Welcome to the Second HackIllinois Open Source Fellowship!
Our Vision
Open Source (OS) has been a central theme of HackIllinois for years. Historically, our annual flagship spring hackathon has provided students to work with OS mentors, but we believe that working on such a project is a long-term commitment. With that in mind, we at HackIllinois present to you the OS Fellowship, an 3-week long event that gives our attendees an exciting and engaging Hackathon experience while still maintaining our commitment to Open Source.
The Program
During the program, students will work in project groups mentored by professionals in Open Source to get familiar with and contribute to a large-scale open source project. As a participant, you’ll gain a valuable insight into a long-term development cycle as sought after industry experience, an appreciation of the community driving open source, and tons of development experience across a variety of tech stacks! Some of the OS projects from our previous fellowship, in January 2021, included Visual Studio Code, Julia, and pandas, among many others - see the complete list here!
While each team will function independently, all teams and participants in Open Source fellowship will be a part of a shared slack workspace, where teams will be able to share progress, consult others for feedback, and gather data on their project as needed. In addition, weekly check-in meetings will allow teams to showcase their development over the week and learn about other projects and the direction they’re headed in—all to provide attendees with the most comprehensive dive into Open Source through HackIllinois.
FAQ
What is the Open Source Fellowship?
Open Source Fellowship is a HackIllinois initiative whereby students work in small project groups led by Open Source professionals to contribute to a large-scale open source project.
How does it work?
Each team will work independently on its project throughout the course of the Open Source Fellowship. Mentors will assign tasks, meet with group members, and hold development meetings where team members will be able to share and make progress on what they’re working on. In addition to this, all participants in Open Source Fellowship will be a part of a shared slack workspace, where groups will be able to share progress and gather feedback on specific features from a larger group.
When is the Open Source Fellowship?
Open Source Fellowship will kick off on September 30th, 2021 and conclude on October 21st, 2021.
Who can participate in the Open Source Fellowship?
Open Source Fellowship is open to any college student regardless of experience level! We are searching for candidates who are passionate about open source, working in teams, and contributing to and maintaining projects that’ll go on to be used by many.
Who will students be paired with?
At previous HackIllinois events, we have had an incredible set of open source mentors from industry mentoring students. These mentors have been invited to help students continue to grow their open source skills through our mentorship program. You can check out our mentors on our website soon!
Mentors
Evan Hazlett
Kentik LabsEvan has a long history in open source including being a maintainer on the Docker Engine and contributions to swarm, containerd, and various personal open source projects. He is always happy to help bring new people into the world of open source :)
Ian Vincent Norris
TerrastoriesIan is a software developer in SF who loves pair programming, cats, and using technology to help improve people's lives. Experienced in software consulting, Rails, pair programming, and agile practices.
Kyle Holmberg
Operation CodeI consider myself a front-end engineer particularly interested in component libraries, design systems, continuous integration, soccer, travel, and video games. I currently work at Capsule, and have worked at Air, Acorns, Nike, AutoGravity, and the University of Oregon over the past 5 years. I've contributed to many open source projects including Next.js and Storybook, and I am the acting CTO at a non-profit organization called Operation Code. I just started the digital nomad life. I'm currently in NYC, but will be living in Thailand, Colombia, Spain, and other European countries throughout 2022.
Michael Kruse
LLVMMichael graduated with a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Paderborn (Germany) and a PhD from the University Paris-Sud 11. After a Post-Doc at the École Normale Supérieur, he currently works at Argonne National Laboratory. His topics of research are optimizing compilers for high performance computing, such as Lattice QCD, especially loop optimizations. He contributes to the LLVM compiler infrastructure including Polly, LLVM’s polyhedral optimizer. Currently, he works on a compiler intermediate representation for loop optimizations, standardizing loop transformations in OpenMP and implementing them in Clang and Flang.
Nabarun Pal
KubernetesA contributor to several areas of the Kubernetes project, Nabarun has led the Kubernetes 1.21 Release Team and is a member of the Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee. Nabarun is a GSoC Admin for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. He works at VMware as a Open Source Engineer as his day job.
Pablo Aguiar
The FuckOh My FishPablo is a computer scientist working as a lead software engineer at MindYourRights GmbH, where he's co-authoring a disruptive, common platform for global music rights management. He's passionate about computer programming, cycling, and coffee. He's been an active open source contributor for at least 15 years, writing mostly in Python, Go, and JavaScript. For the last few years, he found himself in love with Elixir and Rust. He's very excited to return to the HackIllinois OS Fellowship as a mentor for the 2nd consecutive season!
Rajas Kakodkar
KubernetesI am a Member of Technical Staff at VMware working on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and based out of Goa, India. I am an active contributor to Kubernetes most recently helping with maintaining networkpolicy tests. I also hold interest in Deep Learning particularly in fastai. When I am not coding, I am a car enthusiast, a foodie and a guitarist.
Shivani Singhal
Cluster API provider for AWSTIMELINE
TIMELINE
On Thursday, September 30th, students will have the opportunity to “tour” the various projects the Open Source Fellowship has to offer, learning more about the specific project requirements and speaking with mentors to answer any questions.
At the end of the day, we’ll release a form allowing students to pick their top 3 project preferences. After this, we’ll preliminarily match students to project groups based on:
- Skill level
- Overall project experience, particularly with the project’s tech stack
- Additional preferences and considerations from mentors
Over the weekend of October 2nd and 3rd, any mentors who wish to interview students further to ensure the best fit for their project group will also get the chance to do so.
Finally, with this feedback in account, we’ll release final project matches at the beginning of Monday, October 4th, officially kicking off the Fellowship Program.
