“What I learned contributing to a major open source project” will be led by Dr. Claus Wilke, the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in Molecular Evolution at UT Austin. This will be a great opportunity to learn about open source software development and collaborating with others on software projects. We hope you will be able to join in-person for snacks and discussion, but you can also listen in on Zoom.
When: Wednesday May 14th, 10am – 11am
Where: In-person in the PCL Scholars Lab Data Lab / Online via Zoom
Details:
There is a lot more to software development than knowing about programming languages, algorithms, and data structures. Professional software developers need to carefully architect their projects, they need to worry about documentation, about releases, and about backwards compatibility, they need to address bug reports and user questions, and they need to ensure novel contributions to a project don't introduce bugs into existing features. All of these skills are best learned from experienced software engineers managing a large project. In this talk, Dr. Claus Wilke will argue that contributing to a major open source project is one of the best ways to gain this experience. He will use as an example his path to contributing to and eventually becoming a core contributor to the ggplot2 project, and will outline simple steps and best practices to follow for anybody who is new to the world of open source software development and would like to make a contribution.
Sponsors:
This talk is hosted by the UT Open Source Program Office, the UT Libraries, and the Enterprise Technology Office of Innovation