Internship ideas
Outreach Program for Women Ideas List
The GNOME Foundation provides an outreach program for women. You can learn more here: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen.
OpenStack would like to participate as a project for the Dec. 2013 to March 2014 session. We have identified some mentors and have sponsorship from the OpenStack Foundation, Rackspace and HP to participate in this program. This page should collect the ideas for applicants to work on.
GNOME OPW emphasizes that applicants may not have ever worked on FLOSS before. There are several stages to the program, but the first stage is to mentor during the application process itself. Joining mailing lists, IRC, understanding the channels of communication are good first steps. Logging bugs and fixing bugs are also good ideas.
Interns are expected to spend 40 hours a week on the project.
So, feel free to list ideas here:
Documentation
OpenStack documentation is highly technical and processed like the code itself.
Our tool chain is a maven plugin housed in http://github.com/stackforge/clouddocs-maven-plugin and currently includes all branding, CSS, and xslts. We would like to separate those out so individuals or organizations could maintain their own branding files separately from the plugin. We also are looking to output xhtml that could be styled separately.
Contact David Cramer, dcramer on IRC in #openstack-doc or david dot cramer at rackspace dot com if you're interested. Anne Gentle (anne dot gentle at rackspace dot com) and Diane Fleming (diane dot fleming at rackspace dot com) can also help you with onboarding.
Community
- Build a supply-chain management system to distribute merchandising to OpenStack User Groups around the world [reed on IRC / stefano at openstack org] Details
- Add audio and video real time collaboration capabilities to OpenStack User Groups portal [reed on IRC / stefano at openstack org]
- Write puppet scripts to automatically deploy/manage Ask OpenStack [reed on IRC / stefano at openstack org]
Coding
Marconi WebSocket Transport
Description: Marconi, a queuing service for OpenStack, is in its early ages and some of its areas are still being designed and developed from scratch. It is a great opportunity for interns to learn about queuing systems, OpenStack architecture and development methodologies. The proposed project is to help developing a WebSocket based transport for Marconi.
Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/marconi/+spec/websocket-endpoint
Expected results: Patchsets submitted for review, reviewed by community members.
Knowledge prerequisites: programming knowledge
Nice-to-have knowledge: RESTFul APIs, HTTP, MongoDB
Mentor: Flavio Percoco
Surface the "Instance Actions" Information
Description: In the web dashboard (Horizon), it is possible to see information about the instances currently running. It would be nice to be able to see the instance history when clicking on the details, e.g. to figure out when an instance was shut down and by whom, etc. This information is already provided by an API in the compute service (Nova), and needs to be surfaced both for the user (who can see the history for their own instances) and the admin (who can see the history for everyone). This will probably require using Horizon Tabs and TabGroups, adding it to the instance details and finding a nice way to display the data.
Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/horizon/+spec/instance-actions-dashboard
Expected results: Patchsets submitted for review, reviewed by community members.
Knowledge prerequisites: programming knowledge
Nice-to-have knowledge: Python, Django, Selenium/UI Testing
Mentors: Julie Pichon
Glance - adding NoSQL support
Description: Glance is used as metadata repository management tool within OpenStack for server Images. NoSQL can be really useful for DB backend for Glance.
Members of the community already have ideas on how one might want to implement this, therefore the first step will be to reach out to the community to collect and discuss ideas. Glance folks are pretty active on #openstack-glance channel most of the time and would be willing to share their opinions on this or any other project.
Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/glance/+spec/enable-mongo-db
Expected results: Patchsets submitted for review, reviewed by community members.
Knowledge prerequisites: programming knowledge
Nice-to-have knowledge: Python, MongoDB
Mentors: Nikhil Komawar
Neutron - add an extension for port statistics
Description:
Members of the community already have ideas on how one might want to implement this, therefore the first step will be to reach out to the community to collect and discuss ideas. Neutron folks are pretty active on #openstack-neutron channel most of the time and would be willing to share their opinions on this or any other project.
You´ll create an extension for Neutron [1] to be able to expose monitoring data regarding ports (byte or packets transmitted or received). You´ll provide an implementation of the extension using the ML2 framework [2] and openvswitch. This feature will be implemented end to end, from api design to unit testing.
Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/port-statistics
Expected results: Patchsets submitted for review, reviewed by community members.
Knowledge prerequisites: programming knowledge
Nice-to-have knowledge: Python, Openvswitch
Mentors: Rossella Sblendido
Design
Persona research and design for Horizon UI
Description: There has been some initial work done in a few different areas around generating Personas for the Horizon UI. This task/project would allow someone to lead the effort to pull the research together, perhaps perform further end-user interviews or surveys, analyze data, form groups of personas, and put together an initial set of target Horizon personas that we can use during requirements gathering, design phases, and general discussion.
Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-ux/+spec/horizon-personas
Expected results: Initial set of Personas for people to use during requirements gathering, design phases, and general discussion of our target Horizon users.
Knowledge prerequisites: basic interviewing skills, willingness to talk with a lot of new people, readiness to listen and report back findings
Nice-to-have knowledge: User Experience Design basics
Mentors: Liz Blanchard, Ju Lim
Redesign for the Object Storage -> Containers section in Horizon
Description:
Currently, there is a section under the Object Storage panel that allows users (e.g. Consumers and/or Project Administrators) to Create, Delete, and Edit Containers. It would be great to do a little bit of research into identifying the use cases around these features and then proposing a redesign of these features based on the findings. This will include learning some basic Usability best practices and applying them to a design. The design would be done in wireframe format, so it could be done in any tool that allows for this. The design would be reviewed on the UX AskBot site, a new blueprint would need to be created as well. This would take a new designer through the process that currently exists for proposing an updated design to a current feature in Horizon.
Related blueprint: N/A (To be created by intern as part of process)
Expected results: Redesign of "Containers" section in Object Storage panel proposed and approved by Horizon community.
Knowledge prerequisites: basic sketching or wireframing skills
Nice-to-have knowledge: User Experience Design basics
Mentors: Liz Blanchard, Ju Lim
Horizon Concept Review and Usability Testing
Description: There has been very little work done around Horizon UI concept reviews and usability testing. This task/project would allow someone to lead the effort to put together a test plan, identify customers as test participants, conduct (contextual) inquiry / interview, survey users, analyze data to share results / findings with the community findings regarding how current production OpenStack users are using the software, their use cases, and whether the Horizon UI meets their needs. Along the way, you may identify areas of improvement, concepts that need further refinement, and new use cases or opportunities that have not yet been addressed.
Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-ux/+spec/ux-users-community-testing
Expected results: (1) Identify a community of users willing to participate in Horizon UI usability testing and participate in various OpenStack concept reviews. (2) Share usability test findings with the community that will be used for design and general Horizon discussions.
Knowledge prerequisites: usability testing skills, basic interviewing skills, willingness to talk with a lot of new people, readiness to listen and report back findings, ability to analyze data to find patterns.
Nice-to-have knowledge: User Experience Design and/or User Research basics
Mentors: Ju Lim, Liz Blanchard
