It is already time for another year in dgplug summmer training . This will be sixth year of the training.
If you heard about this training before then you already know that I teach programming with help of Python. It will be even more intensive this year. More amount of code reading and more writing. Yes, we teach our students how to read code and learn from others.
The number of demo projects will also increase this year. We will make sure that the students work hard.
Two years back we did a bit of experiment in the training by letting students go slow, we stopped asking for regular reports and found most of the students just vanished during this 1-2 weeks of low sessions.
From last year we are back into more strict sessions and we keep the tab on missing students in every session. At the beginning of the training we get around 20-30 students in the IRC channel, but as the sessions progresses during first one month, many of those students start vanishing. In the end of 3 months, we generally get 2-5 students who become very active contributors in different upstream projects. As we do the sessions generally in Indian evening time, few sessions go very late, we even saw sessions continuing till 1am with a break for dinner. The students, who stay in the training after one month, don’t mind staying up late for the sessions on IRC.
I don’t mind the low number of active students during the end of the training as these people will serve FOSS world in various forms for sure.
We ask students to use any latest Linux distro, but I prefer if all of them are using the latest Fedora. Around two years back we asked them to install gcc and I gave the corresponding yum command, only one student came back saying it is not working, so after trying to debug his problem for some time we figured out that he did # apt-get install yum on a Ubuntu box and then tried to use yum as we told so. So now we ask the distribution and environment details first from every student.
During the training sessions we ask many upstream developers to spend 30-60 minutes in IRC channel and talk with the students, this really give them a moral boost. If you want to help us out please drop a mail or tweet, we will find some suitable time for your sessions in the training.
