maximize your
effectiveness at getting a good mark.

I'm still interested in having that conversation with you, Adam, since I
think you have some thoughts I would like to support.

Thanks Patricia,
Anita.

> I had a project proposal of my own, a web app
> for a friend of mine but my supervisor didn't think it good enough to get
> me a good mark and she suggested I approach you. Final year projects don't
> seem to be about showing off what we have learned over the last 3/4 years
> rather to show off what we haven't learned at college. I started off my
> degree from a very low foundation of knowledge about programming and found
> I really liked the coding side of things so I switched to a software
> development degree in second year. It is very difficult to get the balance
> right when you realize how little you know about the subject, the more I
> learn the bigger the field seems to be getting.
> I will spend some time investigating the links you sent me.
> 
> On 7 October 2014 19:41, Adam Lawson <alawson at aqorn.com> wrote:
> 
>> Is the OP looking to help patch bugs with an individual program or to use
>> Openstack to deploy an interesting use case? The latter is how I
>> interpreted the question.
>>
>>
>> *Adam Lawson*
>>
>> AQORN, Inc.
>> 427 North Tatnall Street
>> Ste. 58461
>> Wilmington, Delaware 19801-2230
>> Toll-free: (844) 4-AQORN-NOW ext. 101
>> International: +1 302-387-4660
>> Direct: +1 916-246-2072
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Duncan Thomas <duncan.thomas at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 7 October 2014 19:01, Anita Kuno <anteaya at anteaya.info> wrote:
>>>> On 10/07/2014 01:38 PM, Adam Young wrote:
>>>>> On 10/06/2014 05:28 PM, Anita Kuno wrote:
>>>>>> On 10/06/2014 04:11 PM, Adam Young wrote:
>>>>>>> I am looking to get someone to work on a Javascript based web client
>>> to
>>>>>>> replace Horizon.
>>>
>>>>>> Can I just say that I think using new people looking to have work
>>>>>> experience with OpenStack to further pet projects, without telling
>>> them
>>>>>> it is a pet project and not considered a project which others may
>>>>>> consider OpenStack to be not the best approach for encouraging new
>>>>>> people.
>>>
>>> I think writing a client / gui for openstack is one of the best single
>>> projects you can do to get a good overview of the whole stack.
>>>
>>>>>> Not knocking your project, Adam, since I know nothing about it, and
>>> this
>>>>>> isn't the first time I have seen this happen. But I do believe that
>>>>>> folks asking to help out with something are looking to gain
>>> transferable
>>>>>> skills so that they have something to offer a potential employeer who
>>> is
>>>>>> looking for work experience with OpenStack. That would be what I would
>>>>>> be looking for anyway.
>>>
>>>>> No offense taken.  I think you are looking out for the interest of the
>>>>> poster and people wityh similar interests.
>>>
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>>>>  It would not be appropriate for
>>>>> someone in Patricia's position to try and come in and get a bug fix
>>>>> through.
>>>
>>>> Now on this point, I'm going to disagree, simply because I don't have
>>>> enough information on what Patricia's position actually is. I can guess
>>>> but until I hear from Patricia herself, I'm just guessing and I would
>>>> much rather know. It was my desire to know more about Patricia's
>>>> position that motivated my suggestion she join irc and perhaps ask a few
>>>> questions, allowing others to ask questions of her.
>>>>
>>>> When interacting with other folks who enter under similar circumstances,
>>>> my first question invariably is "What is your goal?". I truly hope
>>>> Patricia has something better than "to get a good mark" because folks
>>>> with that goal rarely interest me, but who knows. I haven't had the
>>>> chance to ask.
>>>
>>> If you're doing a final year project and your highest goal isn't 'to
>>> get a good mark', then you're doing yourself a serious disservice. You
>>> can have all sorts of secondary goals, but by the point in your
>>> academic career where you're doing your final year project, your main
>>> goal is to prove you're learnt and can apply all of the skills that
>>> your course has covered. This actually involves a very different
>>> process to getting something done in the 'real world'.
>>>
>>>>>  That limits the number of projects available.
>>>> Now here is where I would like to interact with program administrators
>>>> at institutions such as Patricia's to ask them why a project? We have
>>>> over 300 including stackforge, why task a student with starting their
>>>> own, why not encourage them to learn our development process which then
>>>> can enable them to work on any of the 300 in various stages of
>>> development.
>>>
>>> Extremely difficult to get a decent academic project and therefore a
>>> good mark out of an existing project that has had any substantial
>>> amount of work done on it. Not impossible, but flicking through a pile
>>> of old final year projects that got good marks shows that stand-alone
>>> start-to-finish projects tend to get better marks. (I've looked into
>>> this quite a bit)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Duncan Thomas
>>>
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>>> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
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>>>
>>
>>
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