Recently, I was invited by Prem to NASSCOM to give a brief talk on FOSS and Technology as part of the FOSS Wave community. Prem is doing a great job there by putting his effort in helping students from Tier2 and Tier3 cities. Around twenty enthusiastic students were selected and invited to Bengaluru to take part in such events. Mine was one of them. I conducted a GitHub session after Intro to FOSS and a brief intro about Fedora Project.

What is FOSS Wave? It’s a place to learn, teach, enrich and be part of FOSS revolution! It is an initiative to…

• spread FOSS knowledge
• connect with FOSS minded people across the globe
• help students contribute to FOSS projects, tools, and technologies
• Help students become industry ready.

In addition to sharing knowledge, FOSS Wave speakers also take part in organizing events and speaking in conferences across the globe. The FOSS Wave community consists of active contributors from across the globe. It includes both paid employees and volunteers who work towards the goals set forth in the FOSS revolution.

Special thanks to (in no particular order)

• Premananth “Prem” S: for helping us to grow, touch more lives and connecting us to KGISL
• Sudharsan Rajendran: For being a wonderful host and making sure that the event went ahead smoothly. He put in a lot of hard work.
• Prakash Mishra: For being an amazing co-speaker and traveling with me.
• Super enthusiastic participants for getting involved in our talk and discussing FOSS with us.

The Event

The event was successful with amazing feedback.

Arriving

We (Sumantro, Prakash, Smit and I [Vipul Siddharth] ) introduced FOSS Wave to Prem and he loved the initiative. After few days Prakash and I got an invite to address few more super enthusiastic student in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.

The next Friday, Prakash Mishra and I started our journey for Coimbatore, a tier 2 city in Tamil Nadu. This event was planned for 2-day (8 + 5 hrs).

Our suggestion to the organizer was not to have more than 35-40 participants as this was more of a hands-on workshop than just the talk, plus of course, the language barrier. 20 students were selected from KGISL and rest 15 from different colleges from all over Coimbatore. Everything from traveling to accommodations was sponsored by KGISL. We reached Coimbatore at around 12:00am and Sudarshan was there to receive us.

The next morning, after a very short sleep, we were ready to go and meet the participants. The moment I stepped out of the hotel, I could feel the fresh unpolluted air. The weather was same as of Bengaluru’s but a cleaner version.

Starting the day

In the first session, we started with FOSS and its philosophies, and soon moved to Fedora Project and ‘How to contribute to Fedora QA’. We covered the following topics during the time:

1. FOSS and Fedora
   1. What is FOSS?
   2. Why FOSS?
   3. Getting industry-ready
2. Discussions around diversity and contribution spectrum
   1. All FOSS projects are open-sourced: so contribute anywhere
   2. All contributors do not have to code; can be designers or can help in documenting
3. How to start with FOSS
   1. Introduce yourself: let the world know who you are on mailing lists
   2. Every project has identity methods: Fedora has the Fedora Account System (FAS)
   3. What if you run into an issue? Use IRC!
4. Fedora and contribution pathways
5. start.fedoraproject.org
6. apps.fedoraproject.org
7. Fedora Docs
8. Packaging (and using Bodhi)
9. Fedora Magazine
10. Recognition Model: Fedora Badges
11. Creating Accounts (FAS, mailing lists, etc.)
12. admin.fedoraproject.org
13. For Fedora QA: all the people redirected to the QA mailing list
14. Otherwise, shoot a mail to respective mailing list
15. Freenode IRC webchat

After this, we gave participants a lunch break for 30 minutes and then started with GitHub.

In the afternoon

Our talk covered some basics of Git and GitHub such as…

1. What is version control?
2. Need for a version control system
3. Methods of version control
4. What is the git, who developed it, and why you should use it?
5. What is GitHub and why you should use it?
6. Setting up and configuring git
7. Stages of file tracking
8. Creating a new organization and repository on GitHub
9. Basic git commands: git status, git clone, git diff, git add, git commit, git push, etc.
10. Hosting a static website on GitHub
11. Forking and Cloning a project
12. How to send PRs
13. How to solve merge conflicts

The event was until 6 pm in the evening. My plan to roam around couldn’t be successful as I could not sleep last night and was very tired.

Starting Day 2

The next day we started with SSH and Ansible. We explained (with demo):

1. Different terminologies related to the topic like Inventory files, remote nodes, master, slave etc
2. What is SSH?
3. Establish a passwordless ssh connection
4. Introduction to Ansible
5. Inventory files
6. Introduction to Virtual Machines
7. Some common modules like ping, command etc
8. What are playbooks
9. How to write playbooks

And then, after question answer round, we wrapped up our session.

 

It was a great workshop with the great audience and at a great place. We enjoyed our stay there!