Vasanth Vaidyanathan's Blog

I got a chance to meet with some MCA final year students yesterday. They wanted to find out if they could do their final year projects at Sun. I talked to them about some open source projects (NetBeans, OpenOffice, OpenJDK) and told them how they can start contributing code or documentation to these projects. Anything counts as contribution - a simple bug fix, an FAQ, or a small troubleshooting article. Further, by contributing to open source, the students are exposed to state of the art software and documentation. These skills would certainly come handy when they apply for jobs. I talked to them about another aspect - today, software development does not happen in the close confines of an office. It happens everywhere, and companies should just nurture these big developer communities. The students are more exposed to the latest technologies, and they need to keep the faculty updated about the industry scenario.

So students - contribute to open source projects, and make it your final year project!