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LFX’22 Mentorship Experience with Open Horizon

By Blog, Open Horizon, Training

Hey everyone!
I am Ruchi Pakhle currently pursuing my Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from MGM’s College of Engineering & Technology. I am a passionate developer and an open-source enthusiast. I recently graduated from LFX Mentorship Program. In this blog post, I will share my experience of contributing to Open Horizon, a platform for deploying container-based workloads and related machine learning models to compute nodes/clusters on edge.

Background

I have been an active contributor to open-source projects via different programs like GirlScript Summer of Code, Script Winter of Code & so on.. through these programs I contributed to different beginner-level open-source projects. After almost doing this for a year, I contributed to different organizations for different projects including documentation and code. On a very random morning applications for LFX were opened up and I saw various posts on LinkedIn among that posts one post was of my very dear friend, Unnati Chhabra, she had just graduated from the program and hence I went ahead and checked the organization that was a fit as per my skill set and decided to give it a shot.

Why did I apply to Open Horizon?

I was very interested in DevOps and Cloud Native technologies and I wanted to get started with them but have been procrastinating a lot and did not know how to pave my path ahead. I was constantly looking for opportunities that I can get my hands on. And as Open Horizon works exactly on DevOps and Cloud Native technologies, I straight away applied to their project and they had two slots open for the spring cohort. I joined their element channel and started becoming active by contributing to the project, engaging with the community, and also started to read more about the architecture and tried to understand it well by referring to their youtube videos. You can contribute to Open Horizon here.

Application process

Linux Foundation opens LFX mentorship applications thrice a year: one in spring, one in summer, and the winter cohort, each cohort being for a span of 3 months. I applied to the winter cohort for which the applications opened up around February 2022 and I submitted my application on 4th February 2022 for the Open Horizon Project. I remember there were three documents mandatory for submitting the application:

1. Updated Resume/CV

2. Cover Letter

(this is very very important in terms of your selection so cover everything in your cover letter and maybe add links to your projects, achievements, or wherever you think they can add great value)

The cover letter should cover these points primarily👇

  • How did you find out about our mentorship program?
  • Why are you interested in this program?
  • What experience and knowledge/skills do you have that are applicable to this program?
  • What do you hope to get out of this mentorship experience?

3. A permission document from your university stating they have no obligation over the entire span of the mentorship was also required(this depends on org to org and may not be asked as well)

Selection Mail

The LFX acceptance mail was a major achievement for me as at that period of time I was constantly getting rejections and I had absolutely no idea about how things were gonna work out for me. I was constantly doubting myself and hence this mail not only boosted my confidence but also gave me a ray of hope of achieving things by working hard towards it consistently. A major thanks to my mentors,  Joe Pearson and Troy Fine, for believing in me and giving me this opportunity.⭐

My Mentorship Journey

Starting off from the day I applied to the LFX until getting selected as an LFX Mentee and working successfully for over 3 months and a half, it felt surreal. I have been contributing to open-source projects and organizations before. But being a part of LFX gave me such a huge learning curve and a sense of credibility and ownership that I got here wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

I still remember setting up the  mgmt-hub all-in-one script locally and I thought it was just a cakewalk, well it was not. I literally used to try every single day to run the script but somehow it would end up giving some errors, I used to google them and apply the results but still, it would fail. But one thing which I consistently did was share my progress regularly with my mentor, Troy no matter if the script used to fail but still I used to communicate that with Troy, I would send him logs and he used to give me some probable solutions for the same but still the script used to fail. I then messaged in  the open-horizon-examples group and Joe used to help with my doubts, a huge thanks to him and Troy for helping me figure out things patiently. After over a month on April 1st, the script got successfully executed and then I started to work on the issues assigned by Troy.

These three months taught me to be consistent no matter what the circumstances are and work patiently which I wouldn’t have learned in my college. This experience would no doubt make me a better developer and engineer along with the best practices followed. A timeline of my journey has been shared here.

  1. Checkout my contributions here
  2. Checkout open-horizon-services repo

Concluding the program

The LFX Mentorship Program was a great great experience and I did get a great learning curve which I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. The program not only encourages developers to kick-start their open-source journey but also provides some great perks like networking, and learning from the best minds. I would like to thank my mentors Joe Pearson, Troy Fine, and Glen Darling because without their support and patience this wouldn’t have been possible. I would be forever grateful for this opportunity.

Special thanks to my mentor Troy for always being patient with me. These kind words would remain with me always although the program would have ended.

And yes how can I forget to plug in the awesome swags, special thanks, and gratitude to my mentor Joe Pearson for sending me such cool swags and this super cool note ❤

If you have any queries, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I would be happy to help you out 😀

New Training Program Helps You Set Up an Open Source Program Office

By Blog, Training

Written by Dan Brown, Senior Manager, Content & Social Media, LF Training

Is your organization considering setting up an open source program office (OSPO) but you aren’t sure where to start? Or do you already have an OSPO but want to learn best practices to make it more effective? Linux Foundation Training & Certification has released a new series of seven training courses designed to help.

