Projects

CSS member Matt gave a fantastic talk, sharing his enthusiasm for OpenStreetMap. Matt explained how anyone can submit edits to the map to improve its data.

The talk was followed by a ‘mapathon’ inspired by the charity Missing Maps, to aid workers on the ground that previously relied on poor-quality maps in order to know where to send aid. We spent a few hours improving OpenStreetMap in the area of Chad and making pizza disappear!

Justin gave a workshop on why open source is awesome and how to contribute to open source projects. 💻

During the workshop, we explored the benefits of open source, how to find open source projects to contribute to, and how to contribute to them, ultimately culminating in pull request #352 to the CSS website!

Victoria and Dan hosted a “Git Workshop” as an introduction for first years and second years to Git - a version control system widely used in industry and by ourselves.

In the workshop, they covered installing git, making commits, need-to-know git commands, merge requests and more! Towards the end of the event, we carried on workshop tradition by having all the attendees fork a repo and sign the guestbook by making a pull request.

Following the growing success of our Discord server, we ran 2 related Discord Bot events.

Discord Bot Workshop

On Friday evening, we gave members a crash course on all things discord.py, giving them all the tools they needed to make a discord bot themselves. We also recorded an online version for people who couldn’t attend in person.

Discord Botathon

On the Saturday, we ran a 5 hour Discord Bot Hackathon with teams making their own bot using knowledge from the day before. The winners won a Raspberry Pi Zero each, but everyone was the real winners as we all got plenty of pizza.

After an 18-month gap of not being able to hold in person events, we were eager to get back into things with more workshops.

We kicked off with a Python Workshop early in 2021, specifically aimed at students who hadn’t used Python before.

The workshop covered everything from the basics of how python works, inputs, data structures, and of course the traditional “Hello World!” Resources are available here.

We hosted a Google Hashcode Hub to encourage and help people take part in Google’s global coding competition! It was massively successful, attracting many students from across all years of study.

Despite some livestreaming difficulties, everyone had a fantastic time playing with the problem, some teams coming fairly close to the finalists 🎉

Will ran a fantastic introduction to Android app development with Java, covering all the basics that make mobile apps tick 🎊.

During the workshop, we explored setting up a development environment, creating a basic guessing game app, and previewing it in the Android emulator.

Justin ran a fantastic workshop as an intro to docker, a fantastic tool to help manage deployments of software! 👏

We covered all the essentials, from what containers actually are, to running them, and building our own images and playing around on Katacoda! 🎉🎉

Justin and Will hosted the “Git Bit”, an introduction to the best VCS out there 🥰

In the workshop, we covered everything from making a first commit, all the way to resolving some merge conflicts 🎉 At the end, everyone signed the guestbook by forking the repo and making a Pull Request!