[wp-hackers] Joining the GSoC flood

[Nicolás Badano]

Hey everyone!

It's an honor to finally meet you all: I've read so much of your code 
that I feel I already know you, but talking in the flesh is a whole 
different story. My name is Nico Badano, and I'm a web designer and 
coder from Rosario, Argentina. I'm interested in joining the Wordpress 
development team as a GSoC student this year, and have been looking into 
where could I help the most.

I've been working with Wordpress for 4 years now, even before starting 
my System Analyst career. I'm graduated in Social Communications, and 
had a strong design background before writing my first line of code. 
Right now I'm confident working on both aspects (and usually do) 
although they require such different mindsets that it usually takes me a 
day or two to "switch" modes :) I'm familiar with the codebase, but have 
never hacked into it (mostly due to Mika's persuasive posts everywhere 
in the support forums: "DON'T EVER EVER (EVER!) HACK INTO THE CORE FILES").

I've been going over the suggested projects in the GSoC page, and some 
(actually, most!) really caught my eye. I'm mostly interested in CSS, 
Javascript and responsive layouts right now, so anything on that field 
could work for me. The Enhanced Emails project sounds good too, but I've 
read that Boris Kuzmanov is already applying for it: if two students can 
work on the same project, I'd be happy to lend a hand with design and 
HTML/CSS insight. I've dealt with email styling in the past, and you 
would be terrified at how much work does it take to get email to show 
good accross multiple clients, browsers and devices. Other than that, 
I'd like to participate on UI adjustments like progress bars and 
touch-optimized layouts. Finally, I think it would be useful for the 
Wordpress community to lend a hand with the Trac, fixing bugs here and 
there or optimizing things. The great thing about that project is that 
it involves working very closely with the community, and I get to work 
accross the whole platform. This has the potential to teach me a lot 
about how Wordpress works. As far as I can tell, these are the right 
mentors for the said projects:

Trac Annihilation: ?
Email Enhances: Wojtek Szkutnik
UI Updates: George Stephanis

Am I on the right track here? Is there someone else I should talk to? 
I'll get in touch with a mentor as soon as I know which one. Are all of 
them checking this email list?

As a side note, all the websites I've developed I did on Wordpress, and 
have made many plugins for the clients over the years, mostly to enhance 
or provide some additional feature to the core. However, I have never 
adapted those plugins to submit them to the repo: I now find that is 
more or less a condition of acceptance for GSoC applicants... If that's 
the case, I can use this week to try and include one of them. The last 
two I developed had to do with Facebook (a Facebook login and 
registration plugin, and a latest photos/albums grabber) so maybe one of 
them could do as sample code? Would past projects (like websites made 
for clients) help on the screening process too?

I'm excited to be here: hope I make it into the development team this year!
Nico