Earlier I had written about my first Mozilla Education Status Call in which I mentioned my interest to bring Open source software in general and Mozilla in specific to my college, SJCE. Well, good news, it did not stop at that blog post. Actually speaking it had not started with that blog post either. It has been a long standing wish of mine, even from my college days when I participated in the Google Summer of Code 2007. (More about it here). Back then there were a lot of short-comings, both from my side and the institution's side to actually make this idea into reality. Nevertheless, past is past and no point in brooding about it now. The good thing is that now both I and my institution have overcome our short-comings and we have started working towards making that idea into a reality.
Now for some background aka story telling (which I like the most :) )
As stated earlier nothing happened about this idea when I was in my college. Then after passing out of the college and having worked in the industry for about 12-18 months it hit me, very hard, that I did not learn a lot of things during my life as an engineering student which otherwise would have helped me a lot in my professional life. Also I learnt that I was not competent enough as an engineering graduate as compared to some of my foreign counterparts and also those from some of the "famed premier" engineering institutions of the country. It was not just one thing or two, but I saw differences in many aspects, both theoretical and practical. Gradually it occurred to me that these two aspects are inter-related. Since we did not have proper practical experience and exposure to real world software development we never really appreciated the basic theoretical concepts of computer science, which formed our regular syllabus. Note that here I am saying "we" and not "I". This part of the story talks about the state of most of my classmates and that is the worst part. Nevertheless, the moral of the story is the good old philosophy of teaching that the theory and practice should go hand in hand.
Now there is another part to this story. Before I start with it let me tell you that whatever I am putting here is based on what I have perceived. I may be wrong, but I personally don't think so. And this is absolutely not about boasting about myself. So the other part of the story is that, my association with Open Source development communities, Mozilla to be specific, has greatly helped me in my professional life. I am not going to give examples, but it has really really helped me a lot. Also it has sort of put me ahead of several other capable classmates and most juniors of mine (with the difference being considerably more in the case of juniors). The only differentiating factor between me and them was my exposure to developing a real world application, Mozilla Firefox, and the various lessons that I have learnt by being a part of the global developer community. I am also certain that I could have been a much better computer engineer if I had started working with Mozilla at a much earlier stage, say 2nd year or early 3rd year of engineering and had dedicated more time to it. I still continue to learn a lot of general computer science and software development concepts (concepts not specific to Mozilla development) even now whenever I try to fix a Mozilla bug or even when I try to answer any query on the IRC, many a times even when I just observe few people conversing on the IRC.
Ok, enough of story telling. Now is the part for moral of the story. Here is what I inferred from these experiences:
1) Engineering students, specifically Computer Science engineering students, must get exposure to real world engineering (aka application development) to understand and appreciate the theoretical concepts they learn.
2) Open source software development communities provide a suitable environment for students to work with real world applications. Suitable in terms of - opportunities, cost, mentoring and certainly a few more good things also.
With these two points, it was clear to me that we badly needed open source education/exposure for students in my college. I knew that once this happened the possibilities were endless. Every time I heard/read about some of the classic Free Software implementations done at Universities abroad, I thought that our college can at least have several continuous contributors to currently existing open source projects, if not have creators of some totally new world class software projects. We could be having several different groups of students working of different types of software which operate at various levels (which translates to contributing to different open source software). Then they all could be interacting to help each other in troubleshooting problems. I thought of scenarios/discussions like this happening in the hostel corridors:
And so on.
Something like this is really possible. In fact many things much bigger than this are possible. But only if our students start working with and for open source communities.
So this set of thoughts made me work towards getting Open Source into my college. Now that's the background and the story. In the next part I will write about the first set of steps taken towards this, how many of them worked and how many were dead even before they started. And just FYI, the next post too will have some story telling (Obviously since this is just a record of my experiences and my (our) actions).
