After 10 days, on 18th of June, at 7 PM, the 10th edition of the dgplug summer training will start. There are things need to be done before that. We want to have some more documentation explaining the initial pain points. We will also refresh our how to do IRC document. I am hoping to have some videos as the demo for the sessions.

Guest sessions

This year we are reaching out to much more people for guest sessions. You can find many familiar names in the list of people who already agreed. If you think you help us by sharing your experience with a group of new FOSS contributors (they are also new programmers), this can be a good place. All the sessions are over IRC, so it is fully text based. And, we also have a few bots, and a group of volunteers to help you out during the session. The sessions are generally an hour long, but go on more for much longer time, or you can split it into a few different sessions over time. Here is an example AMA session Guido did last year. If you have any particular topic in mind, feel free share your experience with all of us.

The guest sessions will happen over July/August/September. Drop me a note in case you want to join in.

During college days when I started using Linux for the time, one of my favorite past time was to click on every application icon on my computer. By random clicking, I tried to learn the usage of the applications. Once I managed to open a tool called xchat in the similar fashion, but after seeing the big list of servers I was lost. Never managed to find any guide which I could follow. I learned it is for IRC, but nothing more.

Using the first time

I learned a lot of things at foss.in. The 2005 edition was the first conference I ever attended. A fresh graduate from college awes struck by meeting so many people whose names I read on the Internet. It was a super big thing. During the conference, I met Till Adam, a KDE developer who taught me various important things throughout the conference. Things we count as first steps these days, like how to create a patch, how to apply a patch, and how to compile a big application (KDE in this case), etc. After the conference is over, he invited me to have dinner with him, and some friends. When I reached his hotel room he told me to wait while he checked if there was any message for him, and also who else were coming down. I don’t remember which application he was using. While I was waiting, Till asked me if I stay in the same IRC channel. “I don’t know what is IRC” was my reply. Till took his time to explain the basic usage of IRC to me in the hotel room. Before we came down for dinner, I already got a full overview and was eagerly waiting to start using it. There are many funny stories, and great memories from the dinner, but maybe in a later post.

Initial days

Pradeepto founded KDE India during foss.in, and we got an IRC channel to stay and talk to all the new friends we made during the conference. I also found ##linux-india where I managed to meet many other ilug guys whom I talked before only on a mailing list. It was a fun time. After coming back from office, joining IRC was the first thing to do every day. Stay up very late, talk to people, make new friends was part of it. Meanwhile, I also started contributing to Fedora and started staying in all the Fedora channels too. First time saw how meetings can be arranged on IRC. There were too many new things to learn from so many people. I got hooked into Freenode server.

Effects in my life

IRC became an integral part of my life. I stay in touch with most of my friends over IRC, even with many friends who lives nearby :) The Durgapur Linux Users Group became synonyms to #dgplug channel over Freenode server. I landed in few of my previous jobs because of IRC. If I have any question about any new technology, or about a new place I am going to visit, I know I can go to IRC, and ask my friends. I still have many friends whom I never met in real life. I managed to meet more people after I started going out to more conferences. Like I met tatica only after 8 years of IRC chat during Flock 2013, there were too many other Fedora developers whom I met for the first time in a single conference. Same thing happened in PyCon 2013 where I suddenly found Yhg1s aka Thomas Wouters. I don’t know how many times he helped me over IRC before, and there suddenly I met him in the conference. In my current job, most of the meetings happen over IRC only. PSF board meetings also use IRC as a recording medium, and we vote on the agendas in IRC. Sometimes Anwesha complains that I can stay happy in a big city or in a remote village as I only need my IRC connection to work :)

Over the years I met many students who want to start a new Users Group in their college, sometimes it is a Linux Users’ Group, sometimes it is related to any other particular technology. They all have one common question: how to find funding for the group? In this post I am going to talk about what did we do for Durgapur Linux Users Group, and how are we managing currently.

