Something need doing?

I've been putting off posting anything for a about a week now and I really should start getting into the habit of posting more often, which I will try to do in the coming weeks. I'm not usually a blog type of person, so we'll see how it turns out.

Anyways. Let me try to explain the entire situation.

I am a college student currently attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute majoring in Computer Science. One of the requirements of graduation is that everyone must complete a capstone project in their major field, also known at the school as the Major Qualifying Project, or MQP. Most of these projects occur on-site at the school; however, there are also oppotunties for students to attend off-campus projects at a variety of global project centers. This includes locations such as Limerick Ireland or Silicon Valley. This is what I'm doing. My project, unlike the others, takes place at Sun Microsystems which is really close to the WPI campus, which is awesome. I don't have to pay for travel and I get to stay on campus and hang out with friends and such. Oh, and I also get to work at Sun Microsystems, which is pretty awesome in itself. The project takes place during A term (first quarter, basically) which lasts 7 weeks.

So I guess the next question is, what am I going to be doing, exactly?

There are several teams of students who will work at Sun, but my team and I will be doing work on an ongoing open-source project there called Project Darkstar. It's basically a framework for setting up a server system for running MMO's. You can find a better description from their website. As of right now Sun has this system but they have nothing to really show it off. It justs exists as a repository of source code that only hard-core programmers who are interested in the subject will go and bother to look at. This is where we come in. Our job will be to take this framework and construct some kind of 15-minute out-of-the-box experience that will "wow" developers and show off what the system can do.

This past week was my first week back at school since summer and has been dubbed the "Sun Boot Camp" by my project advisors. We spent the week going over things about Sun as a company, expectations, some code tutorials, project descriptions (which were presented by Sun employees), installing various pieces or required software, and probably several other things that I can't remember.

So that leads me back to the reason for the blog. As the project goes on we as a team will need to brainstorm several ideas and do some research after which will need to be compiled in some kind of report. The blog serves somewhat as a historical record of all our ideas and thoughts so that when we start finalizing the project and start writing the paper, we will have a record of everything that we tried and worked on, what went well and what didn't, etc.

So. This past week was mostly us throwing ideas around and getting mentally prepared for the trip to Sun. I'll spare the project details for the time being. I'm pretty excited and I think that this project has the potential to turn into something really cool. It also looks good on the ol' resume. ;)

Well I think that's it for now - next post will discuss some actual ideas and will start recording the progress of the project. Until then ... I'm out.