There is a lot more to software development than knowing about programming languages, algorithms, and data structures. Professional software developers need to carefully architect their projects, they need to worry about documentation, about releases, and about backwards compatibility, they need to address bug reports and user questions, and they need to ensure novel contributions to a project don't introduce bugs into existing features. All of these skills are best learned from experienced software engineers managing a large project.
In this talk, Dr. Claus Wilke (Professor, Integrative Biology) will argue that contributing to a major open source project is one of the best ways to gain this experience. He will use as an example his path to contributing to and eventually becoming a core contributor to the ggplot2 project, and will outline simple steps and best practices to follow for anybody who is new to the world of open source software development and would like to make a contribution.
Register to attend via Zoom or in person: https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZgPi98aiQu-61_aYehLp3g
Hybrid. Zoom and Scholars Lab, Perry-Castañeda Library
