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Contributing to Open Source Software with Red Hat

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Objectives
Learn how contributing to Open Source Software (OSS) helps you and how to contribute.

Why should you contribute to OSS?

• OSS development == Real world development

• Work on projects that matter

• Develop an independently verifiable resume

• Work with and learn from Really Smart People^TM

Real world development

• Collaborative, team-based work

• Produce deliverables for end-users

• Develop good practices and learn good tools:

  • SCM - Git, SVN, Hg

  • Build - make, Maven, Gradle

  • CI - Jenkins, Go, Travis, Teamcity

  • Issue management - Bugzilla, JIRA, Mantis, Trac, Redmine

  • Review contributions - Gerrit, GitHub, Bitbucket

  • User documentation - Asciidoc, Docbook, Publican

Work on projects that matter

Good open source projects:

• Do not exist for vanity

• Target a particular problem or set of related problems

• Provide solutions for businesses and individuals

They’re integral to today’s computing infrastructure.

Work on projects that matter

• Many open source projects are sponsored by foundations and large companies.

• Contributions associate you with their work and culture.

• Contributions also signal your knowledge about the problem and its solutions.

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Develop an independently verifiable resume

Contributions are independently verifiable and undisputable facts.

Why does it matter?

Develop an independently verifiable resume

Independently Verifiable

• The burden of proof is not always on you.

• Contributions are public: they can be examined and verified by others.

• Contributions can be verified in release notes, mailing list archives, bug trackers, commit logs, and more.

Develop an independently verifiable resume

Undisputable

• Projects guarantee all accredidation is accurate.

• An accepted contribution has added value to the project.

• Your code speaks for itself.

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…​ a real-world portfolio of work gives you an edge when applying for jobs. Contributing to an open source project provides you with that real-world portfolio …​

— Leslie Hawthorn

Work with and learn from Really Smart People^TM

• Smart people tend to work with other smart people.

• An OSS project with smart people draws and fosters others.

• Many of them will be glad to help you learn. Take them up on it.

Work with and learn from really Smart People^TM

Learning takes many forms:

• Understanding and fixing bugs.

• Performing code reviews or having your code reviewed.

• Designing and implementing new features.

If you are engaged in the project, you will be learning.

Getting started with OSS

• Choose a project to contribute to.

  • Preferably one that you already use.

• Get very familiar with it.

  • Get involved on mailing lists, IRC, etc.

  • Discover problem areas. Use the issue tracker.

  • Learn about the processes. Some projects require contributions in only one form.

• Discuss on resolving issues and adding features.

• Submit a patch.

Getting started with OSS

• Be courteous.

• Communicate well. Be accurate with technical and project-specific jargon.

• Learn the political waters. Every project has them.

• Remember that you will make mistakes. Learn from them!

A sustained contribution model

• Keep at it. Continued contributions build respect.

• Become a committer. You can do anything now!

  • …​within reason. :)

• Become very knowledgeable in a subject area. Create demand for you.

• Be open to new opportunities:

  • Presenting at conferences

  • Reviewing books about the project, or even authoring them yourself.

  • Supporting related projects that build on yours.

  • Consulting for companies part/full-time.

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The Gluster Community

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To create the world’s largest and most dynamic community for open software-defined storage

— The Gluster Community Goal

A bit of history

• Starts as an attempt to build supercomputers using commodity hardware

• Storage becomes a bigger challenge and focus shifts to GlusterFS

• GlusterFS starts getting noticed and people start using it

A bit of history

• Better management arrives and adoption of GlusterFS increases

• Red Hat becomes the primary sponsor for the Gluster community

• Grows into a community for open source, software-defined storage

So what is GlusterFS?

GlusterFS is

• an open source, distributed, scale-out filesystem

• fully posix compliant

• user friendly :)

• easily extensible

…​and much more.

Contributing to the GlusterFS community

• Install and use GlusterFS

  • http://www.gluster.org/download

  • http://www.gluster.org/QuickStart

• Join #gluster IRC channel on freenode.net

• Subscribe to the gluster-users mailing list

  • http://www.gluster.org/interact/mailinglists/

• Interact with other users and give feedback

• File bugs

  • https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=GlusterFS

Contributing to the GlusterFS project

• Join #gluster-dev on freenode and the [email protected] mailing list

• Pick something you want to work on:

  • http://is.gd/glusterfs_new_bugs

  • http://is.gd/glusterfs_backlog

  • If you have something not present in the above two places, start a discussion and get it on there

• Read the development workflow document at http://gluster.org/SimplifiedDevWorkflow

• Contribute code!

Gluster community is more than GlusterFS

• Register on http://forge.gluster.org - the home of Open Source software-defined storage development

• Contribute to a project of your choice

• …​or start your own project and announce it to the community

A Small contest

Kickstart your contributions with this small contest

• Visit http://titanpad.com/gluster-misspellings and pick something to fix

• Fix it and submit the fix

• Show the submission at the Red Hat booth

• Win goodies!!

Credits

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Note	Original slide template - Dan Allen & Sarah White