Getting the troops mobilized

I gave a talk last Tuesday called “Open Source Development: A Rapid Introduction.”

Here’s the blurb I sent out when I advertised the talk:

Have you wanted to work on open source projects, but just don’t know how to get started? This talk will provide the basics you need to start working on open source software the next time you sit down at your computer.

In particular, this talk will cover:

(1) A brief overview of open source development in the industry and press.

(2) The UNIX development platform. A brief and whimsical overview of the UNIX shell, its surrounding tools, and the power of shell scripting. (Useful to anyone wanting to learn more about UNIX tools.) Learn how to do in a few lines of shell script what you only thought was possible with a big, extravagant hundred- or thousand- line program, and learn why so many of the world’s best hackers hack on a *nix system.

(3) The basics you need in order to hack on open source project: how mailing lists, wikis, bugzillas, source code revision systems all come together to form an organic code management process, and how to get started using those tools and others to learn about a project and what parts need development work done. This will include a brief introduction to CVS.

(4) The last part of the talk will involve actually watching open source development in action. In particular, the speaker will checkout some code from a source repository, make a change to it, create a patchfile from that change, then track down the mailing list or bugzilla related to the project and submit the patch to the maintainer. You will actually get to see open source “in action,” and will want to do it right when you get home!

If you’re a Windows or Mac OS developer who has always wanted to learn more about *nix systems, or if you’re a developer who wants to either take his own project open source or work on existing open source projects, this talk is for you.

Of course, if you’re someone who is just interested in the concept of open source, this talk will give you an inside look at “how things get done” in this community.

This talk was at least partially inspired by Nat Friedman’s blog post, check it out here:

“How to be a Hacker”

The talk was a general success, I think. About 12 people attended. You can see the talk in PDF or ODP formats, and you can also download the patches I wrote specifically for the talk to illustrate “open source development in action.” The patches are pretty stupid, but do illustrate the point, at least. Plus, each of the three patches served one of my own goals (hacking my CPU frequency scaler, fixing a gnome-terminal bug, and hacking galeon “for fun”), so that’s that. I think it’d be cool to give this talk again (maybe a little refined to include less basic UNIX tools and more hacking stuff) at a later date. We’ll see.

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