Previous Post on Portuguese - INdT promove Semana de Mobilidade no Brasil

O Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia (INdT) está promovendo a Semana da Mobilidade em várias cidades do Brasil. O evento consiste em palestras interessantes e minicursos sobre a plataforma maemo e Python para S60, ambas tecnologias desenvolvidas pela Nokia para dispositivos móveis. As inscrições são de graça!! Para maiores informações sobre inscrições, programação, local e duração podem ser encontradas no blog http://semanadamobilidade.blogspot.com/.

INdT promotes "Weeks of Mobility" in Brazil

Nokia Institute of Technology (INdT) promotes "Weeks of Mobility" on several cities of Brazil. The event consists of interesting lectures and workshops about maemo platform and Python for S60 - both have been developed by Nokia to be used on mobile devices. INdT is offering it for free!! For more information about the event, such as programming and subscription, visit http://semanadamobilidade.blogspot.com/.

Python Development for maemo platform

I've posted a tutorial in Forum Nokia wiki that helps to get start with Python applications for maemo 4.x. Follow this link. It is also available a Portuguese version here.

INdT Programming Arena Contest at FISL

Nokia Institute of Technology promotes programming contests in cooperation with Forum Nokia at FISL 2008 Programming Arena Contest

The winners will receive Nokia N95 and Nokia N800 devices as prizes. Forum Nokia will also promote some lectures to guide developers that want to contribute with its projects.

This is the first time that Nokia Institute of Technology (Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia - INdT) will participate in International Forum of Free Software (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre - FISL) that will happen from April 17^th to 19^th at Porto Alegre, Brazil. In partnership with Forum Nokia, an on-line community with more than 3 million of subscribed developers, the Institute promotes programming challenges in FISL Programming Arena and the best ones win Nokia N95 and Internet Tablets Nokia N800.

The challenges consist of programming contests that take into account programming an developing technical skills. The competition, which can be performed by only one programmer or by a team, will be integrated into open source projects for mobile platforms.

There are two phases: qualifying and insanifying. At qualifying phase, some simple task help the teams to get closer with Python language, Symbian OS and the platform API. Those ones that achieve the best results are classified to the next phase. The final result is a contribution to an open source project that can continue even after FISL.

Daniel Rocha, manager of Forum Nokia at Brasil, will present the lecture “Nokia – Open Source Initiatives and Projects for Smartphones”. He intents to show the last Nokia initiatives on the open source world, such as Python for S60, Open C, Maemo, Mobile Web Server and other important projects. The main reason for the talk is to guide the developers on how to become involved in such projects, how to port open source code to S60 smartphones and how to contribute with Forum Nokia open source projects.

Besides being part of Arena, the INdT will also participate of FISL in order to identify potential employer candidates. “We know that the best professionals of open source, the main research upstream of INdT - Recife, are on FISL. The competition atmosphere is the environment to evaluate the abilities of the candidates for possible jobs at INdT”, says Vanessa Nalesso, HR manager of INdT.

Open source world and universities

Finally, my first post!

Last week, I had a very interesting discussion about open source world with some guys from a Brazilian public university and I got surprised with the comments they made. I've been thinking a bit more about this question.

I got realized how some universities are still to far away from open source projects and subjects, such as licensing and team management. Some professors are so involved in academic world that they forget how the student can learn if they would be part of an open source project. In fact, most of them (wrongly) suppose that open source software is a mess: no documentation is available, projects with just a few features, lots of bugs, etc. Fortunately, the world is changing :). There're lots of projects really interesting, cleanly designed, full of useful features for user and also well documented. Becoming involved in open source projects is not a waste of time... they have been taken seriously.

I don't know why most of students think that you can't make money with open source projects and even learn a lot about interesting technologies, such as communication protocols, software engineering, hardware elements, and much more. Riehle shows how open source software impacts the economic behavior of stakeholders in the software ecosystem and we can understand how software companies make money with open source products. The rules are different, then we need specific methodologies to develop open source projects. Most of software engineering we've learned in universities may not be applied on open source software: the development is distributed, the "user" is a community (if it exists), how we can define deadlines, milestones, ...

The most important "post-undergraduate" experiences I had so far were those ones that involved open source projects: LLVM, Eclipse, ESbox, ... I remembered a lot of some software engineering classes on which we discussed how hard is to maintain and keep the software reusable. Also those compiler classes were really useful in LLVM ARM JIT support implementation.

So, don't think twice: we can learn a lot with open source projects and also makes a curriculum vitae stand out.