michaeldehaan.net

Google Summer of Code is a neat program. If you’re a student. If you have a whole Summer. If you have an actual job, you probably don’t have the time to contribute or even to learn how to start contributing to some projects — even though you’d really like to, you don’t know where to get started. There’s always a barrier to entry, even if it’s a small one, and often folks are too busy to help get folks over that barrier. I know I’m busy lately, and I am not always able to implement the ideas people have. Rather than saying “patches accepted!” and leaving things undone, I was thinking, why can’t we as developers and project leaders, instead of saying “patches accepted!” actually teach people to write patches and features, so that we then get a few more contributors for life? Isn’t the whole point of writing simple software so that anyone can come to the table and hack on it? Absolutely. So let’s help folks do that. A little investment goes a long way.

So, here goes: I’m going to be trying something new. If you are interested in datacenter automation around Cobbler, from July 6th to July 10th, I’m going to offering myself up to teach folks how to hack on the Cobbler project. No other distractions.

I expect that folks have at least some experience with something on the likes of Bash scripting (or even Basic, I don’t care) — basic learning Python questions, what files do I need to edit, how does git work, how is this architecture put together, etc, questions are all going to be fair game. During this time, the idea is to help people learn how to implement features that ordinarily they might not know how to implement. Hands on.

If it’s a successful experiment, I think this could be a great thing for a lot of projects to try — for really, our strength in FOSS is in our diversity of ideas, our breadth in various capabilities that can’t be consolidated all in one person. In open source, everyone is welcome at the table. It is time to pull up more chairs.

If you are interested in this, what to do to get ready:

First, think of an idea you would like to add to Cobbler. Download the code, Get a Fedora account here, See if your idea for a feature or bugfix is listed in Trac, or add it if it is not, and assign the item to yourself, Sign up for the mailing list, and join #cobbler-devel on irc.freenode.net.

When July 6th comes around, those taking part are my #1 priority all week. Not features I’m working on, not the usual user help on IRC/email (which I’ll do off hours), just you and your idea and helping you get it implemented (not me writing it for you, you learning how tot write it!). The idea is all about teaching users who might not ordinarily contribute to a project because they don’t know how exactly how to do so.

Open Source software is largely about sharing ideas and collaborating to build technology. It is bigger and better with more people, more ideas, and more perspectives coming to the table. We all should find ways to pull up more chairs. Resources are only as limited as they desire to be, and should in theory be scalable in huge ways. The challenge any community faces is making that scale as much as possible — this is the black art. Simple modular software is step 1. Education, I think, is step 2. I’ll write more about this after we’re done with the Hack Week.

I know this is basically just a sysadmin project (sorry, this is the codebase that I’ve got upon which we hinge our experiment), and maybe not the ideal base for everyone to pile on, but if this works, I hope to see more projects following suit. We have a lot of users in Fedora. Imagine all that we can do to convert more developers. People start by contributing patches, then they grow to write their own projects. The future is so bright we’ve got to wear shades. Accelerate the singularity folks. Accelerate it.