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Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
91–100 of 179 posts
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#92In my opinion, the Hacktoberfest controversy last year points at the opposite being true. A computing student is not likely to understand the processes and etiquette of the industry. Open Source projects are not toy projects, billions of $ depend on them running smoothly, and I don't think we should expect someone with no industry experience to have assimilated this fact.
Lately I have been observing an endemic problem in the Python world, this problem is that the demand for open source project maintainers is higher than the number of people that want and can maintain open source projects. This leads to cool pieces of software being abandoned after a few years. Maybe the focus should be on solving that problem.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even that is 100% sure. You still need to vet the tests. Documentation is also a good thing to add. The perspective of a fresh user is precious and only lasts so long. Documenting the onboarding process can point to documentation shortcomings that are great to fix.
Commenting on documentation and maybe updating is a good point yes. Onboarding docs can get quite stale. Both doc and test have the advantage of not breaking stuff for other users. Sort of, adding huge tests that make CI timeout or bogus doc is not ideal either. But at least both of those are on the starting path of understanding how the project works, which is a pre-requisite for contributing code.
The one thing we don’t need is teachers to dump students on us to assess their abilities by reviewing PRs.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#94> 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.
This depends on your country. In many countries they are.
Also even in countries were the undergrad system is intended to be broader (e.g. US, Canada), politicians typically discuss it as if it were a job training system.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#95Students can make very big and positive contributions to Open Source and contributing to Open Source with a primary goal of benefiting the project is great. But if this is just a secondary goal, then I would politely say "no" to the offer.
If, however, the university would provide resources to ensure that contributions have the required quality and can assist maintainers with the added load, then it would possibly work! I could imagine that a direct link between maintainer(s) and university supervisor/lecturer would work well, so that maintainers can express their needs and priorities to someone who can handle/govern them in front of the learners.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#96Earlier 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.
Playing devil's side: It's dependent on the job, but anyway they can learn this stuff not only during work hours (learning hours or whatever it is called), but also in their free time It's not like only Academia is authorized to teach DS&A, FP
I mean, yes, you can learn these things on your own, but that's by no means an excuse that higher education should focus less on these aspects.
It shouldn't be the default that university teaches you job skills and leaves you to learn the theory on your own.
Honestly, I really don't see a solid case there.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#97Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#98> 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 the problem is that this doesn't matter, because all the industry expects is programming skills, and while any fachhochschule, french engineering school, or even a US community college could provide those programming skills, the university provides them too, and as a result, a university graduate has more job options than a graduate from those other schools.…
The industry expects programming skills, yes. But a lot of the missing semester skills (how to use git, how to write unit tests, how to write a design doc) are very easily taught on the job. Topics like data structures and operating systems are more difficult to teach on the job because they do not come up every day and therefore do not get repeated practice.
I don't think it is unreasonable to have alternatives to the university education model. But I also think that employers would be very foolish to demand that junior engineers have prior experience with git.
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#99As a relatively inexperienced undergrad with some basic knowledge in C and python, can anyone recommend how I should go about to start getting involved in any project? I dunno how to work alongside anyone on anything useful or "real" and all I have done is making line drawing algorithms, sorting algorithms, avl trees and some basic games and simulations in python. I am kind of interested in lisp and functional programming but no experience with it..
Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
#100Earlier 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.
> How can you learn to solve engineering problems without doing engineering?
Yet that's the opposite of what the article focuses on: mostly soft-skills and all the fluff that surrounds the actual engineering work, like dealing with project maintainers, figuring out github, etc.
This approach, when taken to the extreme*, would lead people to be very good at explaining why they opened a certain pull request, but couldn't even merge it on the CLI because that's not something you need for a FOSS contribution.
* note this part