The main goal of the course is to help and encourage university students to join the development of real-world open-source software (in any programming language). The course consists of 5–6 hosted lectures by senior developers, two small homework assignments and quite a bit of open-source development.
The information in this file reflect the spring semester of 2021. For information on older semesters, see spring 2020 and autumn 2019.
In order to pass the course, the student must:
- Contribute to an existing open-source project in scope of 50-60 hours. The student chooses the open-source project for contribution themselves, but this selection must be approved by the teachers till 14th of March. Look for known active projects that you are not yet part of.
- Track time spent on the project. The student has to have a detailed report on time spent on the course. The tracking has to be automatic (e.g. using Toggl or similar). The tracking must be task-based (i.e. per-day report is not sufficient). Each reported period must have a start-time, end-time, short work description and a category (analysis/implementation/management).
- Hand in three compulsory homework assignments. These will cover git, CI/CD systems, pull requests, basic developer best practices and open-source licenses. An approximate description of tasks can be found in the file assignments.md.
- Deliver three short presentation (10 minutes talks) about your work. This will be the initial work planning, mid-term progress update and final presentation at the end.
- Attend lectures on open source development The lectures provided by the industrial experts are strongly recommended.
- IS course info: https://is.muni.cz/course/fi/spring2021/PB173
- Lecture time: Wednesdays, 10:00-11:40
- Lecture room: The lectures will take place on Zoom, always in the following room: https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/92608827888?pwd=SnVka2Zld1dOTGpnd295SktCL1BWUT09#success
- Admission: All the lectures are public, open to anyone
Week 1 (3. 3.): Course intro (slides)
- Course structure and requirements
- Red Hat Open Source Contest
- Choosing a project (basic liveness checks)
Week 2 (10. 3.): Introduction to the open-source world (slides)
- Delivered by Milan Brož (Red Hat)
- Proprietary vs. open
- Open source project management and infrastructure
- Open source licensing
- Open source culture
- Communication (and politics and psychology)
- View of the maintainer
- Short talks of the current progress (about 10 minutes)
- You are required to have presentation slides to structure your talk (upload them in IS MU beforehand)
- The presentation should include:
- Introduce the project you chose (the others should understand, what it is good for, how it works, ...).
- What do you plan to do? (What will the contribution probably be?) If there are specific issues/bug reports you plan to address, mention them.
- State what have you already done: Ran and used the project? Successfully build the project? Dived into documentation? Developeed something? ...
- What system do you use to track time? How much time have you already spent on the project?
Week 4 (24. 3.): Lifecycle of open source contribution, project management (slides)
- Delivered by Vojtěch Trefný (Red Hat)
- Basic contribution workflow
- Issues, forks, pull requests (illustrated on GitHub)
- Software dependencies
- Security aspects of software dependencies
- Peeks into security of development and licencing
Week 5 (31. 3.): Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) (slides)
- Delivered by Vojtěch Trefný (Red Hat)
- CI/CD pipeline
- Code style and documentation
- Build tools
- Tests and coverage
- Packaging and publishing
Week 6 (7. 4.): Mind your Git manners (slides)
- Delivered by Irina Gulina (Red Hat) and Tomáš Tomeček (Red Hat), this talk will be in English
- Recap of git basics (workflow, commits, remotes, ...)
- Git in multi-developer setup (branching, merging, conflicts, ...)
- Power features in git (rebase, reorder, squash, stash, cherry-pick, ...)
- Pull requests and their adjustments
- Solving local and public trouble
- Git etiquette (good and bad practices)
- Consultations possible
- 10 minutes talks of the current progress
- Short reminder of what is the project about is good, though much shorter than in status update 1
- Present the reflection of your plan (Has it gone as you wanted/expected?) and its revision (if necessary)
- Slides are required (to keep the presentation clear and flowing)
- Include slide with your time sheet spent on the project, high granularity (dates, work items, amounts). Also add summary stats on time spent on a) study b) coding c) communication/management
Week 9 (28. 4.): Technical documentation writing (slides)
- Delivered by Shweta Jalgaonkar (Red Hat), Vendula Ferschmannova (Red Hat) and Matej Timar (Red Hat), this talk will be in English
- Documentation and technical writing in software projects
- The process of technical writing
- TechWriting specifics
Week 10 (5. 5.): Open source licenses (slides)
- Delivered by Milan Zamazal (Red Hat) and Pavel Loutocký (Institute of Law and Technology, MU)
- Basic legal context of software licenses
- Understanding the differences: free, libre, open-source, proprietary, FOSS, FLOSS
- Common software licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, ...)
- GPL+LGPL, their benefits and their specifics
- Licensing your code
- Consultations possible
- Consultations possible
- Deadline for finishing the open source contributions (exceptions allowed in justified cases)
- Final project presentations (10 minutes, slides required)
- Start with a short (!) reminder of what is the project about
- Present the work that you have done (including the information whether this was merged upstream or not)
- In the slides, include the final overview of time spent on the project, split to a) study b) coding c) communication/management
- Summarize the things you have learned by doing the open-source contribution (avoid general formulations, try to be specific and don't wave this off in 1 minute – it's important)
- Really, we mean the previous bullet point. What would you not know if you did not participate in the course? Both positive and negative (and neutral) learning are meant to be shared.
- Before the lecture (till Wednesday night), please submit these files to the IS vault
- Slides of your final presentation (PDF)
- The detailed timesheet of your contribution
- A list of your pull requests (a simple text file with a couple of links is sufficient)