Cassandra is participating in the Google Summer of Code, which opened for proposal submission today . Cassandra is part of the Apache Software Foundation, which has its own page of guidelines up for students and mentors. We have a good mix of project ideas involving both core and non-core areas, from straightforward code bashing to some pretty tricky stuff, depending on your appetite. Core tickets aren't necessarily harder than non-core, but they will require reading and understanding more existing code. Non-core Create a web ui for cassandra : we have a (fairly minimal) command line interface, but a web gui is more user-friendly. There is the beginnings of such a beast in the Cassandra source tree at contrib/cassandra_browser [pretty ugly Python code] and a gtk-based one at http://github.com/driftx/chiton [also Python, less ugly]. First-class commandline interface : if you prefer to kick things old-school, improving the cli itself would also be welcome. Create a Cassandr...