Google Summer of Code

[Ibrahim Awwal]

John Bailey wrote:
> Mark Doliner wrote:
>    
>> Hey, we want to participate in Google Summer of Code again this year,
>> right?  Unless I hear lots of people say no, I'll plan on filling out
>> the mentor organization form for us on March 9th (unless someone else
>> particularly wants to be the admin?).  And we should be putting
>> potential ideas up at
>> http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/FutureSOCProjects
>>      
>
> I'd really like to get the native win32 UI project going this year if we have a
> good applicant.  I'm hoping that starting the project will spark interest in the
> Windows-inclined developers out there.

Hi,
I don't really fit most of the qualifications listed on the wiki page 
above, but I'll just throw this out there since I am very interested in 
seeing a native Windows libpurple client, and would like to help with it 
if I can.

I am Ibrahim Awwal, a first year EECS student at UC Berkeley. I consider 
myself a pretty good programmer, and I have strong experience with Java 
and C, and some experience with a host of other languages as well. I 
have good grades; I'm a candidate for joining Tau Beta Pi 
(http://tbp.berkeley.edu ), the national Engineering honor society, and 
Eta Kappa Nu (http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/ ), the national Electrical 
Engineering honor society. I am also, for good or bad, fairly likely to 
stick with the Windows platform for some time, at least for my desktop 
OS. I don't have experience with .Net, but I have made a lot of Java GUI 
applications, and more importantly, I have been able to pick up new 
languages pretty easily and I think I could learn .Net well enough to 
work on this project. I do have some experience with the Win32 API, via 
VB6 whatever you think of that, but I will assert that I did not just 
play with the GUI forms creator, I actually created interfaces from 
code. I haven't done anything with Win32 programming since maybe 4 or 5 
years ago though, but again, I think I can pick it up fairly easily. I 
realize that this is a big project, but maybe I can prove myself before 
the SoC actually starts.

So basically, I *think* I can at least make a good start on the Win32 UI 
project, and if no one else volunteers for it I would be interested in 
doing it. Let me know what you think (I'm subscribed to this list of 
course). And finally, thank you for making the only sane IM client that 
I can use without wanting to punch through a wall ;).

-Ibrahim Awwal