Welcome

You want to become a software developer! That's a great idea! The world needs people like you!

We offer support to people like you for free forever, you just need to ask! Of course we provide this support only as much as our human resources allow. We do our best, not more.

An internship at home

We invite you to start an internship at home. During your internship you get quality expert support for free. You will be a member of our team. You may interrupt or abandon this internship at any moment.

We help you to enter the business of software development with just your own time as your only investment. Try to do that with some proprietary framework! And because Lino is free, your investment doesn't get lost in case you would decide to leave our team. You will always be allowed to use what you learned with us, either on your own or together with others, for making money (see How to make money with Lino). Try to do that with some proprietary framework!

In order to start an internship, simply contact one of the team directly via email. There is no online application form because we are a small team. One of us will be your mentor and will communicate with you individually.

During your internship you will

  • work independently and at a rhythm that suits you.

  • gain experience with working in a free open-source software project

  • increase your chances on the job market

You will learn among others

  • how to write and maintain source code in Python, Javascript and Sphinx

  • how to use Lino and its underlying framework, Django

  • how to use git for sharing your work with others

  • how to monitor and use continuous integration on GitLab

Possible outcome of your internship

Prerequisites

We assume that you have a computer with a Linux operating system at your disposal. If you use MS-Windows as your primary OS, check out Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). See here or here.

Experience with the Python programming language is not required but will accelerate your progress.

You don't need to be perfect, you will learn on your way, and we will help you to learn. And which is more: we will learn from you.

How to read this guide

"Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." -- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

As a first step, your mentor will ask you to read this guide sequentially.

Reading this guide sequentially means that you use the previous/next links. They are on the top and on the bottom of each page, they are even linked to the left / right arrows keys of your keyboard. Consider the inline links in this guide like footnotes of a book: You are welcome to follow these footnotes, but please take care to return to the place you left and continue your journey, because these footnotes lead you into the labyrinth of documentation.

Unlike Carroll's Wonderland, this guide isn't perfect: some pages are obsolete, useless, boring, or at the wrong place. So please tell your mentor when you get stuck or have the feeling that some page is useless, boring or difficult to understand.

We need you

Don't believe we are selfless altruists. We have a good reason for helping you with getting started your business: we want Lino to have a sustainable and diverse community of users.

This guide is written and maintained by volunteers. Lino is sustainably free software, it belongs to us all. The mere fact of asking for help and giving feedback is already a contribution to making this guide better. The Lino community thanks you in advance.

Don't hesitate to ask questions. Keep in mind that every feedback, even critical feedback, is a valuable contribution to Lino.

How to contact us