 Hello again. Thank you for joining us for the third ever DEF CONSIZE mini-conference. My name is Durka, this is Marek. Hello. Yeah, this is not Radek who usually stands here with me because Radek is sick. I'm not a bit shorter, but I hope I will be. Arek, what's your placement? Yeah, it's good for my neck. So thank you, Marek. And we're sending great things to Radek to get better soon, recover soon. Okay, so some housekeeping notes from us and then we'll move smoothly to the panel discussion that Marek is moderating. So for those who have never been here, we have three parallel tracks of talks in the building, D2, D1 and D3 on the top. Then we have one workshop, so very unique, you should consider attending. It's in S building on the fifth floor. There are so many arrows to get there. And the space is limited and it's awesome workshop about sound. Music, very, very cool. Yes. So make sure you check it out in the schedule and be the first one there. It starts at 3 p.m. Yeah, almost as important as talks and workshop. There is a coffee and snacks and it's complimentary and I believe you already seen it. If you wear the badge, then you will get a coffee. We are also collecting lighting talks on the whiteboard. It's not the whiteboard. Let's call it whiteboard. So if you have some short topic you would like to present to everybody, please write down yourself. Yeah, we will close this day with the session full of lightning talks. It starts at 6 p.m. and right afterwards, make sure you keep the badge or keep the sticker here because we are moving to Fleda for a social event. For the party. Or the party. It depends on you how well we will get it. There is, in the agenda, there is also one talk that is in Czech. So unfortunately, we will not be able to cater for English-only-speaking people. But you can watch it later on YouTube. There is a YouTube channel, DevCon, so please like it, subscribe. There will be all the talks from today uploaded over the next week or so. Yeah, this is the start of our YouTube career. Exactly. Matic. Yes. Okay, I think that's it for the introduction of the conference. Did I miss something? No, no, no. All the notes covered, so we are good. Okay, moving it to you. Thank you. All right. And enjoy the conference. Okay, and we will move to the first event and that is the panel discussion. I will share the mics. So what is this panel discussion about? I will give you a short story which is the reason why I asked for this panel discussion. I am a software engineer in Red Hat and I started my career because I played games and I played an open source game and I wanted to be a good at it. And so I started looking into the Python code to understand exactly what the mechanics are, so I can exploit it. And over the time I started contributing and now my sound is better and now it's worse. All right. And over the time I learned Python and then I got hired as a tester and that's the history. So I believe it's a good that the open source is able to support education with meaningful tasks. You know, I was always quite bored by doing tasks like sort the list because everybody did it already. But contributing to something living, to some living organism, even with something minor, that's what give me the reason to actually try. So here we are. I would like to discuss with my guests whether the open source projects are ready, whether they can be even readier. And yeah, I hope we will have a nice brainstorming session. And it will be a beginning of a broader discussion. All right. Now I will ask my panelists to introduce themselves and I will also ask them to kind of position them within this problem space of education, open source projects, et cetera. So let's start with Matej. So I'm Matej Teich. I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, actually, Marek's colleague. And the reason why I'm here is that we, in our team, we maintain a huge open source project and we managed to attract community to it. And now we are in the growth phase with its challenges and benefits. And even before I joined, I was a general open source enthusiast and actually I got my first job because the boss at that time used a library that I've been maintaining. So my open source history goes like a long way back. Yeah, Dan. Hi, I'm Dan Cermak. I represent the Lizard people here. So I don't work at Red Hat. I work at SUSE, but I also contribute in the Fedora community. And so I guess I can contribute here by community experience. And I also support at SUSE internal network where we try to sponsor open source contributions from newcomers. And I've been myself trying to push in certain projects how to lower the barrier to entry for external contributors, especially non-technical ones. Thank you. Lukas. Hello. So my name is Lukas Kutek and I'm also working in Red Hat. I am a software quality engineer. But I guess that the reason why I am here is that I also taught at high school for almost four years. I left, but I still feel certain depth here. So I currently do talks about Linux and open source for one high school. I also prepared some workshop here. And basically I'm trying to fill the gap here between what high school expects and maybe how we can prepare the students here in this way. And Bara. Thank you very much. Great to be here. Great platform. Before I answer, I'll just ask a question. Who is a student at the moment? Just to get some picture of the audience. Wonderful. Thank you so much. So like roughly half of the people, which is great. And I hope you will have many questions. So my role is educator and researcher on the side of the education. I am teaching here at the university and at the same time in being involved in non-profit organization, trying to make the tech education more approachable to girls, which is called Chiquitas. And in terms of the research, my research is software engineering and software architecture research. And I would say that we actually hugely benefit from the access to open source projects because much of the analysis of like how to develop and tailor software engineering practices is tested and validated on open source projects. So that's like a bit of direction from which I will be speaking. Thank you. And last but not least, it's also you, dear audience, because you are also part of open source projects. So maybe you have something to say, not only questions, but maybe you want to get into the debate. So if you want, we can try. The sound is bit wonky. It's the first talk today, but we