Workshops
Open Source Day hands-on workshops are dedicated to help you overcome barriers to contributing to open source.
You will have a chance to attend technical and non-technical workshops and walk away with skills you can leverage in open source contributions.
Build production ready data engineering pipeline using Open Source Framework (Kedro)
Bye-bye Jupyter Notebook! Are you working on a Machine Learning project? Do you have all data cleaning, feature engineering, and model training code in a Jupyter notebook? If the answer is yes, come join us to learn how you can easily upgrade your code to be production ready! In this workshop, we will introduce an open-source Python framework called Kedro, which is designed for building reliable data pipeline and maintainable data science code. We will cover what Kedro can and cannot do; what are the 4 core concepts in Kedro framework; then we will build our first Kedro based data pipeline together!
This workshop will be led by: Annu Joshi and Lingyi Zhang
Bio: Annu is a data engineer building analytics solutions at QuantumBlack, AI by Mckinsey. Her experience involves building distributed data pipelines on complex data systems across diverse problem domains. She has a passion for enabling others to learn and grow. She’s also been helping with the organization of Grace Hopper Celebration for the last 3 years in various forms.
Bio: Lingyi is a data engineer @QuantumBlack, AI by Mckinsey. Her primary focus is to build reliable and sustainable data solutions to enable ML and AI across different sectors, such as Basic materials, Telecom, Retail, Pharma. She is passionate about solving data challenges, such as big data, geo-spatial data, time-series data. Her current learning interest is MLOps, DevOps, and DataOps on cloud.
Deploy Your First Smart Contract
As blockchain technology continues to flourish, companies are moving towards building their applications on-chain using smart contracts. In this workshop, we will discuss how Ethereum smart contracts work and go over related concepts like gas fees, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), customizable event classes, wallets and identities, visualization tools, and more. We will then get familiar with the Solidity programming language and write a simple smart contract together. Afterward, we will deploy the smart contract to an Ethereum test network through the latest Ethereum development tools like Hardhat and the MetaMask wallet. After we test some interactions with our deployed smart contract, you’ll feel empowered to write, test, and deploy your own smart contract to bring blockchain to your use case.
This workshop will be led by: Anastasia Lalamentik
Bio: Anastasia Lalamentik is a full-stack engineer at Kaleido. She obtained her undergraduate degree at UNC Chapel-Hill and her graduate degree at the University of Virginia, where she did Human-Computer Interaction research in haptics and accessibility.
Don’t Sacrifice Security When Coding Your Next Game-Changing App!
Open Source Software (OSS) is hot! But with stories of exploits and stolen data, it can be scary! Creating secure software means you must make your own code safe, but also know any security issues in OSS libraries. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to find vulnerabilities in the OSS you are using, no matter the language or tech. As a result, you will become fearless coding with OSS!
This workshop will be led by: Megan McIntyre and Diane Downie
Bio: Megan McIntyre is a Senior Software Engineering Manager for the Black Duck product in the Software Integrity Group at Synopsys, starting in 2010. During her tenure, she has worked with numerous customers to understand their use of Open Source Software, and its potential security vulnerabilities. In addition, Megan has made it her personal goal to transform the software industry into a safe and welcoming environment for women of all abilities and backgrounds—recognizing the value of the perspectives women bring to the table.
Bio: Diane Downie is a Software Architect for the Software Integrity Group at Synopsys. There she oversees the Black Duck Knowledge Base of Open Source Software Components, Licenses, and Vulnerabilities. Throughout her career, Diane has built enterprise software solutions for small startups to large corporations. She has become accustomed to being the only woman in the room and has learned how to garner respect in those situations. As a first-time attendee at GHC18 Diane was inspired by the experience and became determined to use her leadership skills to promote and support women in technology.
Git 101 - How to Contribute to an Open Source Project
Git is a powerful software development tool that allows people from all over the world to collaborate on open source projects, in an organized way. If you are looking to prepare for your participation in an Open Source Day project, and are new to git or looking for a refresher, join us! In this workshop we will go over the basics of git, and you will have the opportunity to put your skills to the test by contributing to a sample Open Source Project! Along the way, you will learn git tricks, tips, and best practices as you continue on your Open Source and Software Engineering Journey.
