Policies

“The Deal”

You get:

  • Mentorship from students and professionals with advanced skills in software development and systems administration
  • Professional connections in the software industry
  • A welcoming environment to start learning in if you’ve always wanted to learn about software development and systems administration but have never been sure where to start
  • An opportunity to fill in any gaps in your knowledge if you’re a self-taught coder or sysadmin
  • The skills to build and deploy open source software or to contribute to existing projects

Why we’re offering this:

  • The OSL gets a larger pool of candidates to recommend to companies interested in recruiting OSL students
  • The OSL gets to work with a wider variety of students, which fits better with its new status as part of the school of EECS
  • The open source community gets more contributors to its projects

Attendance

We will schedule BootCamp meetings for a time that works for a majority of attendees. Each meeting’s curriculum will build on what you learned the previous session, so if you miss a meeting you’re responsible for studying the basics of its content on your own. To facilitate this, we will provide resources for independent study about each topic that we cover.

BootCamp leaders will be available at times outside of the regular meetings to help answer any questions about the training program’s content. We will not spend class time reviewing material for those who skip a lecture. If you attend a lesson and don’t understand something from it, you’re welcome to ask in class, because others very likely have the same concern. But if you want to make up a class you skipped, it’s disrespectful to those who attended to spend their class time on questions which you could resolve on your own time.

Laptops

As the course progresses, you will need a laptop. We hope and recommend that you will decide to set up your laptop to dual-boot to Linux as the course progresses, but but it’s not required. If you don’t own a laptop and are an OSU student you can check out a laptop from the OSU Library for at least 24 hours at a time.

Realistically, as long as it’s new enough to boot from USB and connect to wireless networks, your laptop’s specifications don’t matter much. If it’s so new that its UEFI configuration prevents you from dual-booting with Linux, it will be powerful enough to run virtual machines. If it’s old enough to be unable to run VMs but still has wireless connectivity, we’ll teach you how to ssh to a remote server to perform more computationally intensive tasks.

If you are not an OSU student and do not have access to a working laptop, contact the DevOps BootCamp organizers and we’ll see whether we can arrange to loan you something for meetings.

Target Audience

Our goal is to make the DevOps BootCamp program accessible to students and community members from all different backgrounds. You have to want to learn, be willing to ask questions whenever you don’t understand something, and be open to making time to play with the cool tools/toys which we’ll be teaching you about.

Fluency in English is strongly recommended, because it’s the language in which the course will be taught as well as the language of almost all open source technical documentation and code comments.