Ben zen

I'm quite used to IRC/mailing lists and wiki/Mediawiki/etc. (Apparently not Mediawiki so much, but I know my way around it for the most part.) I'm not as up to speed on source code management as I've not worked on a large project before, but I think I can catch on fairly quickly. I've used make and gcc before; having worked mostly in Java I've not needed them too regularly, so I'll need to learn some more, but again, I don't think that will take much. Also, since my project is aimed at writing an Octave-Forge package, I don't think these tools will be as necessary. As for staying in the community, if I feel like I can contribute, I'll stay active if you don't chase me away with pitchforks! Otherwise I'll hang around, but I might not be super-active.

I first heard about Octave waaay back in High School, when I was looking for something a little more powerful than my calculator to do a lot of matrix problems, and didn't want to buy an expensive software package. I've not been involved in the project before now, partially because I didn't feel I had anything to contribute until now. I've seen Octave mentioned in places like ##math on Freenode (was #math until recently), so I think there's some effective advertising already happening. As for quick answers, it took me a moment to determine where the application page data was actually hiding (as I wave around my ignorance of the more subtle features of the MediaWiki system) since the [[Student_Application_Template_2012|student application]] included a call to the template, nothing more. On the other hand, I learned something about MediaWiki in the thirty seconds it took me to figure out the solution!