Dev Bootcamp in Ankara

Ankara is the capital of the Turkey. The second largest city of Turkey. Due to its elevation and inland location, Ankara has cold, snowy winters and hot, dry summers. Rainfall occurs mostly during the spring and autumn. It was with this nice scenery that the crazy good Dev Boot-camp accompanied with the exciting LO Hackfest 2019 happened and I'm here to tell you all about it!

Mentor

Muhammet Kara is the mentor of all this, a Consultant Software Engineer at Collabora Productivity, Developer of LibreOffice, Member of TDF and GNOME foundation, and GNOME Turkish Translation Team Coordinator. Muhammet has been lecturing, giving workshops and accepting internees at Hacettepe Technology Development Zone in the Hacettepe University for quite a while now. But finding students with the right tool-set and with the all pre-requisites to develop and contribute for LO has been a bit difficult. And that's how this bootcamp came about, a series of courses that provide that initial step in fulfilling all those pre-requisites and that end-up to go beyond that initial goal sponsored by Collabora.

The students

The students were coming from many different levels, ranging from 1st years students to full PhD professionals! On average they were coming from computer sciences background. Nevertheless there were also people from Mathematics and Literature fields of study. And that's awesome :)

After the first sessions the study group decreased in size but always keeping a great effort (even after the bootcamp!)

What was lectured

• First days: Basic C++
• First days: Object Oriented concepts
• Homework
• By the 4th week Kara felt that the students' upcoming tasks would become easier if their development environment was also easier to setup and if a few concepts were cleared up. Thus a couple of extra topics were added to the course :p
  • F/LOSS
  • GNU/Linux
    • Context and Benefits when developing in it
    • How to install and configure, including dual-boot scenarios (Students were quite excited about all the possibilities and started their own get-together)
  • Collaborating
    • GIT: What is it, How to setup and How to operate
    • Gerrit
  • Development environment
    • Installing all the tools and dependencies needed, sometimes even with short videos (Qt Creator Kurulumu - Windows 10 Üzerinde)
  • Contributing
    • Easyhacks
    • Reviewing and sending patchs

Wow, that's a lot. So many topics with so many interesting ramifications. Note that by having people (students and non-students) from such different backgrounds and with such different goals it could have been a slightly not so interesting event. On the contrary! It actually worked out quite wholesomely, that multidisciplinary group just worked as a exciting independent unit, so and so that they started to schedule extra get-together events every Saturday. Yes on every weekend :)

We closed 2019 as the last event of the year with the Hackfest in Turkey while also being the first to Open 2020 with the 1st get-together of sorts here in Ankara :) - Kara

LibreOffice Ankara HackFest 2019

• Working with local git branches for LibreOffice development
• Event based programming in LibreOffice for UI widgets
• Installing and working with Glade, and the .ui files in LibreOffice

Students' feedback

Here are a couple of written reviews taken from the event's wiki page:

This event greatly improved my vision. Now I have healthier ideas about what free software is, and I think I'm going to enter the community. - Çağatay Yiğit

Until today, I had some concerns about sending patches. Nevertheless, I had any concern about sending. This event was technically educative - Yusuf Keten

I learned processes of contributing to any open source projects and more informations about easyhacks in Libreoffice. - Selim Şeker

These are just some of the commits taken from https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/q/reviewer:%22Muhammet+Kara%22

Oh boy oh boy! So many contributions, congratulations for such a good effort!

If you live in Turkey don't be shy, go say hello to them on Telegram (LibreOffice Geliştirme) and join forces :)

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Footnotes

Sponsor: Collabora Productivity

University's website: https://hacettepe.edu.tr/english/

Kara's blog: https://muhammetkara.com/

Turkish LO Telegram group: LibreOffice Geliştirme

Hack-fest wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Ankara2019

Header photo: "Overview of central Ankara. Photo taken from the Citadel on the hilltop near Ulus. In the front there's the old town, in the upper left part you can see the Atakule (spheric tower) and the Kocatepe Mosque." Author: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen and in http://bjornfree.com/galleries.html