171–179 of 179 posts
Skilled students can make some very fine PRs when they are working on something that intrigues them enough that they get very immersed in the code. But not all students in training are skilled, and making code contribution a required part of a program seems certain to reduce the average quality of PRs. The problem is that somebody has to review those PRs, and often interact with the proposer for quite a while, to tea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like another argument for "Private copying levy" but for open source developers that create useful libraries. So maintainers would be receiving some kind of stipend and not abandon projects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I mean, Github Sponsors has been a thing for a while, but it doesn't seem to be too popular.
With that levy you should get it from the government tax free and with minimal hassle.
Oh wait just realized why it would not work...
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
but there's already significant amount of ds, algos, OOP in academia, also I don't see how those are "scientific types of skills" I do also wonder what people *precisely* mean when they talk about "data structures and algorithms" in context of academia You talk from perspective of competitive programming?
> mean when they talk about "data structures and algorithms" in context of academia Have you taken a senior/graduate level DS&A class before? Part of it is about proving the correctness of the algorithms and making guarantees about the DSs. It's not about competitive programing or acing leetcode interviews at all. In the class I took we didn't write hardly any actual code.
I've taken DS&A class during CS Eng. degree, it was bullshit about sorting algorithms while using 1-indexed arrays in languages that used 0-indexed approach, nothing fancy.
I wish it were about TLA+ and formal proving
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s abusive?
Forcing people to work for corporations for free as part of their education. I paid my way through university with co-op jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, Github Sponsors has been a thing for a while, but it doesn't seem to be too popular.
Might be that because you still have to deal with the hassle of declaring income from that and loads of other small moving parts. With that levy you should get it from the government tax free and with minimal hassle. Oh wait just realized why it would not work...
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…
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 or…
(I had only heard of the city in Italy and the type of sausage so was confused, this was the most likely sounding thing that came up on a search)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 enormou…
And also, open source maintainers are not free teachers. If university expects them to teach students, university first should ask open source maintainers whether they are ok with it. Otherwise it creates absurd situation in which highly expensive institution is demanding that part of teaching is done by third parties for free.
That said, I would love if the professor would reach out so I could recommend specific issues and let them know whether I'll be particularly available for more in depth PR mentoring this semester.
It does seem like they're accounting for the burden put on maintainers as well:
> Getting a contribution accepted is not a prerequisite for passing the assignment
> a small-scale contribution is the only realistic goal. The key to making the course's assignment work, is to have what are, on first sight, very low ambitions for the students' contributions.
I had an awesome professor for a QA course at SFU, who for a project had people choose some piece of open source software at their leisure and work on something substantial for it related to QA. (Adding a different test suite, improving the existing tests, writing some documentation, etc). There was no pressure to actually send the work upstream, but people doing so made him happy. I thought that was a good model, wh…