The Outreachy Program - May 2015

This is the first post of a series of posts about my Linux Kernel development journey in the context of the Outreachy Program.

What is the Outreachy Program?

Formally known as OPW (Outreach Program for Women), the Outreachy Program is similar to the Google Summer of Code, it is a paid internship for 3 months meant to encourage women and other minority groups to participate with the development of free and open source projects.

It was organized by Gnome but it is being moved to the Software Freedom Conservancy organization.

Usually there are two editions of the Program per year and the interns earns $5500 total. Each intern is mentored by a veteran developer.

To participate, one doesn't need to be a student as in GSoC, the interns just need to have enough time to work 40hs per week on their projects, otherwise it is likely that the intern won't be accepted.

How can you apply?

Usually, there is a list of open source projects int the Outreachy page, for example: Linux Kernel, Mozilla, Gnome, Debian, etc.
You need to chose one of those projects and go to theirs specific sites. This is the link to the Linux Kernel Outreachy Program.

The projects are responsible to select the interns, so it is highly recommended to start sending patches before the application period ends.

In the case of the Linux Kernel, there is a really good tutorial about how to send your first patch. It basicaly consists in running a script that will catch style problems, like a missing empty line between the declaration of variables and the code. You can easily fix one issue like that and send them a patch.

In the Linux Kernel, there are also a task list that you can start with.

What it has to do with me?

I am one of the interns of the Linux Kernel projects!!!! \o/
I am going to explain more about my project in another post.
I was accepted and the internship goes from May 25th to August 25th. (Yes, it has already started). Thus, I am going to be posting at least once every two weeks.

How the posts will be organized?

There will be two kinds of post:

1) Log posts: short posts that will be made more often explaining my current work, daily problems and solutions.
These kind of post will have the Outreachy label and the Log label.

2) Article posts: More complete posts about a subject, a tutorial or a explanation about how something works with useful links.
These kind of post will have the Outreachy label and the Nerd label.

If you want to follow both, you can follow the Outreachy feed, or you can follow just the one most interesting to you (the Log or Nerd feeds).


Any questions you can leave a comment or ping me on irc (my nick is koike) at freenode or gnome or oftc servers.

Cheers!