Me And Facebook Open Academy

TL;DR: I am working with many students to improve Rails and it is fun!

WARNING: This is a non-technical blog post. I usually like to write about tech stuff, but I think this is pertinent so I’m going to write about it!

What is the Open Academy?

Facebook Open Academy is basically a program that gives Computer Science students at different universities the opportunity to work with various projects in the Open Source community. I think there are about 20 Open Source projects involved, and Rails is one of them. This year there are about 250 students participating, and the Rails team has 22 students. This is the second year that the Open Academy has been running, and I participated last year too.

How I got involved

I was contacted by Jay Borenstein who is a professor at Stanford and also works for Facebook. He told me that the idea of the program is that there are many CS students learning theory, but maybe not learning the skills they need to work on older code bases, with remote teams, or with Open Source code bases, and that he wanted to provide students with the opportunity to work closely with people in the Open Source community so that they could get these skills.

This struck a chord with me because I had to learn this stuff on my own, and I would have loved to have this kind of opportunity. For payment, I asked Jay to give me an Honorary Degree from Stanford. He has not gotten back to me on that.

Our Team

I’m not sure how many schools are involved total, but our team of 22 students is from 8 different schools: Sichuan University, University of Helsinki, Cornell University, Harvard, Princeton, University of Waterloo, UC Berkeley, and University of Washington.

I am extremely honored to work with these students, but I have to admit that as a college dropout it is extremely intimidating. The students we’re working with are very bright and have lots of potential. It’s inspiring to work with them, and I am slightly jealous because they are much better than I was at their age. I think this is a good thing because it means that the next generation of programmers will be even better than my generation.

Last year I was the only mentor. This year I was able to trick convince @_matthewd, @pixeltrix, and @bitsweat to help out as mentors.

Our Timeline

We started a couple weeks ago. But this weekend Facebook sponsored travel and lodging for all students, faculty, and mentors, to go to Palo Alto for a hackathon. So this weekend I was able to work with our team in person.

The timeline for this program is rather challenging because each school has a different schedule, so we will be working with all students for a different length of time.

Our Work

For the first few weeks we will have the students work on bug fixes in Rails. This will help us to assess their skill levels so that we can give them longer term projects that are a good fit. Fixing bugs has turned out to be a challenge because most “easy” bugs in Rails have been fixed, so most of the bugs left in the tracker are particularly challenging. I haven’t figured out a solution to this problem yet, but we are managing (I think). So if you find easy bugs in Rails, don’t fix them, but tell my students to fix them. ;-)

Anyway, after a couple weeks we will give them larger projects to work on (and I’ll describe those in a later post).

Improvements for the Rails team

Getting the students up and running with a dev environment was a huge challenge. Some students tried the Rails dev box, but running a VM on their hardware was just too slow, so we ended up with all of the students developing on their native hardware. Of course this was also a pain because some students had issues like having Fink, MacPorts, and homebrew all installed at the same time. For the Agile Web Development with Rails book, Sam Ruby has tests that start with a completely blank Ubuntu VM, and go all the way through getting a Rails app up and running. I think we need to do something like that, but for doing dev work against Rails.

One extremely frustrating example of why we need tests for setting up the dev environment is that in the guides it says that you should execute bundle install --without db. This is fine, except that when you do that, the --without db option is written to .bundle/config and persists between runs of bundler. We (the mentors) didn’t know the students had done that, and were ripping our hair out for an hour or so trying to figure out why ActiveRecord couldn’t find the adapter gems, or why running bundle install wouldn’t install the database gems. I find this to be an extremely frustrating behavior of bundler.

These are some things that I think we can improve.

Improvements for Universities

All of our students can program. Maybe not in Ruby, but they know some other language. They have to pick up Ruby, but I don’t think that’s a big deal. A larger problem is that not all of them knew about git, or about VCS in general. Jay tried to help with this problem by inviting @chacon to give a talk on git. I think this helped, but I really think that git should be part of normal CS curriculum. It’s very difficult for me to imagine writing any amount of code without some kind of VCS. What if you mess up? What if your computer dies? How do you remember what the code used to be? Not using a VCS seems like a huge waste of time. Some of the students were already familiar with git, but some weren’t. I am unclear about the role VCS plays among Universities, but I strongly believe it should be taught in all CS programs.

Maybe I can get people at GitHub in contact with people at different Universities?

Departing thoughts

It blows my mind that we have students from such prestigious Universities, and that these Universities are forward thinking enough to participate in this program. I am extremely honored to work with them. I also have to say thank you to Facebook for sponsoring this work even though Rails has basically nothing to do with Facebook. I also have to say thanks to my work (AT&T) for allowing me to have the job that I do, and also giving me some time to work with these students.

All of our students are part of the Friends of Rails organization on GitHub so you can watch some of our progress there. I will try to make more blurrrrgggghhh posts as we progress.

Post Script

Since I am a College dropout, I have an extreme case of Impostor Syndrome. Working with such prestigious schools made me extremely nervous. Last year I went to dinner with some of the faculty members of University of Helsinki. After a few beers, I was able to muster my courage and said “Before we start this program, I have to admit something. I never graduated college.” Their response: “So?”

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