Since OSD600, I have been thinking to transfer my Open Source knowledge to my fellow vietnamese developers at Seneca. There are a couple reasons why I think it could be a good idea. First, Not many people get the chance to take both OSD courses like I did because OSD600 is only offered in the Fall and you need it to enroll in OSD700. I also did not notice that many vietnamese developers in the class. I feel many of them missing out on two of the best (if not the best) courses at Seneca. Personally, I believe OSD600 has helped me get my coop this term by sharpening my technical skills and boosting my confidence. Hence, my first reason is to provide initial guidance to open source knowledge and practices to vietnamese developers at Seneca, so they have a better chance to get a job after graduation. My second reason is to help build a tech community for developers at Seneca through communicating and building things together. My personal experiences working on Open Source projects have been very positive. I realized the only way to be innovative and progressive is to be open and respectful. In OSD700, we have a small team with people who are from different backgrounds and have different thinking process, but we worked together very well to successfully deliver the next pack of Telescope’s features. Since we started, we have made a new contemporary UI with Material UI, made the app into microservices, and made it into a PWA. All of these topics are trending and knowing them while you are still in school would prove critical later on.
To start the initiative, I have already got a few of my friends on board who are willing to work on this project with me. The idea is to imitate the process that we have been doing in OSD classes. I would steal some of professor Dave’s approaches to help the participants begin their contributions asap. So what’s the project will be about? Honestly speaking, I am not too sure now and I think this would require more discussion among the team. However, the initial idea is to build a platform for developers at Seneca to share and learn from each other. I will be open to ideas and will try to sketch it out with the team so we will have a plan to follow.
Ideas would not realize if you did not act on them. And I believe the right time to do it is now.
Thank you for reading.
Tony Vu
