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Open source: what, why, and taking your first steps

Yo Yehudi

y.yehudi@wellcome.ac.uk

@yoyehudi

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To follow along, please open

http://bit.ly/open-source-magenta

y.yehudi@wellcome.ac.uk

@yoyehudi

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My Job:

Open Source Technical Lead for Data for Science and Health at The Wellcome Trust (August 2020)
Open Source Software Engineer at the University of Cambridge (2015-2020)

Stuff I do:

Software Sustainability Institute Fellow
Currently an EngD student at The University of Manchester
Editor at the PLOS Open Source Toolkit
Editor emeritus at JOSS, the Journal of Open Source Software

Passion projects:

Open Life Science co-founder - share your science openly
Code is Science founder and manifesto co-author.

Yo Yehudi

@yoyehudi

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Background - before I got into software development

📞☎️ Callcenter sales & customer service

💻📠 Admin worker (yes, that’s a fax machine!)

🛠💻 Tech support

🎓 I did a part-time degree in Computing and IT over 9 years.

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Q1: What is Open Source?

@yoyehudi

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Open source isn’t the same thing as free.

Some free software isn’t open source (no one can see, modify, or re-use its code)
Sometimes open source software isn’t free

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Open Source is simply sharing the design for your work so it can be re-used and re-mixed by others*

* for software it also needs an open source licence

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Q2: Is Open Source important? Why / why not?

@yoyehudi

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Why open source (for new coders)

Prove your experience: When you’re new in any field, proving you know your stuff is hard if you don’t have employment experience. Open Source contributions allow you to prove your experience even without job history.

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No-one can take it away

When you work on proprietary (closed) software, if the company changes your work or stops existing, your contributions are effectively lost. Not with open source!

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Why open source (in general)

Hacker ethic - nobody should have to reinvent the wheel. If you have benefitted from other’s work, you should give back to the community
Distributed collaborative innovation: share your work, and others will share back
Decentralisation, appropriation and customisation
Document for others and for you: If you include documentation to help others set it up, it’ll be easier for you to come back to the project when you’ve forgotten what you did.

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Open source software does amazing things

The first image of a black hole!

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, Akiyama, K., Alberdi, A., Alef, W., Asada, K., Azulay, R., ...Yamaguchi, P. (2019). First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole. Astrophys. J. Lett., 875(1), L4. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85 (Licence: CC-3.0)

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Getting started contributing to Open Source

@yoyehudi

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Q3: Have you ever tried contributing to open source before?

@yoyehudi

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Dip your toes

Dip your toes into open source, one step at a time

Photo from Unsplash, by Ramesh Iyer - https://unsplash.com/photos/CRhznMXoJlc

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+

Presented by

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Make 5 pull requests on GitHub during October, earn a free t-shirt

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

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First timers only

https://www.firsttimersonly.com/

Useful getting-started guide

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Things to look for in a community

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Newbie-friendly issues

Another great initiative is the drive to create beginner-friendly issues that newbies can pick up and contribute to. You can learn more about them at https://www.firsttimersonly.com/, but the gist of it is - label these issues with a tag like “beginner issue” or “first-timers-only”, and provide careful step-by-step instructions. My rule of thumb for these issues is that it should take longer to write the issue up than it will to fix it yourself - but you’re creating an on-ramp for people who have never contributed to open source before, and you’re guiding them on gently.

I’ve shown an example of this above - it includes instructions for what needs to be done, how to do it, and guidance for what to do if you need help. It’s a pretty special experience to walk someone through their first pull request.

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Clear contributor guidelines

From http://intermine.org/contributing/

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Clear contributor guidelines

From https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way

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A Code of Conduct

From https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/policies/code-of-conduct.html

Communities that care about their interactions with others will have a code of conduct, setting out how people should behave.

They should also have clear guidelines about what to do if you need to report a problem.

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Dive in!

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Get paid to code on an open project for three months
Students only 🎓
Once a year - northern hemisphere summer.

Flip Bits, Not Burgers

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Value Exchange

Intern benefits

Interns get paid for three months,
Learn open source community norms
Three months of experience on their GitHub profile
Potential recommendations for future jobs.

Organisation benefits

Three months of project work, often bringing in diverse skills that might not be suitable for a full-time hire
The potential of adding interns to their recruitment pool

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So how does it all work?

Internship ‘coding’ period

Apply in February/March
If accepted:

Community bonding
Coding!
Monthly pass/fail evaluations

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Open source software developers self-report to be over 90% male and 15% or less self-report as BME

R. Stuart Geiger, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qps53, analysis of 2017 GitHub survey

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Outreachy

“Anyone who faces under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technology industry of their country is invited to apply.”

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Outreachy

Similar to GSoC - code over 3 months
Broader range of project types

Code
UX
Design
Documentation

Runs twice a year

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Real-life stories

When open source contributors joined communities

@yoyehudi

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2017

2019

2020

2018

One way to continue to engage your students is to invite them back in later years as mentors.

From our 2017 student cohort, one student returned as a mentor. This worked well, and ramped up a little - we had three ex-students as mentors in 2018 and 2019, and then in 2020 four of our mentors were previous students, and Nikhil, on the left, was a student with the OBF last year, too.

For you as a mentor org, it increases your mentoring capacity - these are people who are familiar with how your organisation works, and with how your tech works, but also people who remember what it’s like to be learning it - they’re in a great position to help others getting started.

For the interns who became mentors, there’s the chance to learn mentoring skills, to remain involved with an open source organisation, and even after the than-you swag at the end of the year you’ll be able to pass on some of the cash paid to you by google as an honorarium or stipend for their time, and potentially give them a funded spot at the GSoC mentor summit.

It’s important to note that these aren’t the only mentors in the program - we also had InterMine employees and wider community members working as mentors - and sometimes people volunteered to be mentors, and assisted during the application phase, but didn’t end up with an intern due to a lack of applicants or lack of student slots available.

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2017

2019

2020

2018

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Collaboration

with other

organisations