Hi Terri; thanks for your mail. On 2016-02-28 1:46 PM, Terri Yu wrote:
I was just trying to suggest that for academics who don't have the CS background and software internships, getting involved in the open source community would be a good way to develop software skills and find a community that will support someone with an atypical background. Also, it's not that easy to jump into an open source project and start making contributions as someone who is new to the community and new to software. Suggesting to someone that they should go make open source contributions to pad their resume, without giving them any guidance or even explaining to them the FOSS ethos -- that seems a tad irresponsible. That's why I put the emphasis on joining the FOSS community rather than focusing on making contributions. No open source project maintainer likes getting random pull requests.
I agree, and that's good advice -I hope that Software and Data Carpentry are good communities to start with. We may not have much in the way of software for people to hone their skills on, but I'd like to think that doing pull requests on lessons is a gentle introduction to the workflow. I'd be very grateful to hear from anyone whose first encounter with GitHub (or other open source machinery) was through DC/SWC, and who then went on to contribute to other things.
I'd also be grateful for pointers to research development communities that are particularly welcoming to, and have tasks accessible to, newcomers - astro.py (http://www.astropy.org/) and rOpenSci (http://ropensci.org/) are two that I've heard mentioned before, and there are others on our website at http://software-carpentry.org/join/projects/. (Additions to that list would be very welcome.)
Finally, some of our instructors have gone through the 7-week program offered by Insight Data Science (http://insightdatascience.com/), which is a way to learn development skills without having to load it on top of everything else. Stories from people who've taken part in it or similar programs would be very welcome as well.
Cheers, Greg -- Dr Greg Wilson Director of Instructor Training Software Carpentry Foundation _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