The domain name and the whole back story

Back in 2004 when I started the group, I started a page in Geocities. For the young kids, Geocities was a service from Yahoo! where you can create static HTML pages and was one of the easiest ways to have a website. After a few weeks, I found another service which was providing .cc domains for free. So, we moved to dgplug.cc for few months. Meanwhile, we kept searching for a way to get our own domain name. We found one Indian provider where we could get a domain and some space for around Rs.750 annually. That was the cheapest we managed to find. It may not sound too much money for a year, but in 2004 none of us had that much money. We could not even raise that much money among all the regular participants.

I called my uncle Dr. Abhijit Majumder (Assistant Professor, IIT Bombay), then a Ph.D. student in IIT Kanpur, if he could help me with Rs.1500 (for the first 2 years funding). He generally supported all my crazy ideas before, and he also agreed to help this time. But then the question came how to get the money. Online money transfer was not an option for us. Luckily during the same week, my college senior Dr. Maunendra Sankar De Sarkar (he was an M.Tech student in the same institute as Abhijit) was coming down to Durgapur. He agreed to pass me the money in cash and later collect it from Abhijit after he goes back to Kanpur.

Even after we found the way to fund us for the first time, we got a new problem. To pay the domain register we have to use a credit card or use HDFC’s cheque. I started asking around all of my Computer Science department professors if anyone can help. Finally, with the help of Prof. Baijant we managed to deposit the cheque to the bank.

For the first two years, that was the only point for which we required money. For the meetings, there was no other expenditure. We never provided any food or drinks in the meetings. If anyone wanted to eat anything, they did that after the meetings by paying for themselves. Not having any recurring costs was a huge benefit. I would suggest the same to everyone, try to minimize the costs as much as possible. Though in a big city it is much easier to get sponsorship from different companies or organization for the meetups, remember it is someone’s money. Spend it like it is your own money. Find out what the bare minimum requirements are, and only spend money on those.

How do we currently fund dgplug?

Before we answer this question, we should identify the expenses. Because all of our meetings happen over IRC we don’t have any recurring costs for meetings. The only things we are spending money for are:

• The domain name
• The web hosting (we use Dreamhost for static hosting)
• Various bots (running in containers)

After I started working, I started paying for the first two expenses. The containers run beside my other containers in my personal servers, so no extra cost there. Among dgplug and friends now we have many volunteers who are working professionals. We know that we can manage any extra cost that comes up among ourselves. For example, this year, during PyCon India we gave a scholarship to Trishna so that she can attend the conference. We had a quick call, and the funding was arranged in a few minutes. We also had group dinners at a few previous PyCon(s), and provided lodging for women student participants, that was also handled among the group members.

But all of this never came from the start. It took time to grow the community, to have friends who take dgplug as important as I do. We still try to cut costs wherever possible. If you are starting a new group, and try to spend as little as possible, many members from the existing communities will notice that. The group will be in a much better shape to ask for any required funding when it is really necessary. People will help you out, but first, the volunteers have to earn the trust from the community. That comes from work done at the ground level. Be true to yourselves, and keep doing the good work. Good things will happen.

In 2017 dgplug summer training will be happening for the 10th time. Let me tell you honestly, I had no clue that we will reach here when I started this back in 2008. The community gathered together, and we somehow managed to continue. In case, you do not know about this training, dgplug summer training is a 3 months long online IRC based course where we help people to become contributors to upstream projects. The sessions start around 6:30PM IST, and continues till 9PM (or sometimes till very late at night) for 3 months. You can read the logs of the sessions here.

