User:Eg123

A: An introduction

I am Eugenio Gianniti, a student from Italy. I am pursuing my master's degree in Mathematical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Polytechnic University of Milan), currently attending my last year.
- I can speak fluently English and Italian
- I have a background in Mathematics and Electronics. I have done courses on Linear Algebra, Numerical Analysis, PDEs, Scientific Computation and Solid State Electronics
I am interested in coding, but have little experience in such a big cooperative project. I find the GSoC an amazing opportunity to learn how to interface to other developers in a fruitful fashion
- I have no previous experience in the GSoC
I have been using MATLAB during all my studies, so I think that Octave is a valuable alternative and deserves effort. Moreover, my background gives me familiarity with the problems Octave is meant to solve

eg123 is my nick on the Octave IRC channel, bug tracker and wiki. Anyway, in the mailing list and when contributing patches I usually sign with my full name
My time zone is UTC+1:00, but due to DST in the period of GSoC I will be in UTC+2:00. I live in Italy.
I usually code between UTC 08:00 to UTC 18:00

I have been using MATLAB throughout my studies and attended courses in my master's degree about programming in C++. I have no previous experience with OpenGL and Qt
I have some experience in Bash scripting and Python
I currently do not have any experience with development teams, nor with open source projects
I have no previous experience with collaborative projects. Till now I have worked only on small, one-day projects as part of my course of Algorithm and Parallel Computation
I have so far contributed to Octave Forge packages:
- [1] A patch adding functions to the mapping package
- [2] A patch to improve fem-fenics package build system

I am comfortable using the mailing list. I have not been hanging around a lot on IRC, but I do not have problems with it
I do not have a large experience with DVCSs, anyway I have already grasped the basics of Mercurial and of the workflow involved in its use
I am learning Mediawiki, anyway I find it quite intuitive
I am comfortable using make, gcc and gdb. I can use the Autotools, usually exploring the documentation when I need a feature I do not already know how to implement. I know the basics of valgrind and gprof

I first heard about Octave in my studies, but it was always cited just as an alternative to MATLAB and never really suggested
My first problem was related to Octave Forge: I find difficult accessing the development repositories of the various packages, I cannot find a link on their pages

I have a computer installed with Mac OS X and another one with Arch Linux. On the first one I also have a development VM with Ubuntu 13.10 on Virtualbox
I will have access to the internet and my computers with my progressing work all day long
I administrate my computers, so I can install any supported software

I think that criticism is fundamental to learn the best ways to interact with the community and contribute in a meaningful manner
When coding I prefer to get a preliminary general idea and then start to code to have a proof of concept, in order to have a basis on which to build further improvements. If in the process important implementation details emerge, I then like to widely discuss them to understand the better approach

I selected General purpose Finite Element library
- I would continue the work done last year in fem-fenics, with the ultimate goal to have it included in the main FEniCS distribution
I can commit almost completely to the GSoC in the coding period