The main goal of the course is to help and encourage university students to join the development of real-world open-source software. The course consists of 4–5 hosted lectures by senior developers, two small homework assignments and quite a bit of open-source development. We closely cooperate with Red Hat Open Source Contest.
The information in this file reflect the spring semester of 2020. For information on older semesters, see 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 themself, but this selection must be approved by the teachers till 1st of March. Tasks from the Red Hat Open Source Contest are pre-approved. If you choose elsewhere, 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 licences. 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. - (optionally) Attend lectures on open source development
The lectures provided are not compulsory but are highly recommended.
- IS course info: https://is.muni.cz/course/fi/spring2020/PB173
- Lecture time: Thursdays, 10:00-11:40
- Lecture room: FI MU S505 Red Hat lab (note that the room is only available during lecture time)
- Admission: All the lectures are public, open to anyone
Week 1 (20. 2.): Course intro (slides)
- Course structure and requirements
- Red Hat Open Source Contest
- Choosing a project (basic liveness checks)
- Delivered by Irina Gulina (Red Hat) and Tomáš Tomeček (Red Hat), this talk will be in English
- Workshop-style: Bring your notebook!
- 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)
- 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
Coronavirtus adjustment: The status update will take place using a videoconference.
- Short talks of the current progress (max 10 minutes)
- The presentation should include:
- Introduce the project you chose (the others should understand, what it is good for).
- 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 5 (19. 3.): Project management and lifecycle (annotated slides, pdf, feedback)
Coronavirtus adjustment: Lecture in person cancelled, annotated slides available.
- Delivered by Marek Čermák (Red Hat)
- Different views of the project
- Project planning, lifecycle and versioning
- Basic contribution workflow
- Software dependencies
- Security aspects of development
Week 6 (26. 3.): Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) (slides, annotated slides, feedback)
Coronavirtus adjustment: The lecture will take place using teleconferencing.
- Delivered by Vojtěch Trefný (Red Hat)
- CI/CD pipeline
- Code style and documentation
- Build tools
- Tests and coverage
- Packaging and publishing
- Consultations possible
- Consultations possible
Coronavirtus adjustment: The status update will take place using a videoconference.
- 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 10 (23. 4.): Open source licences (slides, Zoom teleconference, feedback)
Coronavirtus adjustment: The lecture will take place using teleconferencing.
- Delivered by Milan Zamazal (Red Hat) and Pavel Loutocký (Institute of Law and Technology, MU)
- Basic legal context of software licences
- 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
- No lectuure (Dies Academicus, Industry partners day)
Coronavirtus adjustment: The status update will take place using a videoconference.
- 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)