I am currently unemployed after spending the last 7+ years running a small business with my wife. In order for my wife to accept a new job offer, we closed our business to move from our home of Iowa to Charlotte, NC.
I spend most days learning bits and pieces about computers, specifically Linux and Android. I read, I learn and I experiment, doing new things with computers that I find interesting or challenging. I've done some free online course work learning C. I've made a few Android apps for personal use. Everyday I find something new to try and learn, from bash scripting and cronjobs to ssh. I've learned about and set up apache2 web servers and game servers and done some compiling of kernels, Android ROMs, and "Linux from Scratch". Plus I learn anything else I've got do to make my new pet project work. Google pretty much taught me everything I know.
At the urging of my brother, who has been a professional developer for many years, I am starting to learn python.
My blog is here
The course is off to a rocky start. The various background levels of the students seems too diverse. It would have made more sense to inform the students that certain levels of knowledge and skill were expected before starting.
My main gripe is that I have all the skills to do everything that has been covered so far, easily. But I am still made to feel like a retard because I don't have my Old Hackers Badge.
I was given some information about what NOT to do, when in digest mode on mailing lists. But I was given absolutely NO information about what not to do (or even better... what TO DO) when dealing with the mailing list in this class when not in digest mode (as I wasn't getting digest emails in time to prepare for class).
This class seems like it is going to end up with two students (and I won't be one of them because I keep screwing up the emails too), the two who needed this class the least. I'll probably end up just continue doing Zed A Shaw's python instruction (and other online tutorials) on my own. I'm getting pretty discouraged.
I don't personally share a lot of information about myself on line but let me share what people know about me on line. My name is Elijah and I'm a computer geek.
I started using Linux around 7 years ago because I wanted to try something other than Windows on my old slow laptop at the time. I started with no help whatsoever from anyone, and did not have anyone to help me either. I had to rely on myself to learn and fix my own problems. The more I learned, the more eager I became to learn even more. I moved from distribution to distribution until I found Gentoo.
Seven years later, here I am a Gentoo contributor with my own overlay and some packages in the Gentoo tree. I test packages for stabilization on Gentoo, write ebuild scripts to compile and/or install packages on Gentoo and contribute to the community as much as I can.
I know a bunch of different programming and scripting languages. I also know hardware descriptive languages but that's not the point of this introduction. I hope the point was made clear of what one person with Google can do all by themselves.
Oh boy, Kushal wanted me to be "brutally honest" so that is exactly what I'm going to do.
Let's start first with Kushal. Unfortunately, Kushal is a very nice guy and has a lot of patience, much more patience than I could ever have. Being a nice guy is usually considered to be a good thing but in this exact case it isn't. A lot of the time spent in the sessions is wasted on answering questions that should have either been obvious or found with a simple Google search before the session. If I were to be him, I would moderate the channel during the session and take questions at the end of the session.
I'll move on to talking about the laziness shown in this summer training sessions so far. Every member who joined the training sessions signed up by their own will. I hope that nobody forced you to sign up and I'm pretty sure that nobody did. You, the members, took the decision to sign up for it so you have to stand up for your decision and give the time and effort to learn. If you expect to sit down and relax the whole session without doing any effort at all and end up knowing python then you are mistaken. Well, mistaken is a small word to describe this, maybe "you missed the point by a light year" would be more appropriate.
Since the beginning of the sessions and until now, without any exaggeration, I've noticed that nobody reads anything. When I say anything I mean nothing. Users are still making the same mistakes over and over again even after being corrected so many times. I have this impression that people are not even reading what's been said in the channel during the sessions even. It saddens me to find Kushal and others working as hard as they can to provide these summer sessions and everyone attending not bothering to appreciate their work. If I were to be Kushal I would take that behavior as an insult. That is disrespectful.
The mailing list is a mess. Every mistake written or unwritten has been broken and not even once. After I sent my email of the mistakes done by the users, including myself, I look at the mailing list and I feel like there is no hope for some of the users. Some users did not even bother reading the email Kushal sent. Three of us were on IRC helping him out to make sure the email is perfectly clear to everyone and works for everyone on all distributions. We even made him add the following to make sure people wouldn't email the mailing list:
reply to this email directly to me with your username.
The outcome was people emailing the mailing list and the worst part is none of those emails were correct. Now I have no idea where Kushal gets the strength to put up with this.
Let me give you an idea on how much time was lost during the previous sessions on useless, irrelevant and painful stuff. After mbuf's sessions at the beginning of the sessions, I stopped attending some of the sessions and read the logs later because I couldn't stand being there. Every 1 hour session took me 5 minutes to study. I also expanded my knowledge by reading some more about the subject for 55 minutes on the web. That's 55 minutes lost on someone who doesn't know how to use the shell, which was explained previously, or how to create a file, also explained previously, or how to install a package on their distribution.
If someone opened the terminal once everyday for half an hour and practiced doing stuff with it we could've saved ourselves half of the sessions lost which, by itself, is sad. People should start doing their homework at home and work more on their knowledge before getting to the sessions and losing other people's time.
During yesterday's session, for example, people gave a list of the programming languages they knew. Then during the session, a lot of useless stupid questions were asked and I felt so good that Kushal did not answer them, mostly. I'm bringing up this topic to show something that no one should do; making claims they can't prove. I'm not going to mention names, but they know who they are. One who claimed to know programming asked what <stdin> is. Now, what one should do with such a person ? How could you possibly answer such a question ? After I forced myself to calm down, another person asked what the #!/usr/bin/env python at the beginning of the file is. That someone claimed to know python (if I'm not mistaken). There is no amount of words to explain this behavior. If I were Kushal I would've banned that person. That's exactly why I was avoiding some of the sessions.
