New to OpenStack? You’re in good company. Roughly 60 percent of attendees at Summits are newcomers, that’s why the OpenStack Foundation developed Upstream Training, a free course taught before the OpenStack Summits.

Students can register with this online form for the October 25-26 training in Tokyo ahead of the four-day Summit. The visa process for Japan is a lengthy one, so apply early if you are interested in attending the course.

What will you learn? Upstream Training schools newcomers in the tools used to contribute code to OpenStack, making sure you know Gerrit from Jenkins as you join a community of over 3,300 developers from 250 different companies worldwide.

On the first day, students pick a real bug to work on, set up a development environment, get online accounts for all the tools, sign the contributor license agreements and learn about the workflow release cycle.

Day two focuses on soft skills and planning contributions — in the form of a role-playing exercise where you build Legos with classmates.

Tim Freund, an operator and application developer, is coordinating this edition of the course with new and returning volunteers, including veteran free software developer Loïc Dachary who created the Lego role-playing game.

For newcomers to OpenStack, the training is a great way to get your feet wet.

“Upstream training was a very easy-going way to get introduced to Openstack’s workflow as well as the community,” says Peter Tran, an Upstream student in Vancouver. “It gave me everything I needed to become a contributor and on top of that it was a great way to start off the summit. I got to meet really interesting developers from all over the world and network with some great companies.”



Upstream Training, Vancouver. Photo: Nicole Martinelli, OpenStack Foundation.

If you’re an OpenStack expert, organizers are always looking for assistants and mentors. These volunteers help students prepare for class, understand the material and mentor them through the contribution process after class. Here’s the form for mentor registration.

Organizer Freund — who was a student in Atlanta, an assistant in Paris, and a teacher in Vancouver — keeps coming back for more.

“I know OpenStack isn’t conflict-free, but I get a tingly butterflies-in-my-stomach feeling at the Design Summits. It’s magical watching people from competing companies gather to design common components together,” he says. “That type of tight collaboration can even be rare within individual business units at proprietary software companies.”

Cover Photo: Vancouver Upstream Training by Nicole Martinelli for the OpenStack Foundation.