Getting involved

[Sophie Sperner]

Dear community,

Let me ask here please. I'm a first-year PhD student in Ireland. My
background is in mathematics, though I'm going to stream my career
into programming with Python, Java and C++ languages. I have some good
experience with C++ what allowed me to have a presentation in Europe
quite recently - I participated in an open-source cloud computing
project. I used Python a little bit in that project, though mainly it
was in C++.

I was reading a beautiful "Thinking in Java" book this summer while
looking for a PhD. I have no experience in Java. I learned some Python
while writing a website based on Django. I know some other auxiliary
tools like Git, SVN, SQL, XML and javascript.

Now...

I really want to find a job, but there is no interesting job on the
market or my skills are not enough to get one. So I really want to
learn Python and Java in parallel by reading books (have already
chosen proper ones), searching google (got used to it) and most
important writing code and thus I think to participate in an open-
source project again.

Could you please list me 2 or 3 projects in Python and/or Java which
are currently active (vivid) and useful?

Thank you.