Now for some background aka story telling (which I like the most :) )
As stated earlier nothing happened about this idea when I was in my college. Then after passing out of the college and having worked in the industry for about 12-18 months it hit me, very hard, that I did not learn a lot of things during my life as an engineering student which otherwise would have helped me a lot in my professional life. Also I learnt that I was not competent enough as an engineering graduate as compared to some of my foreign counterparts and also those from some of the "famed premier" engineering institutions of the country. It was not just one thing or two, but I saw differences in many aspects, both theoretical and practical. Gradually it occurred to me that these two aspects are inter-related. Since we did not have proper practical experience and exposure to real world software development we never really appreciated the basic theoretical concepts of computer science, which formed our regular syllabus. Note that here I am saying "we" and not "I". This part of the story talks about the state of most of my classmates and that is the worst part. Nevertheless, the moral of the story is the good old philosophy of teaching that the theory and practice should go hand in hand.
Now there is another part to this story. Before I start with it let me tell you that whatever I am putting here is based on what I have perceived. I may be wrong, but I personally don't think so. And this is absolutely not about boasting about myself. So the other part of the story is that, my association with Open Source development communities, Mozilla to be specific, has greatly helped me in my professional life. I am not going to give examples, but it has really really helped me a lot. Also it has sort of put me ahead of several other capable classmates and most juniors of mine (with the difference being considerably more in the case of juniors). The only differentiating factor between me and them was my exposure to developing a real world application, Mozilla Firefox, and the various lessons that I have learnt by being a part of the global developer community. I am also certain that I could have been a much better computer engineer if I had started working with Mozilla at a much earlier stage, say 2nd year or early 3rd year of engineering and had dedicated more time to it. I still continue to learn a lot of general computer science and software development concepts (concepts not specific to Mozilla development) even now whenever I try to fix a Mozilla bug or even when I try to answer any query on the IRC, many a times even when I just observe few people conversing on the IRC.
Ok, enough of story telling. Now is the part for moral of the story. Here is what I inferred from these experiences:
1) Engineering students, specifically Computer Science engineering students, must get exposure to real world engineering (aka application development) to understand and appreciate the theoretical concepts they learn.
2) Open source software development communities provide a suitable environment for students to work with real world applications. Suitable in terms of - opportunities, cost, mentoring and certainly a few more good things also.
With these two points, it was clear to me that we badly needed open source education/exposure for students in my college. I knew that once this happened the possibilities were endless. Every time I heard/read about some of the classic Free Software implementations done at Universities abroad, I thought that our college can at least have several continuous contributors to currently existing open source projects, if not have creators of some totally new world class software projects. We could be having several different groups of students working of different types of software which operate at various levels (which translates to contributing to different open source software). Then they all could be interacting to help each other in troubleshooting problems. I thought of scenarios/discussions like this happening in the hostel corridors:
Student_1 and Student_2 are working on the Mozilla Download Manager (and here goes the conversation)
Student_1 : Hey, I want to test my new implementation for Mozilla Download Manager for HTTPS downloads. I am unable to configure my test server for HTTPS. You got any idea?
Student_2 : No dude, never done any server side stuff. Lets ask Student_3 from the Apache team.
Then Student_3 comes and sets up Apache for HTTPS within minutes (because that's day-to-day kind of stuff for him) and Student_1 continues testing his new implementation.
After some time:
Student_1 : Oh man, SSL handshake is taking too much time. I need to talk to Student_4, he knows the SSL library code base.
Student_2 : Yeah, I talked about that to Student_4. He is coming up with a patch to reduce the handshake time. It will probably be ready by tomorrow, I guess. Apparently it was a race condition causing the delays.
And so on.
Something like this is really possible. In fact many things much bigger than this are possible. But only if our students start working with and for open source communities.
So this set of thoughts made me work towards getting Open Source into my college. Now that's the background and the story. In the next part I will write about the first set of steps taken towards this, how many of them worked and how many were dead even before they started. And just FYI, the next post too will have some story telling (Obviously since this is just a record of my experiences and my (our) actions).
