Google Summer of Code 2011 self introduction

SDL Development
1

Hi SDL hackers!

My name is Karan Pratap Singh, and I am a CSE 3rd year student from Panjab
Univeristy, Chandigarh, India. I am going to apply for Google Summer of Code
2011
and want to work for SDL. I have started learning about SDL recently(
lazyfoo.net as well as SDL documentation) and am delighted to use it for my
2D game project!

I wanted to know on what basis are SDL students evaluated for GSoC
participation ?
Does SDL take people with no prior Open Source development experience(like
me!)?
How can I augment my skills so that I have a good chance of being useful to
the SDL community?
Is this email too newbie-ish? :slight_smile:

Here is a paste of my current technical skills:
http://dpaste.com/hold/359280/

from
Karan Pratap Singh
IRC nick: kps_foo

2

I know of one very good way to practice your skills. Make a game at a
ludumdare.com competition.
You’ll get some solid problem-solving exercise and if you use SDL, you’ll
understand the API better.

As for actually developing SDL itself, you’ll probably need to gain some
experience in platform-specific APIs. Choose a platform and choose some
areas that you’re interested in (graphics, audio, human interface, etc.),
then look around for documentation on it. If you want a clearer focus, look
at SDL’s roadmap and bug tracker and hang out on this mailing list to find
things to poke at (and ideally fix) in your own copy of SDL. Then you can
start submitting patches, which will help you and us a lot.

Good luck!
Jonny DOn Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:47 AM, karan pratap singh <wizard.karan at gmail.com wrote:

Hi SDL hackers!

My name is Karan Pratap Singh, and I am a CSE 3rd year student from Panjab
Univeristy, Chandigarh, India. I am going to apply for Google Summer of Code
2011
and want to work for SDL. I have started learning about SDL recently(
lazyfoo.net as well as SDL documentation) and am delighted to use it for
my 2D game project!

I wanted to know on what basis are SDL students evaluated for GSoC
participation ?
Does SDL take people with no prior Open Source development experience(like
me!)?
How can I augment my skills so that I have a good chance of being useful to
the SDL community?
Is this email too newbie-ish? :slight_smile:

Here is a paste of my current technical skills:
http://dpaste.com/hold/359280/

from
Karan Pratap Singh
IRC nick: kps_foo

SDL mailing list
SDL at lists.libsdl.org
http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org

3

Hi SDL hackers!

Hello!

My name is Karan Pratap Singh, and I am a CSE 3rd year student from Panjab
Univeristy, Chandigarh, India. I am going to apply for Google Summer of Code
2011
and want to work for SDL. I have started learning about SDL
recently(lazyfoo.net as well as SDL documentation) and am delighted to use
it for my 2D game project!

I wanted to know on what basis are SDL students evaluated for GSoC
participation ?

IIRC, last year the prospective students had to create a sample patch
for SDL. I believe it could be literally anything, a bug fix or
something a little meatier. I think the idea was to give them a taste
of the contribution processes.

Other than that I don’t know the exact criteria. Having something
public code or projects that people can review would help. Having a
really cool idea for something new for SDL won’t hurt. Alternatively,
having a passion for getting some of the stuff on SDL’s TODO list done
would help.

Does SDL take people with no prior Open Source development experience(like
me!)?
How can I augment my skills so that I have a good chance of being useful to
the SDL community?

It depends on what you think you’d be interested in adding to SDL. You
seem to have a Linux focus, but SDL is a cross platform library. So
you could look into features in SDL that need a bit of attention in
Linux. That, or maybe see about looking at obtaining an alternative
platform for use with SDL. This isn’t always a reasonable option for a
student though.

SDL happens to be a low level API, often a thin wrapper around system
calls. You might want to research and try out these if you haven’t
worked with them before.

The main way to augment your skills is to write programs. If you were
to write a few small games (think pong, snake, breakout, etc) using
SDL 1.3 you could get used to using the new API, as well as building
SDL (it is updated quite frequently now). You might even find a few
bugs, which if you can patch would certainly help your chances, but
even a bug report would be welcome!

Is this email too newbie-ish? ? :slight_smile:

You’re doing fine.On 27 January 2011 15:47, karan pratap singh <wizard.karan at gmail.com> wrote: