Open Source Festival 2013

SUNY Albany April 25th

Vitaly Babiy on the panel from Agora Games

Open Source Festival is an annual event put on by the American Society for Information Science and Technology – UAlbany Student Chapter (ASIS&T). It aims to bring members from academia and industry together to promote participation and utilization of open source code.

Participants from Kitware, Agora Games, The Vista Extensions Hub, MadGlory Interactive and others opened the floor to a discussion panel on how to bridge the gap between academic learning and industry involvement in Tech Valley.

As Vitaly Babiy from Agora Games explained, students who seek internships and co-ops while attending school immediately have a one-up over other graduates. They gain valuable work-environment experience before graduation, and this helps them refine and focus their job search while simultaneously bolstering their résumé. Babiy has made more than 60 open source contributions in the last year.

As I noted during the panel, a great opportunity is for local companies to come in and mentor a class project. As I experienced last semester in Software Analysis and Design with Professor Eliot Rich, solving a real-world example in a class project adds validity to the exercise. For this evening MBA class, Price Chopper mentored the project which involved creating a software development plan and prototype in Access or Java for an online grocery shopping website. Real world requirements analysis and development processes were employed while Price Chopper representatives from their IT department reviewed our progress.

MadGlory takes pride in the Tech Valley region and Open Source Festival 2013 was a great way to see how local businesses can encourage current and future students to participate in computer science, business, and information technology classes. The best résumé for a job application (at MadGlory or wherever) is to participate in open source projects on GitHub.