The Effects of FOSS On My Education, and its Benefits

As a student, Free and Open Source (FOSS) has been beneficial to me.  My understanding of programming, networking, and computing in general has been greatly increased from the usage of FOSS.  Thus I believe FOSS has been a important catalyst to my education.

My first introduction to programming was in 2002, where I had a high school class on C++ programming.  I began like almost every other person, with no knowledge of FOSS and programming.  Also like all other programming classes there was an assortment of tutorials and lab sessions, but unfortunately the class was not highly successful, and in May 2004 I graduated high school, failing to gain anything out of it. The failures could be attributed to many possible (perhaps teenage related) causes, but its not worth discussing here.  After graduation I felt clueless with my life, as I had not decided a college to go to. Little did I know where I would be in just under 2 years.

In the summer of 2004, I grew interested in Web Applications, from where I was introduced to the popular LAMP stack ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP ), except in my case instead of Linux I used MacOSX. Each of these tools (except MacOSX) are freely available, and was a benefit to me as I could learn to develop applications at no cost at all.  I used the many freely available tutorials on the internet to learn, and downloaded many popular PHP projects to further my understanding of the language.  Within a short period of time, my understanding of programming increased.  This included knowledge of application development, PHP, MySQL, XHTML/HTML, CSS, Apache, and the importance of Web Standards.  Yet still at this point I still did not understand what FOSS was all about, but had already benefited greatly from it.

I was to enter University in February of 2005, and in the process skip the foundation year.  Honestly, I feared that skipping the foundation year, I would enter handicapped as my knowledge of programming came from a hobby.  My fears were soon dissolved as I realized that I was in fact not handicapped, but actually far surpassed my classmates.

Not too long after, I began getting involved with the local Malaysian FOSS community. I was easily accepted into the community, and have now become the Meetup Organizer for the group.  With the close interaction with professionals in their field, I was able to quickly absorb their knowledge.  My involvement has carried me forward, and I was actively involved with the 7th AsiaOSS Symposium hosted in Malaysia.

The year is 2006, and the buzz word on the street is Web 2.0, Ajax, and Ruby On Rails. With my interests in Web Applications I started seeing what the hype was all about.  Once again, I relied on FOSS to help my understanding of the Ruby programming language.  I was once again able to understand the language in a short period of time all thanks to FOSS.

Ever since I started exploring FOSS over two years ago, I believe my computing, and programming skills have dramatically increased.  With the involvement of the community, and in the short span of a year I have started being involved with more and more local activities in Malaysia.

Without the availability of FOSS I would not be where I stand now.

Free and Open Source Software has provided me with several opportunities to improve my knowledge:

• Lower the level of entry to develop my own programs.
• Availability of source code to freely study and modify.
• Most importantly interaction with professionals.

No where in my life could I possibly dream where I would be today.

Comments

[flykoo]

I completely agree. Great thing! And the results are excellent!
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