[GSOC] Handshake

Hello lovely people, hope you are all well! I'm looking to contribute to libvirt during the upcoming GSOC 2024, specifically to the XML fuzzing idea. Little about me: I'm a recent graduate of Cairo University, Department of Computer Engineering. I'm extremely interested in all things involving programming languages, compilers, interpreters or metaprogramming and systems programming in general. I'm currently teaching part-time at my university. After reading your GSOC FAQ and the 4 libvirt-specific requirements listed, I have compiled libvirt on my machine and the tests do seem to have run successfully if ninja's terminal logging is to be trusted. After (obviously!) subscribing to your development list, it now remains to have an upstream contribution and the interview. 1- Regarding the interview, the FAQ says it will probably be conducted over IRC. I haven't used IRC before, currently reading up on how to use it. Any specific advice/irc client/guide regarding that ? Also, will the interview be conducted before the acceptance of the contribution or after it ? 2- Regarding the required contribution, I see here https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/issues?label_name=bitesizedtask 2 issues that look interesting, the one about converting the json parsing library and another about switching the code to use Glib's autofree instead of malloc and free. The json one looks more interesting (and difficult!) but it looks like it was already assigned to someone else (and also that it's a whole other GSOC project ?). So is the autofree one suitable as a good first issue for me? That's all. Sorry for any inconvenience and many thanks for your time. Regards, Mostafa