The beginning

I remember looking at how people were trying to apply for Google Summer Code back in 2008, but many of them never had minimum experience with software development in Open Source world. dgplug started in 2004, and I think our motto “Learn yourself, teach others” is still as relevant now, as it was back in 2004. I was thinking about one online training where we can teach the basics of using Linux, and also basics of programming in Linux. How to create, and submit patches etc. I chose to use IRC as the place of the training because of bandwidth issue. Looking at how we conducted regular Fedora meetings on IRC, I was sure it would be doable. Of course there were many self doubts, too many open questions for which I never had any answer. When I shared this idea in different mailing lists, and asked for volunteers, Shakthi Kannan (irc: mbuf) also jumped in to mentor in the training. This gave me some hope. We had around 10+ participants in the first year of this training. Mailing lists guidelines, and how to communicate online were important from the beginning. Python was my primary language back then, and we choose to use that in the training too. With help from Prasad J. Pandit (irc: pjp) we had sessions on programming using C. But we found out that debugging segfaults over IRC was just not possible. We can try to do that if there were 2 or 3 people, but for a large group it was just not possible. As I mentioned earlier, contribution is the keyword for this training, we had other sessions than programming from the very first year. Máirín Duffy took a session on Fedora Arts, Paul Frields (then Fedora Project leader) took a session on Documentation. Debarshi took the sessions on shell scripting, and few of our sessions went up to 2AM (starting at 6pm).

Continuing & experimenting

Many participants from the 2008 session were regulars in the IRC channel. A few of them were already contributing in upstream projects. We decided to continue with the training. The number of participants grew from 10 to 170+ (in 2016). We did various kinds of experiments in between these years. Many of our ideas failed. Many ideas have gone through iterations until we found what works better. Below are few ideas we found difficult to implement in a training like this:

• Teaching C programming over IRC is not an easy task.
• We have to be regular in the sessions, start at the right hours every day. Changing session timings are bad.
• Do not give any longer break than 5 days. Participant rate will drop if there are no sessions for more than 5 days.
• Doing video session is difficult (even in 2016).

Lessons learned (the good points)

Start from scratch

Every year we start from scratch. There are always many participants who does not know much of command line tools, or how to reply inline to a mail in the mailing list. This is why we start from communication tools, basic shell commands, and using editors (we teach Vim). From there the sessions slowly start becoming more intense.

IRC works well on low bandwidth

IRC is still the best medium for a training where people are joining in from all over the world. It works in 2G connection too. Breaking the first entry barrier is difficult, but once we breach that, people generally stays back on the channels.

Stay in touch

Stay in touch with the participants even after the course is finished. Most of the regular participants in the #dgplug channel are actual ex-participants of the summer training. Some were trainees, some were trainers. Talking about other things in life is important to increase the participation in IRC.

Have documentation

We were slow in this point. Even though from the first year we had logs of each session, we never had one single place for the participants to learn from. Now we maintain a Sphinx docs. It is always nice to be able to point people to one link from where they can start.

Meet in real world

Every year we meet during PyCon India. This meeting is known as staircase meeting as we used to block most of the staircase at the venue in Bangalore. Meeting people face to face, talking to them in real life, sharing food & thoughts help to break many hidden barriers. It is true that not all of us can meet in one place, but we try to meet at least once every year. In 2017 we will be meeting during PyCon Pune in February in Pune, then once again in PyCon India in Delhi.

Give them hope, give them examples

Other than our regular sessions, we also get sessions from other known upstream contributors in various projects. They talk about how they have started their journey in Open Source world. Sometimes they sessions on their field. We had sessions from documentation, art work, experiences of past participants, Creative Commons licenses, leaders from various communities. This year Python creator Guido Van Rossum also joined in, and took a very interactive session.

Automate as much as possible

We now have a bot which helps the trainer during the sessions. This helps to reduce chaos during the sessions. As we all know the nature of IRC, it is very common that 10 people can try to talk at the same time. Stopping that was a big win for us. We still do not upload the logs automatically, as we go through the logs once manually before uploading.

Have a group of volunteers whom the community can trust

Most of the volunteers of dgplug are ex-participants of this summer training. They stayed back in the channel after their training is over. They help people almost 24/7 (depending their availability). There are the people whom we all trust. They become leaders by their own effort, no one comes and announces new leaders. Delegation of various work is important, getting fresh blood in the volunteer pool is very important. We constantly look for new volunteers. But at the same time you will need some people who can come in at the time of any emergency (with authority).

Enforce some rules

Rules are important for any community, call it Code of Conduct, or something else. But without these maintained rules, any community can get into chaos. Enforce these rules. We generally force people to write in full English words all the time (instead of sms language). The participants do pull legs of anyone who types u or r in the IRC channel. We also try to push people for inline reply than top posting in the mailing list.

