GHOP students ROCK!

I've been involved in the GHOP project for the last couple of weeks (although not as much as I'd have liked, due to time constraints) and I've been constantly amazed by the high quality of the work produced by the GHOP participants, who, let's not forget, are all still in high-school! I think all mentors were surprised at the speed with which the tasks were claimed, and at the level of proficiency showed by the students.

This bodes very well for Open Source in general, and for the Python community in particular. I hope that the students will continue to contribute to existing Python projects and start their own.

Here are some examples from tasks that I've been involved with:

• Michael Kremer profiled effbot's widefinder implementations and discussed the results superbly
  
• Eren Turkay wrote unit tests for the pydigg module, obtaining almost 90% code coverage; he's currently tackling a 2nd task, writing unit tests for SimpleXMLRPC
• iammisc (not sure what the real name is) is writing an API for interacting with MySpace

Other students have already submitted patches that were accepted and applied to projects such as the stdlib logging module.

If you want to witness all this for yourself, and maybe get some help for your project from some really smart students, send an email with your proposal for tasks to the GHOP discussion list.