The class is into its third week already but I have neglected to post about week 2. Better late than never.

The focus of the second week was to become acclimated to Internet Relay Chat. I started using IRC prior to the start of this course so I already knew the essential commands. Our training exercise was to connect to irc.freenode.net, choose a nickname, and join the #teachingopensource channel. Once in the channel, we had to communicate with a partner in the channel (and only in the channel! No talking allowed.) in order to give information that they could use to edit our user page on the Teaching Open Source wiki. It was very entertaining to see the class of ~25 students all trying to talk to one another in the channel. I was pleased that I was able to get several people in the class to use irssi as their IRC client, because it rocks.

Outside of class we had to research 2 FOSS projects that the class could potentially work on for the semester. I researched and wrote about VLC media player and LibreOffice. I made sure to choose applications that mere mortals (people who aren’t necessarily tech saavy) use and could benefit from our work. I also made sure that whatever I chose was cross-platform and not restricted on one OS. Both VLC and LibreOffice are big projects that have a large user base and they had documents specifically targetting and helping new developers. Both projects seem like they would have members of the community that would be willing to assist us and help us get acclimated to the codebase. Doing this research taught me how to check to see if a community has low entry barriers. Some projects have no information about how newcomers can help the project. Other projects want help but not enough documentation to get off the ground quickly.

From the blog Dave Thompson » WSU CS by davexunit and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This is my first post on this shiny new blog for CS-401!

I have been excited for this course for quite some time. I am a very big (and vocal) advocate of FOSS, but I have had very little experience actually participating in FOSS projects (aside from a couple of bug reports). I have found trying to get into a pre-existing project to be quite daunting. A few months back I took a look at the xbmc source code because I wanted to implement a feature but I did not have the time nor the patience to sift through the massive amount of code. My course goal will be to actually overcome this hurdle and offer serious contributions to a FOSS project.

I’m not much of a blogger. I’m one of those people that make a few posts and then completely stop and abandon the blog. Since blogging is a course requirement, I will be forced to be a good blogger, at least for a few months.

I am looking forward to putting all of my collective software development knowledge to use. I already know how to use version control systems, mainly git, but I am excited that is finally being formally taught in a course. I already use IRC but I’m glad that the entire class will become aquainted with its glory. I have some experience with editing Wikis because I occassionally write documentation at work. Planets are a new-ish term for me. I recognized the term but did not know that they were an aggregation of community blog posts.

Working in groups is not something I usually do. I’m more of the “lone wolf” character, but a cooperative group will accomplish much more than a single person. That said, I will try my best to work effectively in a group. I worked with a team of two others to make Nonagon last year and that worked out very well.

I am pleased with the “Teaching Open Source” book so far. It did a very good job of covering the basics of what open source is and why programmers like us should care about it. I found a few small typos that I should probably submit corrections for at some point.

From the blog Dave Thompson » WSU CS by davexunit and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.