Solve real life problem

Do not try to stay in only examples from books while teaching something. Always try to solve problems which are closer to the hearts of the participants. These solutions will give them much more encouragement than anything else. It can as small as finding photos in their computer, or building a full scale application to manage one’s video pool. We try to use Python to solve many of these issues, as we have experienced Python programmers in the channel . Python3 is our default language to do anything on the sessions.

Outcome of the training

I think we are the highest concentration of upstream contributors in one community in India. We had participants from Singapore, South Korea, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, to Nigeria (a big shoutout to Tosin), to many parts in US and Canada. We had school teachers, college students, lawyers, sys-admins, housewives, school students, music students, participants from various backgrounds in the last 10 years. We have companies personally inquiring about ex-participants before hiring them. Many of the participants are now my colleague in Red Hat. We have people in the channel who are willing to help anyone, everyone learns from everyone else. People are part many other communities, but #dgplug binds us all.

I am happy to announce that Trishna Guha is the recipient of a dgplug contributor grant for 2016. She is an upstream contributor in Fedora Cloud SIG, and hacks on Bodhi in her free time. Trishna started her open source journey just a year back during the dgplug summer training 2015, you can read more about her work in a previous blog post. She has also become an active member of the local Pune PyLadies chapter.

The active members of dgplug.org every year contribute funding, which we then use to help out community members as required. For example, we previously used this fund to pay accommodation costs for our women contributors during PyCon. This year we are happy to be able to assist Trishna Guha to attend PyCon India 2016. Her presence and expertise with upstream development will help diversity efforts at various levels. As she is still a college student, we found many students are interested to talk to and learn from her. So, if you are coming down to PyCon India this weekend, remember to visit the Red Hat booth, and have a chat with Trishna.

The 9th edition of dgplug summer training started few weeks back. This year in the IRC channel (#dgplug on freenode) we saw around 186+ nicks participating in the sessions. Till now we have went through communication guidelines, IRC, mailing list how to, a text editor ( Vim in this case), blogging, basic bash commands, a few more bit advanced bash commands. We also learned about reStructured Text, and Sphinx. We also managed to live demos to all students from the mentor's terminal.

Even though most of the participants are new to Linux, we can see a better quality of questions coming from them, better point is that most of them are not afraid about asking questions. Which is a very good sign to see in the training. Few days back Trishna Guha took the first guest session of this year, she talked about her experience in the summer training last year, and how she has become an upstream contributor. If you read the logs, then you can see people asked all shorts of questions to her.

We also have a feed aggregator up where you can read the blog posts of the participants. I still have to add a few more blogs to this as many sent in the feed URLs much later.

If you are an upstream contributor, and you want to encourage this group of new participants, please drop me a note. We would love to see more upstream folks talking to these new/upcoming contributors. The sessions run on IRC, it can be in a time when you are available. So just ping me if you are interested to take a session :)

Your name (blog/twitter) and what do you do

My name is Tosin Damilare James Animashaun (IRC: acetakwas; Twitter: @acetakwas; Github: github.com/takwas, Blog: takwas.github.io).

I am currently a part-time Software Engineering student at NIIT, Lagos. I am also a co-founder at a startup called Krohx. We are in the final stages of deploying a job/hiring web platform that targets seekers of short-term jobs while also easing the process of getting service delivery for the hirers.

With my involvements with the burgeoning Python community in Nigeria, I recently got elected as secretary for the organization.

How did you learn about the training? (++ My Experience) I fail to recall

exactly how I learnt about the community now, but I remember joining the mailing list and going on from there. This was in fact my first time of joining a mailing list. Upon learning about the #dgplug IRC channel, I promptly enlisted the channel to my IRC client's favourites.

I was so enthusiastic about this, as I had no prior experience of an online tutoring session. The feeling was truly exhilarating.

Having come from a Java background, I was really interested in learning the Python programming language as soon as I caught on waves with. At the time, I had volunteered to write some scripts to help automate some of the manual processing of NIIT's annual scholarship exam records/documents at my school for that year. I accomplished that using Java, but in hind-sight, I feel I could have saved a lot of time if I had utilised Python in the situation.

