GHOP students/Akash Mehta

I'm from Queensland, Australia, a region with lots of sunshine, bright welcoming beaches and oversized artificial produce.

I'm 15, in my last year of school and very interested in useful IT -- technology that makes our lives easier. I'm a little eccentric -- at school I'm known as the imported watch battery salesman; in my free time I pay offshore programmers to hack away at PHP problems for me because I'm too busy running my free hug campaign; and I'm a great advocate for pet rock rights, "because rocks are people too". I've been involved in open source for about five years, but I've gone into the business side of IT/FOSS recently, trying to encourage FOSS and business to come a little closer together, as well as providing consulting services for a few small businesses interested in open source software. I'm also a technical author, with a couple of published articles and a book in the works.

While I was attending the OSDC conference recently, Leslie from Google was giving a presentation unveiling the GHOP program. The idea of contributing to open source in such a standardised way just made perfect sense -- it was something that FOSS projects really needed to get kids involved. It looked like a really good way to get involved in open source -- I'd tried in the past but without much success, except on a couple of my own projects. One of the Joomla! tasks I noticed, while implying many late nights venturing into complex PHP territory while powered by numerous cups of coffee, looked like a lot of fun :) I was hooked.

I think participating in GHOP has been a fantastic experience, simply because I've done some really interesting things while I've had a lot of support from the community. I've tried to help out with various projects on the past, but there was never anybody to help explain things, to say, "Sure, we're trying to work out how to do this and this, can you help? You can speak to this person from our existing team, who should be able to help you out and you can always come to me if you need guidance with something." In my work with the Joomla project, I've had so much support from the community, it's really made the process of contributing really smooth and enjoyable.

Besides adding more technical tasks that don't require a thorough understanding of Joomla (like my issue 43 -- pure PHP), and encouraging more people to hang around on the IRC channel, don't change a thing, it's perfect :)