User:MHolloway (WMF)/Professional development goal ideas

Q1 2016-17 ideas

 * Build my own linux distro (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/)
 * This would be useful if it leads to a deeper understanding of Linux and OS internals generally. Not so useful if it becomes essentially a rote exercise in downloading and building stuff.  Hacker news comments seem to generally support the idea it's a valuable exercise but some say it's not worth the pain for most people.
 * The successor course to the Coursera introductory algorithms course I completed last year just started.
 * Extract a general-purpose MediaWiki app for Android from the existing Wikipedia app. (T107042)
 * This would probably not be tough at all to do as a one-off by just taking stuff out of the Wikipedia app.
 * A better and more useful exercise, both for professional development and the resulting product, would be to restructure the Wikipedia app codebase so that it consists of a core Mediawiki module that can be built on its own at any time, and an additional Wikipedia module that contains the WMF/Wikipedia specific features.
 * The downside to this, either way, is that the more specialized goodies you remove from the app, the more it looks like the mobile web just wrapped in an APK for no good reason.
 * If I did do this, it would probably help in designing and building it if I were to...
 * Complete the Gradle course I've been talking about for a few quarters now but never had the heart to commit to.