Re: Interest in Contributing to FreeBSD

On Tue, 23 Sep 2025 07:53:05 +0300
Islam Imad <islamimad404@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear FreeBSD Team,
> My name is Islam Imad, a computer science student at Suez Canal
> University (Egypt).
> I am very interested in operating systems. I have been learning about
> operating systems and low-level programming, and I want to apply my
> knowledge through open-source contributions.

Hi,

nice to see you here. Welcome aboard!

> I have taken the Operating Systems course from the University of
> Wisconsin and studied Operating Systems: *Three Easy Pieces*. As part
> of this, I implemented several related projects, including a Unix
> shell, an interpreter, a heap memory allocator, and a MapReduce model.

What you wrote shows your are looking for some coding work. Great.
First thing, however, is getting in touch with something. Thus my first
recommendation is installing FreeBSD and trying to use it regularly for
some simple work - you gain some undestanding of the system, its shell,
so you get an idea what you can expect.

> In addition, I actively practice competitive programming—I have
> solved more than 3000 problems across different online judges
> (candidate master on Codeforces) and participated in on-site contests
> such as the Arab and African Collegiate Programming Contests, which
> helped me strengthen my problem-solving and algorithmic thinking
> skills. I would greatly appreciate your guidance on how I can start
> contributing to FreeBSD, and how best to align my skills with ongoing
> projects or future GSoC opportunities.

Hm, this looks like you could help with solving PRs from bugs database,
which would be really great, if you find such task interesting. But
first, read docs, available online on project's page, install FreeBSD,
either on dedicated hardware or in some VM environment, whatever is
available to you, and start testing it. Nothing replaces one's own
experience.

If you encounter some troubles, don't hesitate to ask here or some
other FreeBSD mailing list (maybe freebsd-question for some general
issues and guidance, here for something more involved, at your own
discretion, or other mailing list for more specialised question).

Regards,
Milan

N. B. Jason's mention of debate about basically the same 'issue' at
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-September/005076.html
is great. You can get many ideas from there, I just like to emphasize
importance of own hands on experience with system you are possibly (or
hopefully) going to work on.