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Pedro Pinto Silva

designer addicted to new media 
2020-01-21

Dev Bootcamp in Ankara

LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp Sponsored by Collabora

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++; Object Oriented concepts followed by homework assignment. 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:

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 an 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

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

And these are just some of the commits taken from gerrit.

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 :)

This post was first published in the fediverse.

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Footnotes