Novice Relations Department

The qualification tasks required of students in order to participate in FFmpeg’s Summer of Code program has finally afforded me the opportunity to create a “Small FFmpeg Tasks” page on the MultimediaWiki. Of course, the small tasks list was originally chartered to qualify students, but it need not be limited to that purpose. As I wrote on the page, it can be used for anyone who needs a good starting point for FFmpeg hacking. Further, it could be used for someone who has been away from the codebase and needs an exercise to motivate re-familiarization.

I have this — perhaps unfounded — vision that there are many lurkers out there, watching the FFmpeg project from a distance, on or off the notoriously abrasive mailing lists, hoping one day to get involved somehow, but not knowing exactly how to break in. The small tasks list is a great place to start. Maybe you don’t feel all that comfortable with what you have seen during your lurkings, perhaps because you can’t figure out what is meant with this whole “top-posting” thing for which n00bs are routinely savaged. If that’s you, you can always email me privately about getting started. I will (probably, depending on the day) be happy to tutor you on the basics for contributing some code. Email address is on the side bar.

4 thoughts on “Novice Relations Department”

  1. Kostya

    Heh, I managed to contribute to FFmpeg without any mailinglist activity at all for half a year. And I remember who did the dirty tasks (like adding necessary changes to makefile and avcodec.h and committing it all) for me ;)

    Thanks, Mike!

  2. Multimedia Mike Post author

    And I would be happy to do it again for other interested contributors. Although, as you learned, there is a threshold where the powers that be desire that the individual contributor participates directly.

  3. Vitor

    I second that encouraging people to contribute to FFmpeg in your blog is useful… I still remember a certain post about RoQ ;-)

  4. Multimedia Mike Post author

    Ah yes, that would be this post. Good memories. You put in a lot of work on that and eventually earned your repository privileges.

    To other lurkers: That’s right! You could be like Kostya or Vitor one day, too. :-)

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