FOSS Cell of government engineering college sreekrishnapuram is exploring and guiding each other in open source technologies. Fortunately me and some of my friends got an opportunity to coördinate FOSS Cell. As a part of its activities we conducted meet ups once in a week, workshops etc.
To aware the students about general ideas about Free and Open Source Software (philosophy/licensing etc) we conducted a workshop on topic “FOSS , Startups and Career” by Pramode sir of Recursive labs. The workshop quickly enumerated some important FOSS tools / languages /frameworks which are heavily used in the industry. We got an idea about what start ups are, and how we can build up our FOSS skills to get exciting start up job.The response from all other participants were great . The workshop really inspired us , after the workshop the graph of participation got higher than expected. After that some evening discussions conducted about basic Unix commands and website designing, the students became very much interested to work with Foss cell.
Got an opportunity to conduct two day workshop by Noufal Ibrahim sir on topic ” Programming as Engineering”. The purpose of the workshop was to deliver some general idea about real world programming. We got some new possibilities and some ideas to think about. The workshop dealt with five main topics UNIX,Optimization,Higher order functions,Data Structures and small languages.
Day one forenoon session started with the topic UNIX.The usage of Unix commands in real world scenario were well explained by the speaker.Afternoon section dealt with optimization topic,which started with simple c program to get prime numbers. The same program was then tuned over and again and squeezed performance out of it. It was a real entertainment for us. All are really inspired and excited with the presentation of the speaker.
Day two forenoon session started with the topic Higher order function. The language used to explain this was python ,so many students got an introduction to python and new programming idiom that we are not familiar with ( usage of memoization for optimizing the code and tracing etc are new to us). The afternoon section includes Data Structures and small languages. Speaker introduced some new data structures like bloom filter etc. There was a section to do programming with memory constraints, since we are not usually asked to do things with constraints. That was new to all and got an idea about how to complete a task within optimum time along with all other constraints.
Last topic was small languages where speaker introduced two languages graphviz and Gnuplot. Participants required to draw some Debain package dependency graphs and some state machine transition diagrams using dot. After that,speaker dealt with a tiny pre-processor in python that converts a textual description of an algorithm into a flowchart. Gnuplot is introduced to draw graphs. Those were very much useful in academics, we were very much excited and inspired by the workshop. As a whole the two days were fruitful and learned a lot of new possibilities , enjoyed it fully.
Other than this by collaborating with IIT Bombay, under the guidance of Raseek sir , Department of computer science ,me and Arjun V from computer science department got an opportunity to coordinate SpokenTutorial workshops . Today, SMEs and Govt. departments are moving to Open Sources like Linux OS. Students with FOSS knowledge will have an edge in the job market. They can also become entrepreneurs and use Open Source Software in their businesses, saving money vs., if they were using commercial software.The Spoken Tutorial project is about teaching and learning a particular FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). The response was great from the participants and many got a good exposure to FOSS technologies after some SpokenTutorial workshops.
The main purpose of FOSS Cell is to bring together students and users to explore, discuss and share knowledge on usage of open source software. Hope FOSS Cell activities will continue with more discussions, meet ups, workshops or events. Behind the success of the coordination of FOSS Cell activities, there exist a lot of open source enthusiasts from Government Engineering college sreekrishnapuram, staffs ,professors and many, few of them are Regu raj sir , Head of the department Computer Science & Engineering , Ali akbar sir , Staff coordinator of Foss cell, Ananthakrishnan from electronics department, Deepak from IT department and Arjun from Computer Science department. Main purpose of the cell is to motivate and inspire students to get into open source community and start exploring. Let us know if anyone have suggestions ( fossgecskp@gmail.com )
Happy OpenSourcing !!!
( Courtesy : http://recursive-labs.com/
http://www.spoken-tutorial.org/
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