Two-Day Virtual Workshop on Open Source: An Overview

Join us for an intensive, two-day virtual workshop designed to equip you with the fundamental concepts and hands-on skills necessary to begin your journey as an Open Source contributor. This program provides a powerful mix of essential theory and practical command-line knowledge, ensuring you can confidently make your first contribution.

Day 1: Foundations and Command Line Tools

Day one establishes a strong conceptual understanding of the open source ecosystem and introduces the crucial command-line tools you'll use daily.

Core Concepts & The Ecosystem

• Introduction to Open Source: History, philosophy, and the "Four Freedoms" that define the movement.

• Impact on Tech: Understanding how open source drives innovation and industry standards.

• Licensing Essentials: Overview of common Open Source Licenses (e.g., MIT, GPL) and their legal implications for code usage and distribution.

• Community Roles: Identifying different roles (Maintainer, Contributor, User) and the dynamics of participation within a project.

Mastering the CLI

• Bash Commands (Bash CMD): Practical command line execution focusing on the core shell commands for file system navigation and manipulation, including ls, cd, mkdir, touch, cp, and rm.

• Advanced CLI: Learning to view file content (cat, less) and utilizing input/output redirection and piping for efficient workflow management.

Day 2: Version Control and Contribution Workflow

Day two is dedicated to the industry-standard tools for collaborative development and the step-by-step process of contributing code to a project.

Git: The Version Control System

• Git Fundamentals: Understanding version control, the three working states, and the concept of a local repository.

• Essential Git Commands (Git CMD): Hands-on practice with fundamental commands:

• Setup and Initialization: git init, git clone.

Saving Changes: git status, git add, and git commit.

• Branching & Merging: git branch, git checkout, and git merge for isolated development.

GitHub and The Open Source Contribution

• GitHub Collaboration: Understanding remote repositories, and pushing/pulling changes using git remote, git push, and git pull.

• The Contribution Model: Learning the standard Fork and Clone workflow used by the majority of open source projects.

• Pull Requests (PRs): The process of creating and managing Pull Requests—the primary method for submitting code and engaging in code review.

The Workshop Surprise!

• The "Open Source Explorer" Challenge: To conclude the workshop, a live, beginner-friendly contribution challenge will be revealed from a major open source project. The first participant to successfully submit a qualifying Pull Request will receive a special reward