We're up in Toronto today for the final day of the UCOSP Winter 2013 Sprint. Through UCOSP, we get to meet and work with bright and enthusiastic students pursuing careers in the software industry for a whole semester. Our students work on Review Board, building cool projects and getting a feel for what it's like in the industry. It's pretty awesome.
This semester, we have five new students: Allisa, Behzad, Edward, Elaine, and Natasha.
Allisa got into development at age 13 when she started writing custom maps for Neverwinter Nights. Now she's making it easy to do a security check of your Review Board installation to make sure you're safe from known configuration-related vulnerabilities.
Behzad got his start writing and modifying scripts for mIRC when he was 11. For this term, he's making our hidden trophy support less hidden by giving you a nice trophy case on your user page, showing every trophy you've earned. It'll even support the development of new types of trophies, even under extensions. (One may make the association between fish slaps and fish trophies?)
Edward's background was in systems engineering, until he found .NET and fell in love with programming. That led him toward going back for a CS degree. He's now taking a role on RBTools, adding some nice improvements. This includes extending 'rb patch' to be able to commit under the contributor's name (useful for open source projects) and adding a command to guide the setup of a new source tree.
Elaine used to want to be a writer, but found she liked writing code more than stories. She's working on an extension to help out when using checklists for code review.
Natasha got into CS after her first programming class in high school, because it fed her love of puzzles and problem solving. It also goes well with her coffee addiction. Her project's goal is to automatically suggest reviewers based on who has reviewed similar code in the past.
We were also joined by a former student yesterday, Yazan, who fixed a bug for us, and just generally hung around helping out.
UCOSP is a fantastic program, and we look forward to it every semester. We're super lucky to get such great students, and I'm really excited to see how far this new team will take the project.
Special thanks to Steven MacLeod and Mike Conley, our wonderful co-mentors who help make this happen every semester; UCOSP, who provide the opportunity for us to participate and meet such great students; and Mozilla, who provided the space for the sprint.