This was a blog post I wrote as part of tasks given to us. I have failed to maintain that blog though. I now write here

How this training changed (if at all) your life? Python is surely the more

beginner-friendly language and it's making its rounds these days. Every programmer should have it in their arsenal. One of the things I love most about the language is it versatility in application.

No doubt, I have continued to improve with Python everyday, but more so in my programming journey. I have become more and more familiar with various mainstream concepts and tools. The idea of contributing to open-source can be overwhelming at first, but following the path laid out in this course, one would be surprised to learn how easy it could be.

I have volunteered to mentor attendees at a Django Girls workshop, which held in Lagos, Nigeria. I picked-up Django in a week prior to the event, because frankly, there wasn't much of a learning curve to it since I already used Flask, a different Python-based web development framework.

Flask was a framework I first got introduced to at the summer training, but I did not revisit it until months later. As a backend web-developer, I now do most of my work in Flask.

In my experience, there is no better or faster way to grow, than to collaborate; and that is what open source preaches. Note that growth here is not only about the project, but the growth applies to each contributing individual. Heck, even if you do not contribute, you will grow by reading good open-source code -- this I can attest to. And joining the dgplug community has surely made open-source a more approachable endeavour. # #

Have you contributed to any upstream project(s)? If yes, then details.

While (and a bit disappointingly) I have yet to contribute to an upstream project, I do have quite a number of them lined up. Most probably, the first would be to the official Slack Client written in Python. Having recently developed a bot, which was used in conducting the election of committee members of the Python Users Nigeria Group, I do have a number of changes I plan to push to the aforementioned API library.

With this forked project, I have also tried my hands at revamping the architecture of the official dgplug bot ekanora, which is used in running the summer training sessions.

Some other projects I'd like to contribute to include:

• https://github.com/StellarCN/py-stellar-base
• https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-blog

Any tips for the next batch of participants. (++Final words)

I am not sure I am in the best position to answer this. However, I would advise that you endeavour to remain focused through this; simply keep at it. Even if your experience at the summer camp doesn't go as you expect, you should definitely not count it loss. Instead, make it a reason to put in more effort and grow as you go.

Depending on your personal activity schedule, you might miss one/two classes. But that shouldn't deter you from continuing the program. The logs are available for covering such lapses. Also, you could consult the summer training docs to get a hang of the agenda, so you can anticipate classes beforehand and be better prepared.

While I participated in the training, there were times when there was no power supply, and I had to use my phone. Thankfully, there are IRC clients for mobile phones (I recommend AndChat).

The class sessions have a few rules, and the community would love it if you played by them. Not to worry, they are no stringent rules; just there to keep everyone behaving. For instance, the use of SMS-speak is discouraged.

You should keep notes beside you when attending the sessions. Writing is a good way to memorize things in my opinion. Also, although most clients would have this by default, you should ensure your IRC client is configured to log conversations. Going back over what you've learnt would do you great good as you mightn't be able to keep up with the speed of the class at times.

If you have some time before program begins, two things I'd advise you become familiar with are: - Your OS (Linux, preferably Fedora or Ubuntu) - An IRC client (I suggest HexChat)

I learned quite a lot from the summer training. I was really obsessed with attending whenever I could. Although coming from a different country, the timing wasn't favourable, often meeting me in the middle of the day's activities -- school especially. I made efforts to invite a few friends to join on -- one or two did, but the determination to keep on was obviously lacking, which reminds me of a statement I heard a while back that reads something like this:

"If 40 people begin a course like this together, only about 5 get to
finish."

That in my experience is very often the case. Be aware that a lot of people are on this bandwagon. The question to ask yourself, is "Do I want to be among the surviving commutants at the end of this journey?" Unless you plan to experiment with this experience, if your answer is yes, then I congratulate you as you begin the journey that could potentially kick-start your software engineering career/journey.