The Open Source Management & Strategy program is designed to help executives, managers, software developers and engineers understand and articulate the basic concepts for building effective open source practices within their organization. Developed by Guy Martin, Executive Director of OASIS Open, an internationally recognized standards development and open source projects consortium, the series of online courses provides the foundational knowledge and skills to build out an effective OSPO.

The courses in the program are designed to be modular, so participants only need to take those of relevance to them. This enables organizations to let each member of the team train in the skills they need to be successful in their given roles. The courses included in the program are:

  • LFC202 – Open Source Introduction – covers the basic components of open source and open standards
  • LFC203 – Open Source Business Strategy – discusses the various open source business models and how to develop practical strategies and policies for each
  • LFC204 – Effective Open Source Program Management – explains how to build an effective OSPO and the different types of roles and responsibilities needed to run it successfully
  • LFC205 – Open Source Development Practices – talks about the role of continuous integration and testing in a healthy open source project
  • LFC206 – Open Source Compliance Programs – covers the importance of effective open source license compliance and how to build programs and processes to ensure safe and effective consumption of open source
  • LFC207 – Collaborating Effectively with Open Source Projects – discusses how to work effectively with upstream open source projects and how to get the maximum benefit from working with project communities
  • LFC208 – Creating Open Source Projects – explains the rationale and value for creating new open source projects as well as the required legal, business and development processes needed to launch new projects

The Open Source Management & Strategy program is available to begin immediately. The $499 enrollment fee provides unlimited access to all seven courses for one year, as well as a certificate upon completion. Interested individuals may enroll here. The program is also included in all corporate training subscriptions.

 

New Training Course Aims to Make it Easy to Get Started with EdgeX Foundry

By Announcement, EdgeX Foundry, Training

Course explains what EdgeX Foundry is, how it works, how to use it in your edge solutions, leveraging the support of LF Edge’s large ecosystem 

SAN FRANCISCO, July 1, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the availability of a new training course, LFD213 – Getting Started with EdgeX Foundry.

LFD213, was developed in conjunction with LF Edge, an umbrella organization under The Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. The course is designed for IoT and/or edge software engineers, system administrators, and operation technology technicians that want to assemble an edge solution.

The course covers how EdgeX Foundry is architected, how to download and run it, and how to configure and extend the EdgeX framework when needed. The four chapters of the course, which take approximately 15 hours to complete, provide a basic overview, a discussion of device services, which connect physical sensors and devices to the rest of platform, application services, how to send data from EdgeX to enterprise applications, cloud systems, external databases, or even analytics packages, and more.

Hands-on labs enable students to get and run EdgeX and play with some of its important APIs, as well as create a simple service (either device or application service) and integrate it into the rest of EdgeX.

EdgeX Foundry is an open-source, vendor-neutral, hardware- and OS-agnostic IoT/edge computing software platform that is a Stage 3 (Impact) project under LF Edge. In the simplest terms, it is edge middleware that sits between operational technology, physical sensing “things” and information technology systems. It facilitates getting sensor data from any “thing” protocol to any enterprise application, cloud system or on-premise database. At the same time, the EdgeX platform offers local/edge analytics to be able to offer low latency decision making at the edge to actuate back down onto sensors and devices. Its microservice architecture and open APIs allow for 3rd parties to provide their own replacement or augmenting components and add additional value to the platform. In short, EdgeX Foundry provides the means to build edge solutions more quickly and leverage the support of a large ecosystem of companies that participate in edge computing.

“EdgeX Foundry is on a phenomenal growth trajectory with multiple releases and millions of container downloads,” said Jim White, EdgeX Foundry Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and CTO of IOTech Systems.  “Given the scale of the adopting community and ecosystem, it is critical that there is proper training available to allow new adopters and prospective users to learn how to get started. The new training, created by the architects of EdgeX Foundry and managed by The Linux Foundation, will allow developers exploring EdgeX a faster and better path to understand and work with EdgeX while also accelerating our project’s adoption at scale.”

The course is available to begin immediately. The $299 course fee provides unlimited access to the course for one year including all content and labs. Interested individuals may enroll here.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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How Open Source is Driving 5G, Edge, AI and IoT

By Blog, Training, Trend

The 5G transition is well underway, with the technology rolled out on every continent, and adoption growing daily. This is leading to advances in other technologies – most especially edge computing, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. Many don’t realize that open source software is at the heart of the 5G revolution, making it possible in the first place and helping to speed implementation thanks to shared R&D efforts and greater interoperability than prior wireless standards. 

Considering the accelerating rate of change in the networking and telecommunications industry, it can be difficult to stay up to speed on these and the other latest technologies. Managers and their technical partners will be the ones to build the next great innovations based on the capabilities of 5G – but in order to do so, they require a fundamental understanding of the market pressures and a basic understanding of the technologies driving this shift – technologies like edge computing, IoT and AI.

That’s why The Linux Foundation offers two online training courses exploring these topics free of charge. Business Considerations for 5G, IoT, and AI is designed to help you discern between the hype and real opportunities of 5G technologies. Open Source and the 5G Transition explains the open source infrastructure powering the future and how to leverage it for business benefit. 

These courses are only two hours long, and no technical expertise is required. They are designed for anyone from business professionals to engineers who want to improve their understanding of these technologies and the changes they bring. Register for free today and increase your knowledge!