COMS 4995 Open Source Development

Spring 2022

• TR 5:40pm-6:55pm
• 141 Uris Hall
• Instructor: Tim Paine
• Teaching Assistants
  • Catelen Wu - catelen.wu@columbia.edu
  • Sian Lee - sll2190@columbia.edu
• Office hours:
  • Tim: 4:30pm - 5:30pm T/Tr - CS Lounge
  • Catelen: 7:30pm - 9:30pm T - 480 CSB
  • Sian: 7:30pm - 9:30pm M - Zoom

Course info

In this course, students will learn how to build and maintain open source projects.

Students will be responsible for both supporting an existing open source project of their choosing, as well as creating their own open source project (both in either Python or Javascript, under the direction of the instructor). In lieu of homeworks or exams, ongoing progress reports and a final presentation on these two will serve as the grading basis for the course.

The course will include an overview of general software engineering concepts, including version control, testing, modern development workflows (primarily GitFlow), and software licensing, as well as a brief history of open source software (GNU, FSF) including major court cases in copyright, patent, and trademark law (e.g. Oracle v. Google).

We will also learn about popular tools for

• project management (Github, Kanban/Agile boards)
• testing (Travis, Jenkins)
• static analysis and coverage (Codecov, Coveralls, BetterCodeHub)
• documentation (Sphinx, Docusaurus, ReadTheDocs)
• publishing (npm, PyPI, anaconda).

Beyond the basics, students will learn how these tools can be integrated together in their open source projects to better manage their development and community.

Course Overview in slides

Supplementary materials

• The Cathedral & the Bazaar (available online here)
• The Mythical Man-Month
• Producing Open Source Software (available online here)
• The Art Of Community (available online here)
• The Agile Manifesto (available online here)
• Working in Public (available for purchase here)
• The Lean Startup (available for purchase here)

News

Guest Speakers

Homework

Schedule

Note that the following schedule is tentative. It will be updated as we go.

To view slides as a printable PDF, add ?print-pdf=true to the base url (e.g. 01-intro.html -> 01-intro.html?print-pdf=true)