Open Source Weekend for open source noobs

Let’s be honest, the concept of Open Source Weekend was not our original idea. It was completely inspired from Hacktoberfest by DigitalOcean. In fact, I was super adamant that we must do this in October itself. But it was the middle of October and arranging such events takes time (Specially when we are targeting our audience to just women). November was an exam month in our college, so no, we couldn’t do Hackemberfest. (Please dont comment how hideous that name sounds, we are well aware)

Hacktoberfest is a program by Digital Ocean and Github, where you can easily win a T-Shirt just by making 4 pull requests (between 1st October to 30th October) to any open source projects on Github

And then we realized, December was perfect! New semesters, thus more interest to learn something new, and that’s when we announced Open Source Weekend on 9th and 10th December, 2017.

Day 1

The day started great. Yes, our allotted venues were snatched away from us without any information. There was a high alert of a storm, and we were asked to cancel the event. Also the WiFi sucked but I kind of predicted it. But overall the day started great. I am not kidding. We got a much better venue with all the required facilities and it was pleasantly sunny the entire week. Though WiFi still was a problem, but Jio saved our day.

We started the session with the introduction to version control and how it drastically improves the way we work with files. And then we introduced them to the world of Git.

We spent almost 2 hours just trying all kinds of Git commands, comparing statuses of staged and committed files, creating, comparing, merging & deleting branches, cloning repositories and finally completing the circle with push & pull commands.

Now it was time to introduce something fun. I think our attendees were desperately waiting to know how Github fits in all of this. Shruti proceeded with a little introduction to GitHub and how it differs from Git (If you’re a noobie too, don’t be shocked if I tell you Git and Github are not the same thing).

And now my favourite part of the session — GitHub Pages.
When I found out about it, I was a noobie too. I was self teaching web development, and I really wanted to have a website of my own, but I did not want to pay for it. *classic Indian mentality*

GitHub Pages is perfect. Free domain, free hosting and a great way to showcase your work right from your GitHub repository. Most of our attendees were beginners too, some of them were just starting with Javascript, and had very little knowledge about website hosting.

Shrikriti took this part of the session. We shared a dummy resume template with all of them and asked them to build their first repository on GitHub. All of the attendees were asked to use their knowledge of Git to push the given resume HTML file to their respective GitHub repositories. Most of them were quite expert at the Git game by now! And voila! By the end of the event, every attendee had their own portfolio website and that’s something to celebrate.

Day 2

When you are having events that go on for a couple of days, you measure the success of the event by the number of returning attendees.
And we did it. 95% of the attendees returned the next day to continue on their journey to open source. *Applause time*

Okay, stop.

Day 2 session started with the introduction to Open Source Development by Shruti and I briefly talked about the following :

• Open Source Project properties like — README, Contribution Guidelines, License
• The kind of projects you can add on GitHub
• How most of the things around us is open source like — Python, Tensorflow, Bootstrap, JQuery, and what it means for us developers
• A walkthrough of contributing to an open source project on GitHub

Enough talking. Now we wanted to play a little Open Source game. We had prepared a GitHub repository with a lot of issues and mentioned the issue numbers on chits like this —

Everyone had to pick up one chit, fork the mentioned repo, and solve the issue following the guidelines, and create a pull request. Most of the attendees knew C/C++ so it made sense to only include simple algorithm problems in C as a part of the issue. Few of them had their PRs rejected as they did not follow the guidelines, but that is part of the game. Eventually, by the end of the day, every attendee had one PR merged. Everytime, anybody got their PR merged, we gave them our very own stickers as a little celebratory gift.

But we knew this contribution didn’t mean much in the open source world. They needed to know about the real issues from open source projects that matter. So we talked more about how to find issues in GitHub, how labels help, how we can filter issues by labels or languages (oh and if you want to do it together, check this website).

Talking is fun (or not) but they have got to implement everything that they learned in the 2 days of the session, and that’s when we hit off with the Hack Hour. (Though it lasted less than an hour, because we HAD to wrap it up)

In Hack Hour, the attendees were asked to find issues from actual open source projects using all the tools we taught them, and every pull request created was tracked. The first person to have their PR merged by the end of the week was to get a cool T-Shirt from us! (Low budget, couldn’t afford to give all of them a T-shirt. If you are interested to sponsor us for our next event, the contact details is right at the end of this article)

Veerangana Dash was the winner of the Hack Hour.
Can we get a round of applause for her? Some *medium claps* too maybe?

Open Source Weekend ended on a good note. We finally could call ourselves a community. All of us had a chat at the end about the session we took, the management, the things we learnt, and why we are doing it just for the women. I could tell that Open Source Weekend was a success when they were more interested to know about the next set of events than hoping for us to leave.

If you want to have a longer chat about the event,our community, our future plans or if you are interested to sponsor us for our next event, feel free to contact us here — xxcodecommunity@gmail.com or pbhaumik26@gmail.com.

Please share this article and let people know about our little achievements. Thank you.