Dan Lemon

On Saturday 17th April 2010 the Graduate Development Community held an event called “OpenSource Jumpstart 2010” at IBM‘s Southbank location. The event was aimed at giving people experience with real Open Source development and to meet leading developers in an informal and stimulating environment. It was a full day event which lasted from around 9am and finished about 6pm.

The event kicked off with an informal introduction by Barry Cranford, who welcomed all the enthusiastic students, helpful mentors and friendly project committers together into a large conference room enlightened by the early morning sun. Zoe Slattery then gave a breakdown of the day’s schedule followed by a brief explanation of what Open Source Software is and why people get involved with committing to projects.

Ben Evans than asked each project committer to come to the front and give a short clarification about their project, what programming language it was based around and what likely tasks were available for students. The open-source projects with committers who were able to make it to the event included:

Apache Aries project is delivering a set of plug able Java components enabling an enterprise OSGi application programming model. This includes implementations and extensions of application-focused specifications defined by the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group (EEG) and an assembly format for multi-bundle applications, for deployment to a variety of OSGi based run-times.
Apache Harmony project is a compatible, independent implementation of Java developed under the open-source Apache License. Development is community-driven with contributions from IBM, Intel, Google, academic institutions and individuals. The Java SE 5 API is now nearly 100% complete, and Java 6 is currently at 96% completeness.
Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.
Apache Tuscany provides an open-source services infrastructure for constructing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based solutions from heterogeneous and distributed services. To make the implementation and deployment of services straightforward Apache Tuscany is based on the widely supported Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification currently being standardized at OASIS.
Apache Wookie is a Java server application that allows you to upload and deploy widgets for your applications; widgets can not only include all the usual kinds of mini-applications, badges, and gadgets, but also fully collaborative applications such as chats, quizzes, and games. Wookie is based on the W3C Widgets specification, but widgets can also be included that use extended APIs such as Google Wave Gadgets and OpenSocial.
Citrine is a Java web application which can be used to configure, manage and monitor the running of various tasks (typically, but not limited to, shell scripts). It can be thought of as GUI replacement for cron with extra functionality. Citrine is used extensively at Last.fm as a centralized cron with e-mail notifications for scheduling recurring tasks.
Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform addresses the problem domain most commonly known as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to provide bullet proof integration solutions based on architected open standards for the integration of applications in the financial sector. The Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform addresses this domain as commoditized configurable solutions focused on users rather than simply providing another development framework.
Impala is a dynamic module framework for Java-based web applications, based on the Spring Framework. With a focus on simplicity and productivity, Impala radically transforms application development using Spring and all the usual related technologies. With its powerful dynamic reloading capability, Impala dramatically reduces build/deploy/test cycles, allowing you to spend more time coding and less time waiting for your application to reload.
PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Once the project presentations were complete, students were given small post-it notes to write down their top 3 projects that they were most interested in working on for the day. The mentors and organizers then arranged the students into groups for each project, ensuring that each group had at least 3 students.

Zoe Slattery noted earlier on about Google Summer of Code (GSOC) which is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. However, the introduction to open source at GSOC usually takes about 2 weeks, where as the organizers for this event were hoping to get everyone initialized with OSS by the end of the day. Ambitious? Maybe, however it really is not that difficult to get into OSS and gathering from the feedback everyone was able to learn the basics and get into an OSS project without too much difficulty.

With the students assigned to different groups to work on a specific project for the day, the mentors began to roam around helping students out with anything, whether it was a simple IDE shortcut question or something a little more advanced like helping setup maven, the mentors were happy to help and they did a brilliant job at it. Each project committer was able to successfully help out and mentor the students with getting them setup and helping to contribute to their open source project.

The students cracked on with finding and fixing bugs, writing documentation, creating tests and implementing new features to the open source projects. Students were gleefully happy and enthusiastically excited when they squashed their first official bug. At that moment, I realized how special this event was to students. OSS is not something you should ignore, it will change your life and for the better. You will become a better programmer, documenter, tester or even project manager if you get involved with an open source project. There is a place for everyone in OSS and you don’t need to have the best technical expertise to get involved. You will not get reprimanded, punished or anything like that for bad code, the other project committers will review what you submit and offer helpful advice and changes for you to learn from. Do not feel intimidated by large projects or complex code; you do not even need to know everything about a project to help out. Some students only needed to focus on one function within one class to squash their first bug, I’m sure some well-known committers to some of the biggest open source projects have never looked at each class let alone each function within their own project.

The project committers did a fantastic job with providing the right tools and knowledge to students so that they were able to help with bug patching, documentation, or even bug finding. It was extremely helpful to be able to not only speak directly to a project committer but to also get educated and mentored by them, this in turn allowed the students to gain confidence with working on their chosen open source project because if they had any difficulty, questions or concerns they were able to easily ask their project committer for answers.

Throughout the day lots of hacking, coding, documentation writing, questions, jokes and networking was achieved. Lunch was provided by the IBM Innovation Centre in Hursley, a selection of sandwiches, chocolates, crisps and drinks were available, perfect for the warm sunny day, although we were all indoors coding our brains out.

