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.
 * It would probably help in designing and building this 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.