Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

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Dgplug summer training 2014

So another year and another summer training is going to start. This is the 7th year of the training. Last year we saw a huge increase in the number of the students, almost 3 times of the previous years.

This year we doing the registration using a google form and the number of people already registered is above 300.

What we teach in this training?

The training is not about learning a few tools or meeting few people. The goal of the training is to get more contributors out of these students. Most of the people who joined this training in previous years are complete newbies. But they spend time and worked hard to become upstream contributors in many different projects including Fedora, KDE, Transifex, Waartaa.

A basic outline of the training modules:

  • Communication guidelines
  • Basic command line tools
  • Text editors
  • Documentation
  • Source code management tools
  • Programming using Python
  • Project work

This year during FOSSASIA I was in a presentation from Cat Allman about GSoC's past present and future. I was very happy to see as teaching students mailing list guidelines was a point in that presentation. We make sure that the students learn the few basic but important skillset like this first.

Another major point in the training is documentation. Through the training we spend a lot time in reading and writing documentation. It is the primary means of communication to the users for all projects and we make sure that it becomes a second habit for the student. We use Sphinx for most of the documentation.

Home work system

Last year we also introduced a new homework submission system. Through which the students submitted back the solutions to the homeworks in different modules of the course. This solution is written using few lines of Python code and Nikola project for publishing.

Guest Lectures

One of the major attraction and crucial part of the training is the guest lectures where different upstream contributors come down to the IRC channel and interact with the students. They talk about their own story or different technical things including documentation, licenses, art work. Nick Coghlan did the first guest lecture last year. This year there wil be couple of big surprises in those lectures. But you will have to wait for them :)

How to register

Just fill out this form. Please also remember to register to our mailing list for more updates.