Learn by Doing: Getting Students into FOSS
Getting students involved with free and open source projects is a great way to provide them with real world development experience while contributing to the common good, but making that first contribution is difficult even for students already confident in their skills. This is where the Google Open Source team’s student programs, Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in, come into play.
We’ve been partnering with open source projects for 12 years to provide students with structure, mentorship, and real world experience. Through participation in these programs, students learn how to work on existing codebases, communicate across timezones, run test suites, use version control systems, and ultimately end up making contributions that are nearly professional quality.
In this session I’ll share more information about these programs and other opportunities for students to learn by doing in open source.
We’ve been partnering with open source projects for 12 years to provide students with structure, mentorship, and real world experience. Through participation in these programs, students learn how to work on existing codebases, communicate across timezones, run test suites, use version control systems, and ultimately end up making contributions that are nearly professional quality.
In this session I’ll share more information about these programs and other opportunities for students to learn by doing in open source.
Presented by
Josh Simmons
Josh is a recovering web developer and open source advocate with a penchant for armchair philosophy who has spoken at conferences around the world on community, open source, and web technology. He worked as a freelancer and startup CEO before discovering his love of community work as a meetup organizer and professional community manager.
Now he is a member of the Google Open Source outreach team where he manages the Google Open Source Blog and automates all of the things. Josh also serves as a volunteer CFO and board member for the Open Source Initiative. He uses his copious free time to advise Libraries.io and Utah Open Source on community and outreach.
