[hnwh]

How can you leverage all of us really good programmers with tons of time, who are dying to work on something "important" and meaningful?

[michaelhoffman]

If you want to improve the software engineering quality of bioinformatics software, then find an open source project you are interested in, and offer to submit patches to improve really unsexy but important stuff for bioinformatics user experience. Things like documentation, deployment, user interface, and testing. Some of these things require little domain knowledge but no one wants to do them.

Edited to add: some projects might even have a bug tracker that will already have problems you can tackle.

[kolinko]

Where to start? Any list of this projects?

I don't do programming for fun, but I'll be visiting a local university soon, and could share this with students.

[michaelhoffman]

Our Genomedata[1] storage format/API should be readily comprehensible, and has a Google Code tracker:

[1] http://noble.gs.washington.edu/proj/genomedata/

[2] http://code.google.com/p/genomedata/issues/list

[artmageddon]

Got any examples?

[michaelhoffman]

See other response above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5124490

[artmageddon]

Thank you!!