Many people at the EAGx Berkeley Hackathon chose to contribute to open source projects, which is a great way to learn and practice software engineering skills—not just programming, but project workflows like using version control, static analysis, testing, and responding to code reviews (it certainly worked for me). This page goes into more detail on how and why people contribute to OSS projects. However, to calibrate your expectations: contributing to open source can be challenging, and getting set up is often time-consuming.
I therefore recommend running through this interactive intro to GitHub and then this quickstart guide (up to “be social”) well before coming. If you don’t have previous experience in open source or working in industry (few academic labs teach these skills!) you’ll probably spend most of your time learning the process of contributing, rather than writing code—but it’s worth it!
Thank you so much for your suggestions and involvement!! Also, recommendation that everyone download an IDE (e.g., VSCode) before we get started on Monday.
Many people at the EAGx Berkeley Hackathon chose to contribute to open source projects, which is a great way to learn and practice software engineering skills—not just programming, but project workflows like using version control, static analysis, testing, and responding to code reviews (it certainly worked for me). This page goes into more detail on how and why people contribute to OSS projects. However, to calibrate your expectations: contributing to open source can be challenging, and getting set up is often time-consuming.
I therefore recommend running through this interactive intro to GitHub and then this quickstart guide (up to “be social”) well before coming. If you don’t have previous experience in open source or working in industry (few academic labs teach these skills!) you’ll probably spend most of your time learning the process of contributing, rather than writing code—but it’s worth it!
Here’s a link to some specific open source issues.
Thank you so much for your suggestions and involvement!! Also, recommendation that everyone download an IDE (e.g., VSCode) before we get started on Monday.