Thread: Seeking exciting PostgreSQL development opportunities

On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 2:13 PM, Charles Cui <charles.cui1984@gmail.com> wrote:
>    Thanks again for supporting me to pass the GSoC summer project and I
> found that I have a learnt a lot during this project! Although the project
> is completed, I am thinking of contributing to PostgreSQL community in the
> long term. So, the purpose of this email is to seek the exciting project you
> are currently working on or you plan to work on and see whether I am a fit
> for these projects. I should be able to contribute in my part time and I can
> work remotely in China. Please feel free to share your project and let's
> start coding :)

I always have difficulty answering this question. It is a question
that can be personal, at least in my opinion. It may seem like it
should be easy for experienced contributors to offer specific
guidance, but I doubt that it is.

I can offer you my personal opinion on how to go about working on
Postgres as a novice hacker:

What are you interested in? The project that has the greatest chance
of success may be the one that you have the greatest intrinsic
motivation to work on. You are the one that will be doing the work --
nobody else will. I don't mean the project that is the most fun,
though it may be a fun project.

There are large differences in how individual contributors assess how
important a project is to users. You may be able to identify an area
where Postgres is weak from the point of view of a large number of
users -- people expect many things from a database system. It might
even be relatively easy to add an enhancement that satisfies these
users. Don't assume that somebody else would have seen the opportunity
already, so it must not be there. This mentality can be very
counter-productive. A long term outlook is absolutely essential.

I also think it's important to know *why* you're doing something.
Ideally, you'll have multiple reasons for working on something, and
not just one. Ideally, you'll be able to pick a project that could
easily lead to another project, and then another. A "virtuous circle"
can be created.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan