[Haskell-cafe] open-source project looking for novice help?

[Anon 2014]

One suggestion is to write a paper on how to create a simple hybrid mobile
app in Haskell. Just basic functionality like take a picture from a mobile
device, geotag it and store it on the server.

Fullstack toolset to write hybrid mobile apps similar to the below project
https://github.com/mtolly/hs-cordova


-----Original Message-----
From: Haskell-Cafe [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
Mateusz Kowalczyk
Sent: Saturday, November 8, 2014 6:31 AM
To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] open-source project looking for novice help?

On 11/07/2014 06:40 PM, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
> I'm teaching an introductory Haskell course this semester
> (http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall14/) and am about to assign students 
> their final project. Is there anyone out there who would welcome 
> getting some novice help on an open-source project? You certainly 
> don't need to commit to accept their patch(es), but I know it would be 
> a great experience for some of the students to contribute to the 
> "real" world of Haskell, instead of just doing exercises. You can get 
> an accurate summary of what we've covered by looking at the lecture 
> titles at http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall14/lectures.html
> 
> 
> Students will be choosing projects starting next week, and will need 
> to have them completed by Dec. 15 or so. A good project is about 20 
> hours of work.
> 
> Thanks! Richard
> 

I'd love to snatch a helper for something but I think most of what one would
consider 'serious' projects would take a bit more than 20 hours:
I'd welcome some patches for Yi, Haddock or even some dabbling in GHC's
lexer/parser if you have an ambitious student who wants to get involved
further ;). Alas, that's probably not the kind of scope you're after.

For something a bit easier, I can suggest two projects which offer multiple
sub-projects:

* [1] is a front-end to tesseract[2] OCR software. Possible work involves
improving the interface (hey, I'm a programmer not a designer.), adding
features such as on-the-fly translation through Bing or another service
(this seems like a nice little project, you end up with a lib to talk to the
service even if they don't get to integrate it), add support for history
(probably not enough for a project by
itself) or if the student is more ambitious, automatic region detection as
boasted by the (proprietary) software KanjiTomo[3]. So there's talking to
the service, messing around with a GUI (gtk2hs) or work with images/pattern
recognition (I can only help with Haskell side here). The plus side is that
the existing code is pretty primitive if they choose to do something with
the GUI, no 7-layer deep monad transformers.

* free-game[4] is a game library but it is pretty small in what it
offers: you get some basic stuff but it's not a full-blown suite. A project
could involve writing useful libraries around it, I could come up with some
specifics if there's interest. I can't offer help with hacking on free-game
itself but I wouldn't mind overseeing any libs that spawn around it.

* EDIT just before sending: For a while now I have quite an annoyance with
criterion; it produces those pretty HTML + JS graphs you can mouse-over and
stuff, right? The problem is that they are absolutely useless to the point
of hanging your browser if you have more than a few benchmarks on the page.
I think a nice project would be developing a reporting package with
'diagrams' or something which takes Criterion's output (CSV) and spits outs
images we can actually inspect. This seems like something a student can get
on with pretty easily and take it as far as they wish while having practical
value at the same time.


I wish I could offer more ideas but it's hard to come up with something that
will fit into 20 hours including getting the feel for things and that might
be interesting to the student, have some value to the rest of us and doesn't
feel like an exercise. I am a big fan of 'learn by actually hacking stuff'
approach, just not in such a (relatively) small timescale ;).

I don't mind overseeing someone if they happen to pick anything I mentioned
here (with the exception of GHC itself) or something that interests me. I
don't mind volunteering as 'overseer' for some other project if the student
is willing and is likely to join the community for longer.

[1]: https://github.com/Fuuzetsu/tsuntsun
[2]: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
[3]: http://kanjitomo.net/
[4]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/free-game

--
Mateusz K.
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