This workshop will be led by: Rashan Smith
Bio: Rashan Smith is currently a Software Engineering Consultant at Red Hat. Her experience spans areas such as Enterprise Application Development, Cloud Computing, and DevOps. In her free time, she works on Blockchain side projects, and participates in hackathons and conferences as a participant and/or mentor. She is passionate about increasing representation in tech, and helping others navigate their tech journey. Rashan is a former GHC16 Scholar where she also attended her first Open Source Day event.
Hack an Open-Source Database Together
Databases are crucial to modern applications today, and they come in many flavors. Even though they are widely used, like other system software they are often viewed as black boxes. In this workshop, we will take a peek under the covers of a mission-critical enterprise-grade open-source database system and implement a small feature together using test-drive development (TDD), GitHub, and raise a pull request.
This workshop will be led by: Alexandra Wang and Ashuka Xue
Bio: Alex is a Software Engineer at VMware. She works on the Greenplum open source MPP database. In the past five years she has worked in many areas of the database kernel, including query optimization and execution, catalog and storage, distributed transaction, partitioning, WAL replication, etc., as well as building tools and infrastructure for CI/CD, performance testing and release engineering. Alex has worked with many teams and has led the query performance acceleration team. She is experienced in cooperating cross-team/cross-geo and is working closely with product managers, engineering managers, field engineers and technical writers. She loves TDD and pair programming. Alex holds an MS in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science.
How to Write an Accessible Pull Request
Web accessibility is the practice of making a product or feature usable for as many people as possible. This practice ensures that users with disabilities can perceive, navigate, understand, and interact with websites, tools, and technologies. Web accessibility fosters inclusion and diversity by removing barriers that make it impossible for some people to use the web.
Diversity is an important part of tech because it helps create a culture that welcomes new ideas and brings more perspectives together to solve problems. Projects tend to perform better with a diverse set of participants. With that being said open source are still facing issues maintaining a diverse set of contributors. A recent study on The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Source, conducted by the Linux Foundation, showed that 18% of respondents do not feel welcome in open source. A large number of the respondents that did not feel welcome came from disproportionately underrepresented groups, including people with disabilities.
This workshop will demonstrate how we as developers can remove barriers and create a more inclusive open source community by adding accessibility into the markdown in a pull request.
Markdown is a formatting language that generates semantic html from plaintext and it is used in pull request to write descriptions and create comments. Writing proper semantic html is critical for accessible users. Because the semantic html generated from markdown reinforces the meaning of information and can be easily read by assistive technologies.
This workshop will be led by: Kendall Gassner and Adrián Bolonio
Bio: Kendall Gassner is an Accessibility Software Engineer at Github. She became passionate about accessibility while working to make an inclusive drag-and-drop feature early on in her career. Her passion led her to become a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility and Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies. Outside of work she loves spending time painting and hiking.
Bio: Adrián Bolonio is an Accessibility Software Engineer working at GitHub as part of a talented, diverse, and motivated team that will work on making GitHub and the Internet a better and more accessible place for everyone. When he is not at the office he enjoys a good read, working his way through any delicious recipe, and indulging his love for travelling to new places.
Overcoming the Fear of Contributing to Open
If you’re feeling uncertain about contributing to an open source project for the first time, Rizel can relate. Navigating the open source space can feel intimidating. Mentors and managers always advised Rizel to contribute to open source, but it was difficult. She would feel anxious and overwhelmed by the large codebases and the confusing issues. In August 2021, she took a different approach. Instead of spiraling, she started small, read documentation, and interacted with the community. In this talk, Rizel will share funny anecdotes about her failed and successful attempts to contribute to open source. The audience will gain inspiration and confidence to make their first contribution.
This workshop will be led by: Rizel Scarlett
Bio: Rizel is a Developer Advocate at GitHub. She moonlights as the Director of Programs at G{Code} House, an organization aimed at teaching women of color and non-binary people of color to code. Rizel believes in leveraging vulnerability, honesty, and kindness as means to educate early-career developers.