As the conclusion to the event dawned upon us, we were told to stop and head back to the conference room for an evaluation of the day’s event. Each group was asked to give a short presentation about what they achieved, learned and what they found good or bad about the day. Each speaker bravely stood up and spoke at the front describing how much they enjoyed working together, how awesome their project committer was and what bugs they squashed, what documentation they wrote and what features they implemented.

A colossal number of 16 bugs were squashed over the various projects, and a great amount of documentation was written as well as some fabulous created widgets. This was an incredible achievement to be accomplished by the students at the event. Well done to everyone!

With the announcement of this stunning performance by everyone, Martijn Verburg then gave a concise ending to the day’s event and announced the bar! Overall an amazing day with some awesome people, a lot of experience, knowledge, confidence and inspiration was gained throughout the attendees; not just the students, but even the mentors and project committers too!

Most of us headed for the bar as we were so excited about what we achieved we just wanted to continue talking about it all. During the networking and drinking, I came across a student who did not have much experience with Java, he studies C# so he was hesitant prior the event thinking that he would not learn much or be able to help out with anything, as most projects were Java based. However, he was able to get grips with one project and even helped out with bug patching, he later informed me that he is enthusiastic about learning Java because of the event, brilliant! You do not need to get tied down to one language, you should learn the right tools for the right job and sometimes the right tool is a different language.

On behalf of the Organizers to the Graduate Development Community, we would like to say a huge thank you to everyone! Students, mentors, project committers and IBM (for providing the food and venue).

We hope that each student who attended the event continues their involvement with the open source project they worked on during the day or at least finds another open source project to get involved with.

Once again, Thank you to everyone involved! If you’re interested in joining the GDC then head on over to the meetup page. You can also view more feedback from the event too!

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Apache Aries project is delivering a set of plug able Java components enabling an enterprise OSGi application programming model. This includes implementations and extensions of application-focused specifications defined by the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group (EEG) and an assembly format for multi-bundle applications, for deployment to a variety of OSGi based run-times.
Apache Harmony project is a compatible, independent implementation of Java developed under the open-source Apache License. Development is community-driven with contributions from IBM, Intel, Google, academic institutions and individuals. The Java SE 5 API is now nearly 100% complete, and Java 6 is currently at 96% completeness.
Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.
Apache Tuscany provides an open-source services infrastructure for constructing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based solutions from heterogeneous and distributed services. To make the implementation and deployment of services straightforward Apache Tuscany is based on the widely supported Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification currently being standardized at OASIS.
Apache Wookie is a Java server application that allows you to upload and deploy widgets for your applications; widgets can not only include all the usual kinds of mini-applications, badges, and gadgets, but also fully collaborative applications such as chats, quizzes, and games. Wookie is based on the W3C Widgets specification, but widgets can also be included that use extended APIs such as Google Wave Gadgets and OpenSocial.
Citrine is a Java web application which can be used to configure, manage and monitor the running of various tasks (typically, but not limited to, shell scripts). It can be thought of as GUI replacement for cron with extra functionality. Citrine is used extensively at Last.fm as a centralized cron with e-mail notifications for scheduling recurring tasks.
Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform addresses the problem domain most commonly known as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to provide bullet proof integration solutions based on architected open standards for the integration of applications in the financial sector. The Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform addresses this domain as commoditized configurable solutions focused on users rather than simply providing another development framework.
Impala is a dynamic module framework for Java-based web applications, based on the Spring Framework. With a focus on simplicity and productivity, Impala radically transforms application development using Spring and all the usual related technologies. With its powerful dynamic reloading capability, Impala dramatically reduces build/deploy/test cycles, allowing you to spend more time coding and less time waiting for your application to reload.
PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Zoe Slattery noted earlier on about Google Summer of Code (GSOC) which is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. However, GSOC lasts at least 2 weeks before everyone is fully “initialized” with open source development, where as the organizers for this event were hoping to get everyone into OSS by the end of the day. Ambitious? Maybe, however it really is not that difficult to get into OSS and gathering from the feedback everyone was able to learn the basics and get into an OSS project without too much difficulty.

With the students assigned to different groups to work on a specific project for the day, the mentors began to roam around helping students out with anything, whether it was a simple IDE shortcut question or something a little more advanced like helping setup maven, the mentors were happy to help and they did a brilliant job at it. Each project committer was able to successfully help out the students and get them setup with helping to contribute to their open source project.

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The project committers did a fantastic job with providing the right tools and knowledge to students so that they were able to help with bug patching, documentation, or even bug finding. It was extremely helpful to be able to not only speak directly to a project committer but to also get educated by them, this in turn allowed the students to gain confidence with working on their chosen open source project because if they had any difficulty, questions or concerns they were able to easily ask their project committer.

<!–[if gte vml 1]> <![endif]–><!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>

On behalf of the Organizers to the Graduate Development Community, we would like to say a huge thank you to everyone! Students, mentors, project committers and IBM (for providing the food and venue).

Once again, Thank you to everyone involved! If you’re interested in joining the GDC then head on over to the meetup page. You can also view more feedback from the event too!