Outreach Program for Women

Libav participated in the summer edition of the OPW. We had three interns Alexandra, Katerina and Nidhi.

Projects

The three interns had different starting skills so the projects picked had a different breadth and scope.

Small tasks

Everybody has to start from a simple task and they did as well. Polishing crufty code is one of the best ways to start learning how it works. In the Libav case we have plenty of spots that require extra care and usually hidden bugs get uncovered that way.

Not so small tasks

Katerina decided to do something radical from the start and she tried to use coccinelle to fix a whole class of issues in a single swoop: I’m still reviewing the patch and splitting it in smaller chunks to single out false positives. The patch itself gave some spotlights to some of the most horrible code still lingering around, hopefully we’ll get to fix those part soon =)

Demuxer rewrite

Alexandra and Katerina showed interest in specific targeted tasks, they honed their skills by reimplementing the ASF and RealMedia demuxer respectively. They even participated in the first Libav Summer Sprint in Torino and worked together with their mentor in person.

They had to dig through the specifications and figure out why some sample files behave in unexpected ways.

They are almost there and hopefully our next release will see brand new demuxers!

Jack of all trades

Libav has plenty of crufty code that requires some love, plenty of overly long files, lots of small quirks that should be ironed out. Libav (as any other big projects) needs some refactoring here and there.

Nidhi’s task was mainly focused on fixing some of those and help others doing the same by testing patches. She had to juggle many different tasks and learn about many different parts of the codebase and the toolset we use.

It might not sound as extreme as replacing ancient code with something completely new (and make it work at least as well as the former), but both kind of tasks are fundamental to keep the project healthy!

In closing

All the projects have been a success and we are looking forward to see further contributions from our new members!