[fedora-india] request for speaker for our FOSS festival Mukti 2010

[A. Mani]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Debayan Banerjee <debayanin at gmail.com> wrote:
>

> People who participate in programming contest arenas spend a lot of time
> getting accustomed to the arena rules and keep practicing whenever they are
> free. These arenas have a ranking schemes which require consistent
> performance. If you are a student, you generally choose what you want to do
> with your free time.
> Why dont these people choose to contribute to free software instead? The
> biggest reason is the learning curve. Going through the process of
> interacting with developers online, making sure that a particular feature is
> indeed required and then going to work on it.

> I remember Vignesh, my college friend, deciding to get a patch upstream. It
> took him many months to get a sorting bug fixed with a few lines of code (I
> think).
> For the coder who spends his day writing O(log n) code to lookup n-ary trees
> in limited time in programming contest arenas, looking for similar
> issues/challenges of similar level in real world projects requires an insane
> amount of time investment and also a lot of luck
> Hence, from what I have seen is that the really good programmers who are
> hooked onto the contest scene never look back at anything else. They just
> keep going.
> Can these people be converted to contribute to Free Software? Sure. We need
> to ask them one question: What is your code being used for? Is it doing
> anyone except you any good?
> That may be the only way to convert the best of the lot. After that  active
> mentoring and hand holding for a little while is desirable.
>

There are FOSS projects, which are modular enough to be used
in setting up contest goals. A relatively gradual process can
therefore be used for such people.


Best

A. Mani


-- 
A. Mani
ASL, CLC,  AMS, CMS
http://www.logicamani.co.cc