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Speaker Name	Andrew Cowie
Organization	Operational Dynamics
Type	Tutorial
Scope	General
Slides	Click to download
User to hacker in 90 minutes: the tools and techniques needed to actually contribute to Open Source
Abstract	The essence of open source is not USING free software, but CREATING it. The purpose of this talk is to teach you how to contribute to open source projects. Admittedly, getting involved isn't as easy as it could be, but that's often because you haven't had an opportunity to learn how to go about participating in a project's development. This talk is aimed at people who probably already know something about Linux, already know how to program, and already believe how important free software is... but haven't yet made the jump to being contributors themselves. And that's LOTS of people. So, it's time to become and open source hacker. It's easy to talk about "interacting with the community" and "filing bugs" and "submitting a patch", but until you know how to do this, it can all be a bit daunting. So we are going to be do all these things, TOGETHER, on stage, LIVE. We're going to file real bugs about real problems in real open source projects, and then we're going to fix 'em, right there on the screens in front of you. How do you contribute? You have to check out source code, learn how to build open source software, run it, test it, and debug it... but it doesn't stop there! Then comes creating and sending patches, receiving feedback from the upstream project, dealing with rejection, but finally when you're successful exalting your success. For the beginners in the audience we'll be demonstrating what you do to submit to upstream, but we're also going to show what the upstream people do when you make that contribution. So we'll see the whole open source process, beginning to end. Take joy in your work, do your work in the open, and open it to the world. Do that, and you ARE an open source contributor.
Pre-requisites	This is a technical talk (ie, very hands on) but aimed at the general full-conference audience. Not that everyone will do it, but we will be pushing a series of briefing notes and links (via blogs, emails to list, etc) ahead of time so that people can get the background on the things we'll be talking about so they get more out of the talk. That said, my presentation won't assume that you did this homework; it'll just enhance the experience. We will be publishing and handing out on the day a one-page set of "cheat notes" with the key command lines and URLs that we're talking about so that everyone can take home the essential details and not worry about trying to mad scribble them down.
Speaker Profile	Andrew Cowie is a long time Unix and Linux user & advocate, but somewhat unusually was an infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal Military College with a degree in engineering physics. He saw service across North America and a peacekeeping tour in Bosnia. He later ran operations for an SMS company in Manhattan and was a part of recovering the firm after the Sept 11 attacks. Now based in Sydney, Andrew runs Operational Dynamics, a consultancy helping clients worldwide with crisis management: crisis prevention, proactively evaluating organizations for resiliency and disaster preparedness; change management, helping plan and execute major upgrades to their critical infrastructure; and troubleshooting, working with people to solve difficult problems in uncertain and complex environments, be they financial or technical ... at levels ranging from the board suite to the engineers doing hands-on implementation. Andrew is a frequent conference speaker, presenting about increasing the level of professionalism in the operations world. On the technical side, Andrew has extensive experience as a Unix/Linux sysadmin, Java developer, and has long been an Open Source advocate. Most recently, he has been contributing to the GNOME project by maintaining the java-gnome bindings allowing you to write GTK programs from Java. You can usually find him online as AfC on irc.freenode.net or irc.gimp.net