Eclipse, Education and Open Source

I’m excited to learn that certain computer science students will be contributing to Eclipse (WTP in particular) as part of university class credit. Personally, I think this is fantastic and much better than say killing yourself over automata theory :)

As a student, I think one of the best ways to prepare yourself for a career in software is contributing to an open source community project. Depending on the project, you can learn about various development methodologies, source control systems and even project politics! From my own experience, I learned a lot when I spent time committing to the Gentoo project back in the day. I learned the importance of community building, breaking builds and how to work in a highly distributed team. Oh those were the days…

If you’re a student and interested in working with the Eclipse community… Eclipse is participating in the Google Summer of Code program this year again. Feel free to post your project ideas!