Know this, free and open source software is for the good of all. The open source community is wide and continues to grow. It welcomes all and sundry, but it poses a few hurdles to sieve the wheat from the chaff. In the end, the gains are worth it.

Couple of years back we moved dgplug into a static website. But still there are requirements when we do want to update parts of the site in a timely manner. We also wanted to track the changes. We tried to maintain a sphinx based docs, but somehow we never managed to do well in that case.

This Sunday Suraj, Chandan, and /me were having a casual discussion, and the site management came up. I knew Armin wrote something new in the static sites side, but never managed to look into it. From the website of Lektor:

A flexible and powerful static content management system for building
complex and beautiful websites out of flat files — for people who do not
want to make a compromise between a CMS and a static blog engine.

So Lektor is for static cms, and that is what I was looking for. The dependency chain also looked reasonable. As usual documentation is in great shape. Yesterday I spent some time to setup a Fedora container which has Lektor inside along with a small flask based webapp. Sayan helped to fix the template/CSS issues.The web application listens for events from github webhoooks, and rebuilds the site. You can find the source for our site here, and the container Dockerfile and other details are here. Note: The web application is actually very crude in nature :)

• Your name (blog/twitter) and what do you do

Name: Dhriti Shikhar

IRC nick: dhritishikhar

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DhritiShikhar

Blog: https://dhrish20.wordpress.com/

Github profile: https://github.com/DhritiShikhar/

Pagure profile: https://pagure.io/user/dhrish20

I am a final year Engineering student in Information Technology. I am a regular contributor to FOSS and a regular participant of Pune Python meetup.

• How did you learn about the training?

I learnt about the dgplug training from Chandan Kumar.

• How this training changed (if at all) your life?

The dgplug training was completely life changing and the best decision I have ever made. I can't imagine a more rewarding way to spend my free time. It helped me to learn the developer tools. I learnt how to use IRC, git, vim, Python. And as a result of that I started contributing to OpenStack and Fedora Infrastructure. I hope to continue learning from dgplug. 

• Have you contributed to any upstream project(s)? If yes, then details.

I have contributed to:

• the documentation of various modules in OpenStack
• Fedora-Hubs
• Pagure
• FAS

• Any tips for the next batch of participants.

DGPLUG is a great place to learn. If you want to contribute to Open Source, attend the training attentively, follow the mentor and ask questions. Show people your passion. Open Source contributions show your willingness to learn. Make sure you blog regularly about new technologies you learn.

Feel free to add anything else you want to talk about.

I am really grateful to Kushal Das for inspiring and guiding me. Also, to really learn and understand a new technology, you should try to implement it. This learn-by-doing spirit is the most valuable thing you will learn in this training. 

• Your name (blog/twitter) and what do you do

Name: Suraj Deshmukh

Twitter: @surajd_

Blog: https://deshmukhsuraj.wordpress.com/

What I do: I work as an Associate Software Engineer at Red Hat

• How did you learn about the training?

From Chandan Kumar, when he was attending an event at my college.

• How this training changed (if at all) your life?

It has entirely changed the course of my life. It paved a way into open-source for me. It helped me get a job at Red Hat. I found people with similar interests. I found people whom I can talk geeky stuff with ;). I learnt things that you otherwise learn the hard way. It wouldn't have had possible without training. I learnt how to get into community and start doing things, in a way made me confident enough to ask things on mailing lists. It has shown me how can you help others by writing code. Before training I just knew things by their name never got a chance or say push to start things but being in training helped me do that. And most of all I made friends for my life.

• Have you contributed to any upstream project(s)? If yes, then details.

Before joining Red Hat, I have been contributing to Project Scapy and Openstack as a part of my job I contribute to project called as AtomicApp which is a sub-project of Project Atomic.

• Any tips for the next batch of participants.

What I would like to say to new participants is that #dgplug is a ladder to reach open-source world and do stuff that really interests you, where you can hack with stuff and you are free to do things you like. And believe me, when you do things that you like without bothering if you are getting paid just for the sake of your passion, someday you will be paid to live your passion. Final word: get along with the training learn things, ask questions and start contributing to open-source project.