The software industry in Taiwan is still in its infancy. The computer science students in Taiwan often find themself unable to find internship opportunities. They lack the motive to learn because they are unable to apply their skills to practice.
The Apache Software Foundation is the largest governing body for open source software projects, managing more than 350 top level projects, including many of the world’s mainstream network systems, big data systems and machine learning systems. Numerous world’s top-notch developers contributed countless hours in the projects.
Why don’t we encourage the students to join the Apache communities, let them sharpen the skills by working with the best talents first-hand? After all, the best software and the best developers are out there in Apache!
Over the past few years, we selected a few Apache projects in the Big Data and Machine Learning area, encouraging the students to participate in the development of these project, working with the communities. To date, we have had 7 committers in the various Apache projects. Even more, our students have largely taken over the development of the Apache Submarine, a Machine Learning Platform. Despite that Taiwan lacks the Silicon Valley-like environment, our students gained the experience that’s comparable to the internship at top software companies.
The speaker will share the successful stories of Taiwanese students in these projects: Apache Hadoop, Ozone, Submarine and Yunikorn (incubating).
The speaker wishes to foster software talents by having them participating in the development of the top international open source projects; moreover, pursue the technological independence of Taiwan via open source projects, staying away from the destiny of digital colonialism.
About Wei-Chiu Chuang
Wei-Chiu joined Cloudera in 2015 as a software engineer, where he leads the development of Cloudera’s distributed storage system: the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
He is an active committer and Project Management Committee member in various Apache open source projects, including Apache Hadoop, HBase, Ozone and Submarine. He serves as the PMC Chair of the Apache Hadoop project as well as an Apache Software Foundation Member. He is also a founding member of Taiwan Data Engineering Association, a non-profit organization promoting better Data Engineering technologies and applications in Taiwan.
Wei-Chiu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University for his research in distributed systems and programming models.