N/A: these preparatory steps should be completed prior to the start of the course.
This section is intended for the workshop student. It outlines what students should do to get the most out of the workshop.
Not all contributors to open source projects are programmers, so this workshop makes no presumption that participants know how to program. Contributions to open source projects include documentation, design, graphics, user experience, etc. This workshop will enable programmers and non-programmers alike to contribute.
Having said that, the following will help with successfully completing this workshop:
- a desire to learn and experiment
- a basic understanding of the operation of a computer
- a basic understanding of command-line tools
The workshop is about four hours and covers a lot of material (it may be broken into two days OR may be a single day event). Anything you can do to optimize your learning experience will be beneficial. Below are just some suggestions:
- Ask questions. Lots of questions.
- Take advantage of the fact that you are in a room with mentors to get your questions answered.
- You will be given post-it notes. If you are nervous about asking a question in public: put up your red post-it to let a mentor know you are struggling. They will come to help.
- It will be recommended that you partner with someone... if you are comfortable with this, please take advantage of the chance to work with someone. Experience shows that both parties tend to benefit from this arrangement.
- Participate as much as you can, do the hands-on exercises, try the steps.
- Take notes.
In the hands-on practice session, you will be using command-line tools to contribute to a practice project, namely a calculator. If you don't feel comfortable with the command-line yet, see the Resources below for cheatsheets and references to a number of the most common commands:
- Windows command-line Windows commandline stuff
- Linux/Mac command-line Linux commandline stuff
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