can try to incorporate you. All right. I guess we can start with the first topic or question. That is, I feel that there is probably something that already works well. We have quite a few interns in there, for example. So are you aware of any successes in this combination or connection of education and open source that you would like to highlight or just mention? The Google Summer of Code. I mean, that's an easy one. Yeah. I think many projects are a member of that. I know OpenSUSE submits multiple Google Summer of Code projects. That's usually a great opportunity for students to just contribute there. So I hope you've heard of it. If not, Google it. I'm pretty certain it's going to show up as the first place. So that's a great opportunity to just get your hands wet, but it's not really, so it's really mostly for technical contributions. But there's also the Google Summer of Docs, I believe it's the name, which is more for technical writing. In the case you're not a programmer, which I know might sound weird, but those people exist as well. But they can also contribute very much to open source. And so that's a great opportunity for those as well. I can actually say that I've asked the chat GPT what are the best opportunities to start with open source. And it has actually really many ideas. So I want to say that there is not really one platform that you would really need to go to if you want to start. There are so many opportunities. And I would say that over time, many people are really making efforts to make open source more approachable. Also because we still see that it's not that easy as it might look. We are like open community and yet from the distribution of different ages and genders on the platform, we see that it's really not very diverse like the community is. There is a certain age on certain gender that you can find on the platform. But yet, the community is investing enormous effort and it's actually recognizing that there needs to be ways to make it approachable and make it fun. And also thanks to Red Hat who for example organized a mini tutorial for high school girls that we had in education to really get their hands on contributing to open source even if they were just updating documentation. But still having the experience I think pushing through the first boundary is what makes a difference. So it doesn't matter which platform to choose but to make the first step is important. Yeah, I think I can continue with the first step. I can give you one thing. You know, we are at the DevConf. It is the conference here about open source and so on and so on. And I must say I was really glad every time when I noticed that there is some student here of mine who visited the conference because I always tried to notify them, hey, there is a Linux out or there is another conference open out and so on and so on. And actually only minor number of my students eventually came but they came and I think it's just great that there are such events here because they really need a starting point and I think that a lot of years ago, yeah, it was probably some federal related event or maybe Linux days or something like that. There I was for the first time really introduced to an open source world. So yeah, starting point. I would come back to the topic of interns that Marek mentioned. It's not only the only scenario that an intern come to a company and works on an open source project which is finally something else than creating a graph or sorting a list. But we have actually very good experience with a program for high school students when they came to our company and they've been coming like for two, three months and we were teaching them programming on something else than sorting lists. We were teaching them scales like GIT, CI, good coding practices, architecture and things that are useful when developing an open source project. And actually in our team that we did this activity in, we have like two interns, now we can't have more and both of them they basically went through this program of ours, yes. So if you ask the question how do you attract interns to an incredibly dry topic of regulations, compliance, scanning and things like that, that's possible. You just need to make it nice for them and it's much more useful than comparing lists alone and it works, yeah. It can really attract people and make them enthusiastic about that and that's really nice because we need that boring stuff as well. Yeah, because for interns it's not the boring world of regulations, it's just coding, right? So it's the basic level. So it's more pleasant for them. All right, let's stay on the positive note and let's unleash the fantasy a bit and imagine what could be the opportunities in the open source projects and specifically I believe it doesn't necessarily have to be just about coding because the coding is covered. But maybe we have other ways how to incorporate even people from different faculties like faculty of arts or whatever or faculty of law, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if we want but it might be necessary. Any ideas? I'll start with some basics and we can then I think elaborate and come together with more ideas. So what I see as an educator what the open source projects are already giving to students and what I find really huge. One is access to real world examples because what we see in the classroom typically is that you start from scratch with an empty screen, you are by yourself and you have very clear context. So it's been given, right? Like what is the assignment and what is the context of the problem you are solving? Well, what you get access to through those open source projects is that you really see the real world examples which have much more complex context, right? Very often you need to make decisions to wait like one decision against another because the assignment is not like that clear so you are reaching a goal. And you can see the thing in its breadth. We see that like when you look at the problems that students have when they contribute to open source like one of the biggest problems is actually like how to tackle complexity in their brains so that they can actually create a map of the solution in which they understand what impact their change has in the broad scope of the whole project. And that is like a competence that I believe is crucial to any developer but they do not really have that opportunity to get it through education. So that is like one example. At the same time this is a great