As you may, or may not, know I am taking a course called Advanced Free Software Tools (pdf) held at the IT University in Göteborg, which basically boils down learning about and how to use the tools commonly used in Free Software projects, and as a part of this course the students are encouraged to either take part in an existing project, or to create a project of their own.
I opted to create a new project. I figure there are pros and cons with each approach (if you join an existing project there will (possibly) be a lot of code to get the hang of before you can start contributing, which is bad, but at the same time, it is also good that you get exposed to other peoples code. The inverse for these pros and cons are the pros and cons of creating a project of your own)
One thing that I don’t believe I would have gotten any actual “real-world” training in, had I joined an existing project, is in writing change logs and the more project administrative-posied tasks, and I have to say, I am finding it rather enjoyable, not the administrative tasks in themselves, but researching syntaxes, finding the ones which are conforming to the overall environment in which my project will coexist etc.
For instance, the project I have chosen to work on, is a web-based voting system, implemented as a Django application. It should be some sort of free software in order to follow course-requirements, so a free software license had to be chosen. Then a coding standard. Django is programmed in Python, following the Python coding standard, so my application should follow this as well. The Django team doesn’t appear to have any official changelog document, which would have overridden most other considerations, but instead I fall back to the GNU ChangeLog format.
Who knew all this “administrative work” could actually be this fun?
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Tags: Advanced Free Software Tools, ChangeLog, course, Django, Free Software, GNU, Python
