Materials for the workshop 'LV=GI Workshop on Open Source Software', part of Bristol Data Week 2023.
Workshop presented on Jun 7th 2023.
The open-source community is a marvel of working in tech. Many, if not all, of the fantastic tools that data scientists use day-to-day are built in full visibility of anyone online, with a collaboration model that is truly open to all. Contributors come from across both for-profit and non-commercial organisations, with almost every sector represented. I'd like to give you an overview of what this means for groups working in data.
In this workshop, I'm going to speak to several underappreciated features of the open-source ecosystem that should be of interest to anyone in the data community. Namely that you can: see how other, remote, high-performing data practitioners operate; upskill and learn how to communicate effectively with other tech workers; and how to improve the standards at which you operate in your own projects. All from the comfort of your own laptop! I'll progress through a workshop example of making contributions (not just code!) to open source projects, using a GitHub repo seeded by LV as a case study.
Beginner and intermediates will get the most out of this session. Experts could still learn a few things though!
Understand the benefits of following and engaging with open-source communities.
I have been building computational, statistics-backed products for well over a decade. With a background covering academia, biotech and now insurtech, I am convinced that our disciplines have more similarities than differences across data-centric roles. I'm interested to see how our sector grows whilst also remaining mindful that we need to actively drive it forwards to prevent stagnation. We are the first people in history to be creating the sorts of tools that we build; this should be a well-spring of motivation for us all.