Proposal for Disco idea #1 Disco Streaming

[James Eagle]

Hi,

My name is James, I'm a second year Software Engineering and Management student at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. I'm sorry for how late this initial communication is, I initially heard about GSOC on the weekend and spent the last two days convinced I am probably not experienced enough to take part this year. But here I am, nothing ventured, nothing gained right? 

I am not a life long coder so as a second year student I have just that many years experience. I haven't contributed to an Open Source project yet, it is a pretty intimidating thing to attempt when you are still at a fairly early stage so I'm hoping that the GSOC with the mentoring and supportive communities will be a good introduction (if something of a trial by fire in terms of project scope).

I have had some experience in Erlang in a distributed context (my 3rd semester major project) and I would really like to further explore that area so I am hoping to take part in the Disco project. Idea #1 appealed most to me as I (think) I grasped just how useful it would be as a possible feature, the aforementioned uni project involved the twitter streaming API and I can straight away see the usefulness of being able to stream data into a distributed computing tool. I have read (if not absorbed) the attached paper and looked at some of the suggested 3rd party solutions to try and further grasp the idea. My draft proposal has a bit more detail on my understanding of the idea and what I think is involved in implementing it.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hd7ZCKrO2_JbSrUXO_iwm9ONiwiLADOHOhtXwG5kFwM/edit?usp=sharing

I would love any feedback or suggestions, even if it's advice to maybe come back next year :)

I haven't attempted to work on any issues yet on the Disco project and I can't anticipate being able to get anything concrete in the next two days (uni deadlines) so I hope that I can get some advice on some good practice issues between the proposal deadline and the selection period so that both the mentors and myself can get a better idea of what I can actually achieve over the summer.

/ramble

Cheers,

James