DGPLUG Summer Training

What is a LUG and DGPLUG ?

LUG is a often used term in computer communities. It stands for “Linux Users Group” , DGPLUG stands for “Linux Users’ Group of Durgapur”

Check out their website for more information about the community. Every year DGPLUG conducts a summer training program every year, to further increase open source development. Its free and anyone from anywhere can join in!

How I came to know about DGPLUG ?

Well, it was through PyCon India. I was going through the past blog posts about pycon and read about this group “which meets every year by the stairs” , it piqued my interest and I did some googling. And here I am now, part of their summer training program.

The team

Our sessions are genearlly handled by senior members of the community. I feel so lucky to get hands on training from them, I mean who on earth gets the opportunity to train with actual software engineers from fedora, redhat !! Being a linux and redhat fanboy, its like a dream come true.

My Experience Till Now

Pre-requisites - Although there are no pre-requisites as such for the training but we are expected to go through past years’ irc logs. In case a student misses a session he can also follow along in the logs.1

Almost 2 weeks of training have passed and I must say it is awesome. We have regular session or “classes” everyday at 18:30 IST on #dgplug at freenode (Funny, address right ?). I really like the class structure, it almost feels like being in a real classroom. We have this roll call thing where all of us call out their names and give their attendance.

After the usual roll call, the session proceeds, first we discuss any doubts or questions from the previous class and after that we discusss and read up on a new topic. So far we have learnt about -

• How to use IRC
• Mailing and Chat Etiquettes
• How to ask questions and use google.
• Basic Shell Command Usage
• Linux Filesystem Hierarchy
• Using command line text editor VIM
• RST
• Documentation using sphinx
• Blogging

Although I was already familiar with most of these, but inspite of that I learnt many new things, especially about sphinx and documentation in python. Moreover, this training is about making you an “open source contributor” which I have wanted to be for a long time.

Apart from that, I have gotten to meet and communicate with so many smart people, with which normally I wouldn’t have ever known. Infact, most of the regular previous years’ participants are now good software engineers in various big firms. So, that doesn’t hurt as well.

The best part till now which I have found is the community. It feels really good to be a part of open source community, where the main aim is to “learn and share”.

Hoping that after this summer training, I will become a regular open source contributor to something linux related (Again, once a fanboy, always a fanboy :P)