User:RyanDang/FSOSS 14

Key Note Bob Young

Bob Young is co-founder of Red Hat Inc. and also the owner of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League. He is a huge software and open source fan. Everything is distributed by Red Hat is under GPL license. Bob Young claim himself to be “One of the world worst students” and how academic people don’t like him! He believes that your academic success has 0 correlation to your success in life and how marks don’t matter; only what you learn matters. It was great to hear from one of the very first people who work in the open source field. He talked about how he was just a type writer seller, lost his job and became unemployed to become the co-founder of Red Hat. He talked about how his meeting with Dr. Thomas Sterling change his point of view about Open source. He also mentioned briefly of how GPL license is invented, what he like and doesn’t like about GPL. He also answers interesting questions such as should company rely on poorly maintained open source projects. He talked about how some of the open source projects that got so big and it became unmaintainable for the original project owner and then shifted to a new owner who is more capable of maintaining the project. He also talks about the reason behind Linux changes from KDE desktop to Gnome desktop. How one piece of permissive software in an open source project can cause so much trouble for Red Hat to the point they have to write their own Linux Desktop.

Building a CI system with free tools, and duct tape by by Julian Egelstaff

You must attend two talks and write a report and analysis of the two. Your report must be 1,000 words in length and include:

Julian Egelstaff is an enthusiastic open source developer. He shows us how to add automated testing to our development process using GitHub, Travis-CI, Sauce Labs and Selenium builder. It creates a continuous integration system that can test your web application after every single commit on GitHub. It’s free for all open sources project so you can run as many test as you want. There is a monthly fee for using Travis-CI and Sauce Labs if your project is not open source. So as long as your project is open source, you can use it for free forever! This is why “open source is awesome!”

The speaker main point here is just to show how web developer can use different set of tool to have a continuous integration of system that can be tested and to show how awesome it is to be an open source project because there are many tools are free for open source projects.

Analysis of the two speaker’s views on open source

Those both speakers talk about different topic. Bob Young is more about story telling of how he gets to where he is while Julian EgelStaff is more about demonstrating and on hand tutorial of how to implement a testing system for your web application. Both speakers clearly show their love for open source. Julian EgelStaff mentioned “Open source is awesome” several times throughout his presentation while Bob Young showing his passion for open source. They are both benefit from open source. For Julian, he is able to do as many testing as possible for his company web application for free as for Bob, we was able to make a lot of money. From unemployed to billionaire

Conclusion

During the FSOSS event I was able to attend 2 Keynotes Bob Young and Chris Aniszczyk and 4 other talks about Open source. It is an eye opening experience. I was also able to do some networking and have some good conversation with 2 of the presenters. At least two of the presenters from the talks I attended mentioned that what you learn in school doesn’t matter much. If you know what field you want to go into, go out there and look for the top 5 languages/technologies that are most commonly use in that field and start focus on one of the languages or technologies and get really good in it. One of the presenter told me that when he was in school, he didn’t study what was taught but he focus on getting really good with C#. Once he graduated, he was able to find a job very quickly even though the job he got had nothing to do with c#. However, because he know C# so well, he was able to pick up the other languages very quickly. This really makes me think if I am wasting my time in school learning things that won’t help me in the field that I am going into. 80% of the courses that I am taking are irrelevant to web developer and I feel like I don’t have an option to be more focus in the career that I am heading into. Keynote Bob Young also mentioned that Academic success has 0 correlation with your success in life. I am one of the students and put his grade before everything else because I think it will help me succeed in my career. FSOSSS had changed my point of view about academic. I was considering not to write this report since it only worth 5% and grade doesn’t really matter. I could’ve spent 6 hours for writing this report to working on an open source project or something.