FSOSS Report by vlam6

Introduction

Before I begin my report, I think it is best if I give a brief introduction of what is FSOSS. FSOSS stands for Free Software Open Source Symposium. It is an event that happen every year in Seneca@York where people from all over the world gather together and talk about their view on open source, open content, open format which are changing the way everybody work, play and learn. This is my very first time involving in the FSOSS and I find the experience to be extremely rewarding. I strongly encourage everyone who is interested in developing software to attend FSOSS next year. The purposes of this report are to summaries, analysis and make comparison of two talks that I have attended in FSOSS. It is difficult to choose which talk to attend to in the first place, and now it is difficult to choose which two talk to talk about because there are just too many of them. Among all the talks that I have attended, I have decided to focus my report on the following two talks.

1. Code Reading and Review, by Benjamin Smedberg from Mozilla Corporation.
2. Open Commercial Development, by Lawrence Mandel and Jeffrey Liu from IBM Canada

I picked the talk on Code Reading and Review because I have been code reading and reviewing for years. I find a lot of strategy on code reading and reviewing Benjamin talked about is similar to what I have been using and I picked the talk on Open Commercial Development because I would like to learn more about the IBM insight of open source development and find their insight to be completely different from what I believe in.

Summary on Code Reading and Review

“Code Reading and Review”, I chose to attend to this talk because I really want to learn about how to read and review better as code reading and review is essential to any coding and debugging process. Especially when I am taking Open Source Project (DPS907), I am hoping I would learn something which I can apply directly to my open source project on localization. His presentation involved materials such as fixing a bug, fixing a feature, reading, writing and using documentation, difficult of code reading and reviewing, how to get detail, how to use lxr, tools that he uses such as grid and find, software framework, version control tool, how to look back in time, where to find and how to talk to an expert, goal of code reviewing, API/design, maintainability, security, UI, integration, testing review, how to form/involve in an open source community, how to decide if the code is worth reviewing or reusing, and the important listen to the community but take the leadership.