Hi Megan, hi Erik, glad to have you working with us this summer!

First a bit of a project introduction is probably in order. Stem is a python controller library for tor. Like its predecessor, TorCtl [1], it uses tor's control protocol [2] to help developers program against the tor process, enabling them to build things similar to Vidalia [3] and arm [4].

Most of stem's core bits (process communication with tor, asynchronous message handling, etc) are done, and development is now focused on the wrapper around that which makes for a developer-friendly API. There's still a ton of work to do, and currently three people hacking on the project...

* Damian (project author) * Ravi (GSoC student) - Working on a grab bag of stem related tasks including the general controller, some descriptor parsing, and migrating the first client (arm) over to stem. [5] * Beck (volunteer) - Doing a deep dive into the crypto behind descriptor validation. [6][7]

Karsten, Ravi, and I just updated stem's development wiki yesterday so it should be reasonably up to date... https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/stem

Codebase: https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git

So my first question is, what are your interests? It seems that most people either lean toward research or application, and we have a lot to do that fit both.

To start with please take a look at the wiki's bugs and improvements sections. Those are bite sized tasks that should be reasonably small and start immersing you in the codebase. After that, both the metrics-lib tasks (more research focused) or porting the tor interpretor (more application) would be great projects.

Here's a brief overview of the communication channels we use:

- #tor and #tor-dev on OFTC: we're most active on irc, so I definitely suggest being in these channels [8]

- tor-talk [9] is our user mailing list which is somewhat high volume.

- tor-dev [10] is a lower volume development list and a good place for technical discussions. Unless something is private please include this in your email cc.

Hope this helps, and again - welcome! -Damian

PS. I highly suggest introducing yourself to this list. The more you're involved with the tor community the better, and we'd be thrilled if you stuck around after your project to become core tor developers!

[1] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#project-torctl [2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/control-spec.txt [3] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#project-vidalia [4] http://www.atagar.com/arm/ [5] https://www.torproject.org/about/gsocProposal/gsoc12-proposal-stemImprovemen... [6] https://trac.torproject.org/5810 [7] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-May/003510.html [8] https://www.torproject.org/about/contact.html.en#irc [9] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk/ [10] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev/