Open Source Summer - Week 1
Introduction to Open Source
Hi there, happy summer 🌞 and welcome to Open Source Summer!
Open Source Summer is Open Source @ UCSD’s first initiative to build a community and foster an ecosystem that promotes open source, and helps bring together people and ideas 💡.
Open Source Summer:
1️⃣ Learning About Open Source
2️⃣ Building a Project
3️⃣ Open Sourcing Your Project
Open Source @ UCSD aims to build and foster an inclusive open source community at UC San Diego 🔱. As a student organization, we want to encourage and help everyone who is interested, regardless of skill level, to get involved and contribute to open source through various projects, programs, workshops, and events. We’ll be fully active starting Fall 2019-20, so keep an eye out 👀! Follow us on these platforms to keep updated:
Facebook Page and Facebook Group
Hey Open Source @ UCSD, you’ve been talking a lot about “open source”, but what does it even mean? 🤔
Great question! Open Source is a way of sharing and building 🏗 ideas. The core ideology revolves around publishing (usually) code and design schematics to the public. Often, the resulting product is distributed by an organization, but equally often it is just hosted by people 👫 and made available for others to use.
The ideology has some great benefits - it allows people to collaborate effectively 📈 and in a structured way. The core ideology is often used by even large companies, extending from Microsoft to Bloomberg, to manage huge codebases. It has allowed for large projects such as Linux 🐧 to emerge which are transparent, and the public can arrive at a consensus on their trustworthiness.
As such, open source extends beyond just managing code and projects, and has had great influence in shaping key areas of computer science, in operating systems, cryptography, cryptocurrency 💸, software development to name a few 💻.
If you’d like to read more in depth about the Open Source and its practices in code, check out this neat article 👉 What is Open Source Code?
There are a lot of key instruments used to perpetuate open source, and we will cover a bunch in this series. One you may have often heard mentioned, or perhaps used is git. Git offers a powerful and simple way of managing different versions of your projects and more!
This can get a little overwhelming, so we created an interactive way for you to get your hands dirty with git, and see a visual representation of how you can make contributions with git.
Learn the Git workflow and how to make Pull Requests by tagging our Graffiti Wall!
Check out our wall here: https://os-ucsd.github.io/graffiti-wall
Follow this tutorial to add your own tag to our wall: GIT GUD - Graffiti Wall Workshop
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask on our Discord channel here!
If you already have some experience in open source or can't wait to get started, we included some links here for you! Otherwise, stay tuned for our email next week which will talk more about starting off.
https://firstcontributions.github.io/
https://www.firsttimersonly.com/
