Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

cacm.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 179 posts

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#61

Post by oytis »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #60
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is already a significant amount of it; and that's good. My opinion is that academia should not waste too much time preparing people for a job, but give them as much as possible of precisely the kind of problem solving skills that they won't be picking up on the job.

How can you learn to solve engineering problems without doing engineering? University teaches you about theoretical computer science, not problem solving skills for software engineering. No university teaches you about how to assess an engineering problem, how to break it down, how to create at timeline/estimate, etc.

> No university teaches you about how to assess an engineering problem, how to break it down, how to create at timeline/estimate, etc.

Many of them do actually. Obviously you will not be very good at it before having actual work experience, but it is useful to be open to thinking about it.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#62

Post by chalst »

A lot seems to turn on exactly what kind of open-source project might be used. The author refers to a letter from 15 years ago:

> Future CS Course Already Here In his “President’s Letter” (“Computer Science Education in the 21st Century,” Mar. 2006)

> David A. Patterson suggested creating a course that would leverage high-quality examples from open source software. I’ve been teaching just such a course for the past three years at the Athens University of Economics and Business. The lectures (see www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ismr/)focus on how students comprehend, evaluate, maintain, and enhance large software systems.Students’ grades are derived by assessing their contribution to an open source project they select based on their own interests. The course’s theoretical background is covered in my books Code Reading and Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective (Addison-Wesley, 2003 and 2006, respectively); all the examples I use come exclu-sively from large existing opensource projects. Two of the soft-ware systems I use for drawing examples are the very ones Patterson mentioned in his column:BSD Unix and PostgreSQL.

> I also use the source code of other systems (such as the Java HSQLDB database engine, the Apache Tom-cat application server, the ACE networking framework, the X Window System, ArgoUML, and Perl) to cover subjects like object-oriented programming in Java and C++, networking, language processors, and graphics.

> Diomidis Spinellis. Athens, Greece.

Communications of the ACM, 49(8), August 2006, pp 11–13. doi:10.1145/1145287.1145299 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1145287.1145299

I don't know the 'Athens University of Economics and Business', but it sounds pretty vocationally oriented to me.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#63

Post by glangdale »

oytis wrote: post #8

> in the 21st century programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did. Universities are not vocational education facilities though. Time a student has in university is better spent on getting deeper understanding of things that are hard to pick up in the workplace, and…

I agree. Further, to the extent that students need to learn "Jira-fu, unit testing, peer reviewing, etc." they can learn this in a controlled environment run by the university.

The problem with trying to have all students (not "some exceptional students", but all students) going out and engaging with the real world of open source is that the degree of difficulty in navigating different open source projects is enormous and may not be obvious to the professors nor students ahead of time.

Some students may wind up working on projects with nice guard-rails, helpful communities, plenty of up-to-date high-quality documents for how to contribute. Others... maybe not so much. It will be very hard to judge whether students have been successful and to compare their performances against each other (a perennial chore of academia, but one that people seem to insist on: grades!).

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#64

Post by marcus_holmes »

siva7 wrote: post #21
oytis wrote: post #8

> in the 21st century programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did. Universities are not vocational education facilities though. Time a student has in university is better spent on getting deeper understanding of things that are hard to pick up in the workplace, and…

Universities are of course nowadays also vocational education facilities (with a strong track on research). I'm always flabbergasted where this misconception about higher education as some form of romantic ivory tower comes from.

Because universities see themselves as research institutions - that's where they get their prestige and status from, not from teaching. Teaching people to code doesn't do anything for them (except pay some of the bills).

The whole bachelors -> masters -> PhD process is just winnowing out the unworthy and stupid. The ones who survive this and go on to publish papers are the entire point.

The entire IT industry is a byproduct of CS research, not the point of it. The point of it is to explore the intellectual realms enabled by the mathematics of CS.

Reducing this to "university CS departments exist to train programmers" is ridiculous.

Slightly tongue in cheek, but not too much.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#66

Post by [deleted] »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #30

How can I leave this industry. I've been a web dev since graduating in 2007 and no longer have the desire to compete in an oversaturated, increasingly complex industry. If i have to work for someone else, I'd rather take the path of least resistance. Try to be on easy mode. That's just me. I lost my passion for all of it. We recently started hiring for a junior front end, and I had to review the test results. 95% of…

[deleted]

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #64
siva7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are of course nowadays also vocational education facilities (with a strong track on research). I'm always flabbergasted where this misconception about higher education as some form of romantic ivory tower comes from.

Because universities see themselves as research institutions - that's where they get their prestige and status from, not from teaching. Teaching people to code doesn't do anything for them (except pay some of the bills). The whole bachelors -> masters -> PhD process is just winnowing out the unworthy and stupid. The ones who survive this and go on to publish papers are the entire point. The entire IT industry is a by…

> Because universities see themselves as research institutions - that's where they get their prestige and status from

Also, most of their money.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#68

Post by aritmo »

piokoch wrote: post #10

I only hope it would not be some kind of common sentiment "you have to contribute to an open source project to earn better grade or get a job". It will end up as Huawei Linux kernel "contributions" - a lot of pointless commits that are only a pain for project maintainers and bring zero actual value.

Why disparage China when you have Hacktoberfest?

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#69

Post by AussieWog93 »

oytis wrote: post #8

> in the 21st century programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did. Universities are not vocational education facilities though. Time a student has in university is better spent on getting deeper understanding of things that are hard to pick up in the workplace, and…

>Time a student has in university is better spent on getting deeper understanding of things that are hard to pick up in the workplace, and that give you a better picture of the industry in the long run

That may be the case, but the job market for grads is fierce (or at least was when I went through the gauntlet 5 years ago) and projects absolutely help students stand out.

>burdening open source maintainers with training students in these issues is hardly a good idea

I've had exactly this happen - a random Argentinian student I met on Reddit modernised a whole lot of my project's codebase and we went through the review process together etc. "Burden" is not the word I'd use; it was a positive experience without a doubt and the contributions he made were generally of a high standard.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#70

Post by jcelerier »

em-bee wrote: post #40
pjc50 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universities are not vocational education facilities though I see this argument a lot; universities would like to not be vocational education, but unavoidably they are. Certainly for all the older class of professional job: engineer, actuary, lawyer, doctor. For those you absolutely have to go to university to even begin your vocational training. Programming is different in that the degree is less of a hard require…

france has a lot of engineering schools, which are not universities. autoconf is one famous project from a french engineering school. likewise germany has the fachhochschule, which is also expressly for vocational education at university level. i would not call those equivalents to lamda school, mostly because lambda school is private profit oriented startup, whereas french and german engineering schools are establis…

VLC is another such project coming from a french engineering school AFAIK.

I do some TA in such schools (ENSEIRB) and every year I make students contribute to OSS, generally by writing small plug-ins to an existing software, it always works fine. Not a lot of them keep going afterwards though.

Post reply on HN