... because otherwise the system whereby giant corporations run on software maintained by free labour comes grinding to a halt :P
Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
71–80 of 179 posts
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#72Earlier 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…
The taxpayers want skills education and that's what they are paying for. The ones receiving the taxpayer funds want to promote fringe ideas and revolutionary societies. So this is a typical principal-agent problem -- the universities take public funds and public guarantees and then try to redirect those for their own private agenda.
This seems very shortsighted. The fringe ideas as you call them are the modern ideas in many cases. Companies can equally benefit from these new ideas coming from recent grads.
University is a time to explore new ideas and old ideas at a level of detail that one hopes they can maintain throughout their career, but most likely once one enters a career they are focused on the needs of their employer, which is not necessarily the best for personal advancement or the advancement of software as a whole.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#73I felt the same when I studied Biology, I proposed to the prof to let students write Wikipedia articles, instead of making them write so much text that ended up in a bin. It would mean a meaningful contribution to the world, + a prof was going to check it already anyway, so it would probably result in a good Wikipedia article. They never went for it.
I finished my PhD and am still mostly at a loss for finding notable Wikipedia articles I can contribute to. I'd fear a day when undergrads are writing Wikipedia articles with perverse incentives.
I think it‘d be similar to all these data science bootcamps requiring their students to write articles on medium.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#74> 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…
There's a difference between a vocational school, and a university program which teaches vocationally relevant skills. Many land-grant universities especially, were explicitly founded to teach practical, technical, economically relevant skills in the context of a broader liberal arts.
In that context, it's not surprising that many public universities do see post-college employment metrics (employment rate, median salaries) as an extremely important measuring stick of success. Many of these programs do make efforts to include vocationally-applicable education in the core curriculum, because it helps to keep those numbers up.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#75Earlier 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…
Same applies in Portugal and Spain, actually I think most European countries follow similar models.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#76Any website to see open source project for contributions? I'm willing :)
Debian bugs which are tagged “newcomer” and are also lacking an attached patch: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?exclude=tags%3...
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#77> 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 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…
That is why in Portugal you want the full learning package, CS with enough programming projets, you go into a 5 year degree in an university, certified by the Engineering order.
You want some CS concepts, with emphasis on what is fashionable the work market, you got into a three year degree in a vocational degree.
This changed a bit with Bologna, but the overall process is mostly the same, just now the Enginnering order requires the master degree (which is the old 5 years degree).
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#78Students contributing to open source to get better grades should have a flag on GitHub so project maintainers can easily recognize them and treat their contributions with an extra bit of care. I've been consulted by students (and PhDs) regarding their final project (not strictly IT related) and the song was always the same. The primary objective of that person is to get uni finished. Quality or usefulness of their work is always second place. What counts is the grade they get in the end. I always felt used if not "raped". These days, I turn all students down.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#79I think it is very reasonable idea, but time's gonna show how it'll affect maintainers when majority of schools start doing it >The most common problems faced by the students over their assignment are the inability to build the project sounds like somebody tried to build llvm
Many open source projects are hard to build, especially C/C++ ones because these languages don't have a standarized package manager and a proper package ecosystem. C/C++ projects often use Makefiles which rely on bash commands. If you're on Windows, good luck. Sometimes you get lucky and there's a CMake file which can create a Visual Studio solution for you.
With languages like Rust, D or any webdev project it's much easier, because you can go "cargo build" and it will autodownload dependencies and build everything, no matter the OS.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#80How would this work? How many project maintainers would sign on for this?
"Hey, can you merge this PR? I'll fail if you don't review and merge this by tomorrow morning. I'm sorry I left it until the last minute but I had a bunch of work do to in another class and couldn't get to it until today."
"Hey, I ran everything through flake and black and spent the past 72 hours getting my test coverage (and the coverage of the rest of the project) to 100%. /Now/ will you approve this PR?"
"Hey, you stopped responding for the past week, are you on vacation? Is there any chance of approving this PR by Friday?"