My Experience at SLIIT FOSS as a Sub-Committee Member
hese past six weeks I have been a sub committee member at the FOSS community of my university, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT). When I joined, I was inspired by the mission of SLIIT FOSS and the dedication of the volunteers to achieve targets. Before sharing my experiences, I would first brief on myself and then lets move on to additional details. I started my bachelor’s degree on Software engineering at a well recognized Sri Lankan private university which is Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT) in the year of 2019. There are many student communities at my university, I have joined and worked with many of them. Each of them have their own unique culture and practices. Joining a student community will not only develop self confidence and leadership but it will help us to interact more with the senior students, which is important in a university environment.
What is SLIIT FOSS and how does it differ from others?
After completing few programming modules, I started to love coding and learning new technologies and I always wanted to learn how to develop production level applications, it was quite difficult because most of the tutorials were based on beginners. SLIIT FOSS is a student community with a team volunteers who believe in the usage of Free/Open Source Software. Simply, though SLIIT FOSS you can learn how to develop production level applications with the usage of variety of technologies and programming languages etc. What’s inspiring the most is that how dedicated and self motivated these students are, they volunteer as a team to achieve targets. This community does not welcome everyone and only accepts the students who are skilled and passionate on learning new technologies and trends related to the computer science industry. And that’s how SLIIT FOSS stand out from the rest.
How did I join and what am I doing?
As soon a I got to know about SLIIT FOSS, I wanted to join and be a part of the team but due to this pandemic(Covid19), communications got weak because we had to do all our academic work online therefore, I did not get the opportunity to volunteer this organization. Since I was connected with SLIIT FOSS through social media, I saw a Post, requesting volunteers for the sub committee. Few days after applying, I was invited for a short interview. Interview was not that complex, they asked couple of questions on my technology stack and personality. Finally, I was lucky enough to be a part of this team. After few days we had a virtual meeting and the top board students introduced themselves and we were subdivided into few sections such as Dev team, DevOps etc. I was added to the Dev team and I have to design and develop applications, which I prefer the most. We will be having meetings weekly to update our progress, and then we will get the tasks which needs to be done in the upcoming week. To know more on what we develop please refer our GitHub profile:- SLIIT-FOSS
Culture at SLIIT FOSS and Summary
At SLIIT FOSS every volunteer is equally respected without considering their Grades, Year of study or any other factor, we believe that everyone is talented and skilled. Even though we develop scalable applications, there are no strict policies or deadlines because all the volunteers have university work, internship / office work and personal stuff. But unlike other organizations, you cannot stay without doing nothing, we have to update on what we are working on at the moment and get new tasks for the upcoming week. And it is not about you, it’s about all of us. If you are not capable to do a task, you can get the assistance of a person who already knows the subject or you can learn and do it, what matters is the interest and the motivation.
To summarize everything, SLIIT FOSS is a community of volunteers who believe in the usage of Free/Open Source Software and writes scalable code to develop applications. Working with this community is like getting prepared to the industrial training beforehand. If you are passionate on web technologies and developing applications then this is the right place for you, check our content in the GitHub profile, you will definitely find them useful.
