Activities for Newcomers

Boston Summit is a yearly conference at which contributors of the Free and Open Source GNOME project meet to discuss latest developments and hack together. It is run as an unconference, which means the schedule for the sessions is created on the morning of the first day of the event and the sessions are highly participatory. This year, we are adding some events to introduce newcomers to GNOME and to contributing to GNOME. Anyone is welcome to attend these events and the conference, both of which are free.

Please RSVP for the Friday event by adding yourself to the event on Facebook or e-mailing marinaz at mit dot edu

Try out GNOME 3 and learn how to contribute

When: Friday, October 5, 6-9pm
Where: MIT Campus, Room 32-124, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA

Resources from the session:

• GNOME Intro presentation

• Newcomers tutorial attendees were going through, complete with installation instructions

Bring your laptop. You will be ready to dive into the hands-on missions if you have Fedora 17, Ubuntu 12.04 or another very recent GNU/Linux distribution. If you have Windows or Mac, we will help you install a live image of Fedora 17 in a virtual machine. Programming experience is helpful, but not required for this session.

The goals of the event are to

• Demonstrate and help people try out GNOME 3
• Show new and existing GNOME users how to contribute to the project
• Give an example of how to approach contributing to any Free and Open Source project

We will begin with a demo of the latest GNOME 3.6 system and an overview of the tools and processes used by the GNOME community for development. You will learn about the use of

• IRC for communicating with each other

• Git for storing and contributing to the code, documentation, and translations

• Bugzilla for bug tracking

• diff, patch, and Git-specific commands for making patches with your changes

• JHBuild for building a development version of GNOME on your system

• Wiki and Planet GNOME for knowledge sharing

• GNOME Love and Developer Center for information on how to start contributing

We will have a couple key GNOME contributors talk about how they got involved and what motivates them to work on GNOME.

Then, we will have a hand-on workshop, where people new to GNOME 3 will be able to try it out from a live image and everyone will work with the tools for contributing to GNOME. By the end of the event you will have experience talking to other contributors on IRC, checking out a Git repository, making a patch fixing a small bug, creating a bug report in Bugzilla, and attaching a patch that fixes a bug in Bugzilla. You will also have an opportunity to build the modules you are interested in contributing to and start on fixing a real bug, getting a head start for the fix-your-first-bug mini-hackfest.

Throughout the event we will have many GNOME developers ready to help with any questions or issues that arise.

GNOME University

When: Sunday, October 7, 10am-12pm
Where: MIT Campus, Room E51-315, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

Resources from the session:

• First chapter of introduction to C

• An example for introduction to GObject

GNOME University is an online effort to help people learn how to develop for GNOME in C that is just starting out. Anyone can join it. Christian Hergert who is leading this effort will be at the conference and will run a session there. The session will be an introduction to C as it pertains to GNOME. We will get your development environment prepared, and have a short lecture on the anatomy of C.

Fix-your-first-bug mini-hackfest

When: Sunday, October 7, 3pm-6pm
Where: MIT Campus, Room E51-315, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

Optional prerequisites: Go over the slides and the tutorial from the event on Friday, and think about what module you want to fix your first bug in and start running JHBuild as described in the "What's next?" section. JHBuild takes several hours, so it's good to start on it early. Also, feel free to ask anyone at the Boston Summit if you encounter a problem with it. Alternatively, you will be able to work on this at the event or use an image with a pre-built JHBuild checkout.

GNOME is an international community. While people usually communicate with each other on IRC, nothing can beat working together on something in person. In addition to GUADEC, Boston Summit and GNOME.Asia conferences, GNOME contributors meet at specially organized hackfests. Hackfests allow GNOME contributors working on the same area of the project to meet in a small group (usually 10-20 people) and work in the same location for several days.

At this mini-hackfest, you will have a chance to choose an easy bug to work on and fix. While the bug you will train on at the Friday event will be planted, this one will be real! We have many bugs marked with the "gnome-love" keyword in Bugzilla, which means these bugs are suitable for beginners. Established developers will be present at the hackfest to help you choose which bug to work on and help you with it. Also attending different sessions at the conference can help you decide which module you are interested in working on. While we will help you locate the relevant code, API and language syntax during the mini-hackfest, going to the sessions for beginners and going through the tutorials in the Developer Center are good ways to start building the knowledge about the foundations of GNOME development. GNOME has modules written in C, Python, JavaScript and Vala, and reviewing the basics of one of these languages before the event would be helpful, though not required. Going through the exercises from the Friday event or getting help installing Fedora 17 on your computer will also be an option at this event.

GNOME contributors you will meet

Please keep sorted alphabetically by first name