Interested in GSOC - some advice?

[Jonathon McDaniels]

Hello freebsd-hackers mailing list!

I'm a student at VCU currently enrolled as an information systems major 
with a CS minor - I'm currently a junior but I've not been able to work 
on my minor courses - to be honest.

I've been teaching myself C for the past 8 months or so, I'm still at a 
rather rudimentary level, but I am confident I'll be ready to tackle 
some form of GSoC project by the start of the actual project side of 
things. Since there's only a matter of months left, however, what are 
some recommendations for getting to know FreeBSD that would make the 
best usage of my time in these months?

Just so you have an idea of my background - I've been following FreeBSD 
off and on since around 2008 or so. I've been using it as a workstation 
OS for about 1-2 years, and a server OS for about 2-3. I've not 
submitted any diffs or anything yet because of a lack of understanding 
of the finer details of the FreeBSD kernel or userland, or its ports for 
that matter. Still, I've been able to comprehend and rewrite many of the 
BSD CLI tools just to see what does what.

As far as what I have interest in advancing, I have interest in a lot of 
things, but I use FreeBSD because of its exceptional network performance 
and security, and its ports tree.

So, with the registration opening in just a few scant weeks, any advice, 
words of encouragement, protips or whatnot? I'm pretty open-minded in 
regards to what I should focus on - I've mostly used my programming up 
to this point to simply advance farther in my knowledge of the language.

Best Regards,

Jonathon "Johnny" McDaniels