It has been a while that I don’t write here but I thought this subject was worth it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Open source is a huge part of Facebook engineering. Whether we’re building new data infrastructure tools like\u00a0Corona<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Presto<\/a>\u00a0to manage our warehouses on Hadoop, releasing a new mobile build tool like\u00a0Buck<\/a>, or improving PHP runtime with\u00a0HHVM<\/a>,\u00a0open source projects are integral to our operations.<\/p>\n The hypothesis Facebook is exploring with Open Academy (I love the fact that we have Akademy already :P) \u00a0is that the best way to learn\u00a0about software engineering is to do software engineering. As simple as\u00a0that sounds, we have not traditionally done a good job with this in\u00a0academia. CS departments may provide a project experience as part of\u00a0the curriculum, but it typically does not map well to a real world\u00a0software engineering experience. Facebook and the partner universities\u00a0wants to do better.<\/p>\n To help bridge this gap between school and industry, last spring Facebook teamed up with Jay Borenstein,\u00a0a computer science professor\u00a0at Stanford, to launch Open Academy. Open Academy is a program designed to provide a practical, applied software engineering experience as part of a university student\u2019s CS education. The program works\u00a0closely with key faculty members at top CS universities to\u00a0launch\u00a0a course that matches students with active open source projects and mentors and allows them to receive academic credit for their contributions to the open source code base.<\/p>\n The idea is that partnering with selected open source projects holds a\u00a0great deal of promise on a number of levels; it will give students\u00a0exposure to learning how to come up to speed in an established code\u00a0base, revision control, project estimation and access to examples of\u00a0good software engineering practices beyond what we are able to provide\u00a0inside university walls, among many other things.<\/p>\n One question that might be on top of your mind is: “how is this different than\u00a0Google Summer of Code?” One key difference is the tight integration\u00a0with universities. Facebook OpenAcademy runs as a university course\u00a0offering for which a student receives a grade and academic credit. It\u00a0also allows the university teaching staff to stay very involved and\u00a0work in tandem with the open source mentors to give students good\u00a0support for their software development efforts. Another difference is\u00a0the team element. This course offering partners students from around\u00a0the globe on teams that work together, which IMHO is exactly the way KDE works.<\/p>\n In a nutshell, the program works like this:<\/p>\n Summary of expectations for mentors:<\/p>\n\n
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