David+Abad

Being involved in OSS since late August**,** I have found it very helpful, but not in the way that I though it would. I came into the community expecting to pick up a well-known existing project and add some cool features to it and have it be in a familiar language and everyone would think I'm cool, but just the opposite took place. We haven't really done any coding, the project isn't that well-known, and i have no idea how to program in XML or Python haha. On top of that, we have done a ton of requirements documents, such as SDS, SRS, and some test specs. But that has helped me more than i thought it would. On several job interviews, potential employers have been more impressed that i have done these documents as well as review sessions than knowing how to code in like 4 languages.
 * 11/22/2010**

OSS gives students an opportunity to experience a sort of "real world" scenario right in school. The teachers don't have all the answers and when they don't, they tell you to go ask the community. That is what you have to do in a job - if you don't know, go find out. Also, communicating with such a vast populous as the Linux community can be also teaches students how to respectfully and properly interact with someone else who you don't know anything about. They could be a star athlete next door or a blind 12-year-old in Croatia and that experience isn't found one-on-one like that in a professional setting in too many places.

One of the main roadblocks I faced was the digital learning environment. I had never worked in Linux before and knew nothing about their command line codes, git repositories, pushing, pulling, cloning, or python. However, one awesome key to helping was to have a professional come and help us for a little. Mel Chua, Red Hat Education Liaison, was with us for a few classes and really explained what the open source community was like and what we could get out of it. She didn't just talk about OSS, some of the things she talked about would apply anywhere, such as how to go to your boss and say i think that spending a week or two to see how OSS could work or be introduced better or easier to college-level kids is worth the company paying for me to go. And, of course, the reports and analysis of how it went and where we could go from there afterwards. Contrast that with "I want the company to pay for me to go hang out in college with the kids and hang out with their professor. Ok thanks...let me know what you think." She really helped with certain things we didn't quite understand such as the git calls (i don't know if many people know how to do those because there aren't many tutorials on it.) But now she knows where students new to OSS are and the problems and questions they have so at least Red Hat can hopefully make it easier for future students to assimilate.

Being in an open source environment has been a very new experience for me. I was used to starting at the design stage and planning out a project and the coding and debugging it. Now, before we have done any of that, we need to come up with requirement specifications and design specifications. I understand it is very important because not many open source projects have the time or resources to do it religiously every step of the way. That being said, I still would much rather be coding at this point (almost 2 months into the class; or half a semester if you prefer).
 * 10/19/2010**

I was looking forward to learning a new programming language and, with the intro to GNOME, a new way of communicating within an open source environment (over IRCs, Wikis, etc.). I was excited to learn and apply Python and/or XML and/or HTML, so I hope that can still be accomplished.

When there is action, the A11y IRC is very tough to understand. Usually nothing happens until someone has a question about what they’re working on. Everyone then helps that person and it goes back to quiet. I picked a really quiet 24 hours, but everyone that posted was very professional and helpful. I used to use AIM a lot, so some of the abbreviations are known to me, but the GNOME-specific abbreviations had me completely lost. I was amazed how you can actually tell that people are from different places just by seeing them type. I could tell by some of the sentence structures and word choices that they were not from here.
 * 9/14/2010**

Leaning in an open source environment is very different than the previous major one that i have worked on. It was the Marine Biology Case Study in Java in 2006-2007. We had everything we needed and our professor knew everything about it having used it for 4 years. But with OSS, we'll have to ask questions from anyone and hope the answers come relatively quick.
 * 9/6/2010**