The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit 🇪🇺
Top resources discovered at the Open Source Summit that RGSoC alumni should consider applying to: Outreachy and the Linux Foundation’s LiFT scholarship programme! 🎉
This year the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe took place in beautiful Prague. Fortunately, thanks to RGSoC, I was able to attend this incredible summit.
The Open Source Summit is massive, with over a dozen different tracks. In fact, it is a conglomeration of at least four conferences: LinuxCon, ContainerCon, CloudOpen and the Open Community Conference. In addition, it is run in conjunction with the Embedded Linux Conference. More than 2,000 technologists attend to share information and learn about the latest in open technologies such as Linux, containers, and cloud computing. On the first day, there was a Women in Open Source lunch, which was a pleasant way to be welcomed and also to network. All members of the RGSoC community who were attending the summit found each other at the lunch:
There were talks on the community aspect of open source woven throughout the main three days of the summit. On the third day, Linus Torvalds spoke in conversation with Dirk Hohndel. A theme of this conversation was the process the Linux community engages in when working on the kernel. It was interesting to hear Linus Torvalds emphasise the importance of the work done by kernel maintainers: “The people who do the work and are reliable are the most important in the community. We’re looking for more.” I also appreciated that Linus considered increasing diversity in open source intrinsically good: that it is vital to enable all people who are interested in open source to engage and contribute.
On the fourth day, there was an optional Diversity Summit which I happily attended. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo from that event, so here is a photo of all the attendees at the Women in Open Source lunch!
During the summit, I attended both technical talks and talks focused on community and diversity in open source. I found both to be highly beneficial for my work as a developer and also as an organiser of codebar.
Although I learned a ton throughout the conference, the information that had the most immediate impact on my life was finding out about the Outreachy programme. Outreachy was discussed during the Kernel Internship presentations and at Vaishali Thakkar’s talk on mentoring kernel newbies and then again at the Diversity Summit. Knowing that a programme exists is the essential first step to applying, so I am very grateful that I found out about Outreachy at the Open Source Summit. I messaged the organisers to see if I was eligible to apply (they have a clause that Google Summer of Code alumni are not eligible) and they assured me that RGSoC alumni were eligible for the Outreachy programme. What’s more, they said I should apply in the next few days, as the window for applications was about to close. Examining the projects to apply to, I was very interested in OpenTracing, specifically the task of splitting the Jaeger JavaScript OpenTracing library.
Happily, I was already signed up to attend the optional Tracing Summit the next day. As you can imagine, I listened to the Tracing Summit talks with rapt attention. Then it was time to fly home and work very hard on the application. Fortunately, I was accepted onto the Outreachy programme and will be contributing to the Jaeger JavaScript OpenTracing library!
Being at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit was an incredible experience, and it has led to opportunities that I had not previously imagined. I had a wonderful time, learned an enormous amount, made new friends, and got to spend more time with my super RGSoC supervisor, Inês Coelho.