Now to clarify things as a conclusion, I'm not perfect. No one is perfect, we all make mistakes, I make mistakes. Making mistakes is human but not learning from your own mistakes when corrected is not the path to learning. That's a big tell that that person is not willing to learn anything and is losing their and other people's time with these sessions and by attending them.
My name is Elita Lobo. (elita15) I am a student of NIT Durgapur.
Views about Dgplug Summer Training
Dgplug Summer Training has provided us a unique opportunity to enrich our knowledge about FOSS and hence helps us to contribute to it in future.Dgplug training has been an interesting and fun learning experience till date.I am thankful to the mentor for his patience and number of hours he dedicates in training us everyday.
I guess it's not interesting for most people to read something about me, and because most information I usually tend to give away has already been seen and discussed in the IRC channel (Profesionnal tip: Being in this digital classroom at other times than class is not the worst idea. Beneath interesting discussions about FOSS and other things you are more likely to get some pieces of information way earlier than the people just following the mailing list.) I'll skip this part of the essay and head straight to the more interesting things, namely ..
Kushal has been very patient, very helpful to everyone and has aimed his efforts towards anybody willing to learn a thing or two. And for most of the time it felt like his efforts and he himself have been kicked by, virtual, feet.
The correct behaviour for mailing lists or, more general, the ways how free projects communicate, have been a matter of discussion in one of the first lessons. There was plenty of material provided, especially aimed at those people that have never had any contact with this topic before. And a lot of folks said "Thank you very much! That looks like some good material to read!"
This was about a week ago. We have started actually using the mailing list for communication just a few days ago - and it was pure chaos. Even worse, it mostly still is. HTML mail, top postings, massquotings, completely empty mails .. I mean, seriously? Did anyone even read anything about mailing lists?
It was the same for the introductory class held on git. The concept of a decentralized source code management system may be new, but it's not that complicated to grasp and the theoretical part was held as short as possible and the practic approach was very basic and slow, slow enough that even complete beginners should have been capable of following. It was also stated that if you don't know something you should first take a look into the world wide web and after you've done this - if you remain undelighted - you are gladly welcome to ask, in a proper way with enough information provided by you so that folks willing to help you won't have to look into their magic information glassball.
"Is not working", "this does not werk help" [Mistake intended.] and questions like this were the main ones were coming up. And many of them resulted out of the lack of basics, not-read-assignments or stubbornness. Maybe ten percent or even less were actual problems above the usual complexity. Is this really necessary?
Even if it looks like it I'm in no way saying that I'm perfect. I make mistakes too. I was just lucky enough that I was mostly in the IRC when kushal needed somebody for testing purposes and therefore was capable of avoiding the mailing list for now. Maybe this whole article will be a huge failure and I'm going to make a ton of mistakes. But that's the path of learning. Fail, learn out of it, try again and make it better. I've just been missing the "make it better"-part in the last few days ..
I work around ten hours every day, sometimes more and sometimes less. Beneath that I have to run a household for myself and try to educate me in order to keep developing myself in my profession. So you can believe me that I know how it feels to have little time to spend. And that you are exhausted after being busy all day. And that you sometimes just want to go to sleep or just relax a little bit. Even though some people would not agree with me I consider that a normal and absolutely legitimate feeling. But how about investing fifteen more minutes on reading some assignment for this class. Or play around with the Python interpreter a little bit? Fifteen minutes seem to be a waste of time for most people, but if they are wasted, why not waste them on class-related stuff? You don't even need to take this journey alone, there are people at the IRC waiting for somebody to come have a chat with them. They are eager to help. And they don't charge you anything. The only thing they ask for is that you stick to some simple rules. That is all. This small commitment would take a lot of pain from kushal's back. And therefore would help us all by making the course easier manageable for him.
Something else what bothers me is the fact that for me (I like to emphasize this. I'm not the holder of the ultimate truth, even though I'd sometimes love to be.) it often looks like many people are not actually enjoying what they are doing. To me it feels like they are attending the lessons just like one of those lessons back at school, maybe about a subject you really did not like but you had to attend the lessons anyway. I feel like the euphoria to learn something new is not really there. Learning something is the main goal of this course, for sure. But learning should go hand-in-hand with enjoying something. I urge you to think about this.
I am Christina Beemer.
A superb experience of learning python. It is always a delight to learn programming languages. But learning it online is something new. A very good experience. Enjoyed.
my name is Anurag Kumar, I am a student at heritage institute of technology, kokata
I really like this training, I get to learn new things (almost) everyday. Open source was a new thing for me and this training helps me discover it more. Using git has been the best part till now.
This is Pritha Ganguly,a 5th semester Btech student of Computer Science and Engineering department of National Institute of Technology,Durgapur.
This is the first time I am attending this summer training.My roommate told me about it.I am enjoying being a part of this training.Though the mentors here are a bit strict about following the guidelines(which is good), they are eager to help the newbies like me(of course if they are eager to help themselves).At present we just begun with python training.
I am Sudip Maji, C. S. E. 3rd year student in Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College. I am from Durgapur, West Bengal.
Currently I am doing dgplug training and as far I enjoyed it and learned a lot as example how to send mail correctly, how to use terminal and lot more and looking forward to learn more.