[Scaffoldhunter-devel] [GSoC 2014] Intoduction

[i M. <ti...@ho...>]

Hello,
My name is Tim Weidner. I'm a student of Computer Science at the University of Ulm (Germany), currently pursuing my bachelors degree. While looking for a suitable engagement in GSoC I stumbled upon ScaffoldHunter and was in love with the beautiful Java program. In the past I thought of Java as slow and ugly, but that's necessarily not the case as it seems. So I want to get involved in this, subscribed to the mailing lists, went through the GenericView/TreeMap packages, the tutorial and also the provided papers.Although it is still overwhelming to see the massive wall of code as an unexperienced (real world) developer, I think it's certainly not impossible for me with the right guidance. Sadly my work experience outside of university (Java) projects is non-existent, but that's why I'm here.As you might have guessed I'm particularly interested in the implementation of heatmaps. Coming from a bioinformatics background, I cannot say much about chemistry but certainly know what a dendrogram is or how clustering algorithms work. After reading the MPX Paper, I come to the conclusion that heatmaps in this context mainly differ by the fact that they allow more than two-way clustering, is that correct?
Two other meaningful questions:
Is there any special task we have to complete in order to be accepted as GSoC applicants?
Why doesn't ScaffoldHunter utilize Git/Mercurial?
Digging into Piccolo2D now,feel free to ask me anything :)
Regards,Tim