Shift Left with Quality: Scalable Testing Infrastructure in UI Automation
Many test automation practices rely on third party, out of the box frameworks as opposed to building out a native test framework. However, test automation written in this way can have a low return on investment. This typically causes client automation to run as an afterthought, acting as a simple report card of the product. Within our UI test automation spectrum, we’ve found a solution to help deconstruct what is truly important in the app and adopted a strategy that has encouraged collaboration between quality, engineering and product teams. A behavior-driven approach to UI test automation can increase your return on investment and confidence, all the while running in your CI/CD pipeline. To ensure smooth adoption, we developed a set of tools that can help your organization drive adoption of behavior driven development (BDD) within UI test automation using the Gherkin language.
This workshop will be led by: Leila Navon
Bio: Leila Navon is currently a Senior Engineering Manager at SiriusXM+Pandora. She has 10 years of experience spanning startups to large-cap companies. Leila currently leads a team of test automation engineers driving a culture of shared quality across the engineering organization through pragmatic test automation, influencing manual testing, quality of service, and overall CI/CD confidence. Before her career in tech, she worked as a sound designer on major motion picture films and owned a calligraphy business.
The Open Source Games
Open source ecosystems contain multitudes of people who are critical to the creation, maintenance, distribution, security, and usage of open source software. But depending on whom you talk to, each group will have a different perspective of what makes open source communities tick - sometimes they even talk to each other. And if you’re new to open source, this presents a number of confusing obstacles to participation.
This workshop will help participants see how “the falafel gets made” from the perspective of different open source ecosystem stakeholders. The premise is simple: You have all been called to the White House to discuss a new security issue with the open source supply chain, and the department of Homeland Security is desperate to understand how to address it. Some of you will represent a non-profit software foundation that oversees the governance of a number of affected software communities. Or a lone developer just trying to keep up with the demand. Or in-house legal counsel at a company that uses this software. Or a risk manager from a financial institution. Or the CEO of a startup building products on the affected software. Or the CISO of a cloud vendor that both maintains and uses the software in question.
From these various perspectives, you will learn about the complexity involved in maintaining the robust innovation that defines open source communities and their respective ecosystems. Is open source the engine of software innovation? Is it a way for startups to market themselves? Is it a grave risk to the daily operations of critical services? And how can we pull together all of these perspectives to achieve our goal of well-functioning software ecosystems?
Workshop attendees will participate in this mock open source problem resolution and develop a more nuanced understanding of the level of effort required to sustain open source software communities.
This workshop will be led by: Brittany Istenes and John Mark Walker
Bio: Brittany Istenes
Bio: A long-time open source product, community, and ecosystem expert, John Mark has built numerous enterprise software communities, launched new product initiatives, and implemented collaborative processes with internal as well as external stakeholders. A recognized thought leader, he wrote the provocative article "There is no Open Source Community" (http://johnmark.org/tinosc.html) and has spoken at numerous conferences on the subject of open source community engagement and product strategy.
When Design Thinking Meets Open Source
When it comes to open source contributions – design is often a second thought. There is a plethora of innovative open source software that are made with little or no contribution from experienced designers, which often lead to inconsistent interfaces, confusing interactions and ultimately, a poor user experience. When paired together, strong open source projects and human-centered, empathetic design thinking can create software that users can actually use. This session will explore the opportunities for design in open source projects and how developers can exercise a few design practices to influence the adoption and usability of their project. It will examine what experience design is, why it matters, and the principles behind effective design. Attendees will learn through hands-on activities how to incorporate design thinking strategies into their projects without sacrificing design, and how doing so will result in a better product for their users.
This workshop will be led by: Ramona Sartipi and Huda Khan
Bio: Ramona is a lead UX Designer on Watson Assistant at IBM, focused on delivering more value and functionality to cognitive assistants to help client’s businesses grow. She works in a diverse team of designers, engineers and product managers working towards creating user-centric products that provide meaning and purpose in people's everyday lives. Ramona believes that technology has the power to build strong communities and create a more inclusive world. She enjoys empathizing with people and crafting digital experiences that both empower users and boost business growth. Ramona is a proud alumna of the York University, where she earned a degree in Computer Science and Psychology. She was the President of Women in Science and Engineering where she led a team in organizing the largest all-female hackathon in Canada.