opportunity for the community if it wants to be more open to newcomers to actually create a way to create this map faster because a newcomer or student does not have this I would say like a mental training to do that like fast and well and that is why we lose many newcomers. It is actually those risk adverse people who are afraid that they will break something because they do not really know like what is beyond like how things influence each other. We are losing those people. There was actually an interesting study that was done on Hadoop by creating a documentation of an architecture of the whole code base and trying to understand how it changed the newcomers ratio to contribute. And it was really substantial. So like people who are newcomers when they get this quicker understanding of the architecture of the whole solution they are much quicker to actually contribute. So yeah, so this is the real world examples and everything that like all that is around it and plus I would like add one more thing and that is access to expertise because they learn from those who really know what they are doing. So access to expertise and I will keep that short so that I can space to others. Yeah, I will just very quickly like second for that. That my biggest frustration was that there was lack of documentation or I was unsure whether the contribution that I'm trying to do is good enough whether it breaks or not and this approach we also we went through this in our project that we are focusing quite a lot on quality so when somebody submits a request they get quite a lot of feedback which is automated basically but it's not garbage. It's like meaningful. It's not that you switch on every check with default values and then you ignore one third of it because it's too strict or it doesn't make any sense. Of course this would be very stupid but I think that the proper CI and up to date documentation with examples that it really can lower the barrier and our observation confirms that. Like the community really is coming and they are able to come up with quite complex contributions and I think it's thanks to the investments into tests and documentation. So I would really say every open source project that wants to grow needs to focus on these things. I will for example add one thing. It's not necessarily related to this line of thought but in our project we work on with Maciej. At some point when we got more contributors we were thinking of organizing some online conference. Very small one but just to meet the contributors from the Lizard folks and stuff. And you know the engineers could organize the conference but if there are people who are not engineers the organization is usually better. You can see here that it's good because it's not organized necessarily by engineers. So it would be awesome to actually have somebody who could help us. So this can be an opportunity for somebody who likes to organize things and be more social without necessarily having a coding skills. And we would still benefit from it. So that could be one example of other opportunities. I see also another opportunity. I am not sure to be honest if it's the realistic one but hey let's imagine students at high school of third or fourth grade. Students right before their final exams and students of this age are or at least some of these students are pretty capable not only coding but of course other fields of education etc. etc. But this is not my point. My point is they produce a lot of interesting stuff just because of their final exams. Final exams at high school is not only about these exams but also about a lot of interesting projects created just for the purpose of these final exams. So where these projects remain. I would say in some almost hidden school or repository and it is not published. No one continues with it. So hey this is a lot of wasted effort and maybe this is an opportunity for open source community to try to you know to move a focus to move a focus a bit to that but maybe maybe it is just a dream maybe it is a bit realistic. I'm not sure about it. So I'm going to maybe move more into the non-technical contributions part because there's I think there's already great projects out there for instance the Fedora Badges project which is I mean at least from an artistic point of view there's many people from outside who are just creating these cool badges so in case you don't know the project it's essentially an achievement system for contributing to Fedora. Pretty cool one and all the badges are or most of the badges are created by the community and I frequently see also external people just contributing who might not even use Fedora so I personally didn't ask them but these are just people who find the project cool who probably don't care about coding or have no interest in learning but they can still contribute and there's a ton of ways so that's a great project and people can contribute translations that's also a pretty big thing. Since we are in the Czech Republic and in case you speak Czech English I'm unfortunately a bit sorry because many open source projects are already pretty well translated into Czech but in case you speak some other less known language there's also a great way to contribute but then again if something is already fully translated it doesn't mean that the translation is actually good so reviewing it is also a great idea writing documentation in case you know the project you don't have to be a coder for that and there's plenty of other ways often just trying the software out and giving feedback can be a bit hard because if you just try someone else's software and you want to tell them it's not good it might come off, it can be hard to communicate but that's then also more of a task to the project to provide means how to get feedback and how to take it from external people. Okay, thank you. We have a question back there. Yeah, I will quickly say I believe I forgot to say that on a slide in the room or under the hashtag defconn-d2 you can post your questions and they will be gathered but if you have... Yeah, I will repeat so the note was that the projects are always changing so the lines to translate are also changing so the need for translation is continuous it will not try out. I mean in a perfect world with perfect tooling the tooling itself would tell you you should check this because it's changed between revisions but then again we probably have all seen our tooling and how it sometimes doesn't do the things the right way.