Some of you will remember the post My Year of Open Source from 1 January 2011 – almost 3 years ago – where I made a New Year’s resolution to participate more in FOSS. Here are the goals I listed for myself for that year:
I have four main goals (at this point):
- Learn the tools and processes myself by participating in a FOSS project.
- Figure out what FOSS tools and processes I can begin to introduce my students to in earlier courses.
- Figure out what FOSS experience(s) I can provide my non-CS students.
- Find a project (or projects) to place my Senior CS students into in Spring 2012.
Well, it was as successful as most New Year’s resolutions – meaning, not very. Or maybe, not completely. I was (partially) successful at some of those goals, although almost none were completed within the year that I so rashly promised.
Figure out what FOSS tools and processes I can begin to introduce my students to in earlier courses.
This one was somewhat successful, although not until this past June (2013) when I managed to have my summer Introduction to Programming class (all six students!) use git and Bitbucket to collaborate with their lab partners and to submit their work to me for grading. Fresh from that (small-scale) success, I tried to have my Programming for Non-CS Majors class do the same, and ran into some scaling issues. We’re working on the solution for that right now – more in a future post.
My Spring 2013 capstone project course did use git and GitHub for our project developing an app for a Worcester Art Museum exhibit. But my understanding of git was not a good as it could have been and the student use of git was spotty. We also planned to use Pivotal Tracker, but didn’t get very far. We did successfully use IRC, however.
Find a project (or projects) to place my Senior CS students into in Spring 2012.
My Spring 2012 capstone project course worked with Eucalyptus, and had some pretty strong interaction with some of the members of the community, but I think that both the students and I felt we weren’t as successful as we could have been due to some technical issues early on in the course. For Spring 2013, I abandoned working in an existing FOSS project in favor of new development when the Worcester Art Museum opportunity presented itself. We did, however, make our code freely available (https://github.com/CS-Worcester/JILOA)
Figure out what FOSS experience(s) I can provide my non-CS students.
This goal got very little attention, other than my abortive attempt at using git in the Programming for Non-CS Majors course.
Learn the tools and processes myself by participating in a FOSS project.
And I still have not made any real progress in my own participation in a FOSS project.
However, that’s all going to change. Stay tuned for My Year of Open Source v2…