1 Down, 2 To Go

Woah, it’s been another one of those crazy weeks. This was my first full (1 down, 2 to go) week doing a work placement in a local school, and it’s been hard work. I said it already, but teaching is definitely not for me! I tried to stop some children from play fighting the other day but it back fired and they started trying to tie my shoe laces together – I made sure not to let them succeed at doing that but that they even tried says a lot I think :S (Probably one of the funniest things to happen to anyone doing this placement…)

Also this week, I returned to uni for a day to see friends for one last time before the summer, move out of my room and collect results. Seems strange to think that my first year (1 down, 2 to go) has finished already, but it’s been really enjoyable and I did just fine in my results despite worrying about them (highest mark in my year, apparently ). Leaving my own room wasn’t that strange, but saying goodbye to the friends I’ve made and thinking that I won’t be seeing much of them for the next 3 months, and not living with some of them next year, seemed very strange!

Being home is super cool though, I’ve met up with my closest friends from school a couple of times already, though I haven’t been able to spend long with them due to all sorts of others things going on. While I’m at uni I don’t often think how much I enjoy spending time with them, but when I’m home and with them it always hits me how much I like them! Things always seem to click straight back into place whenever we meet, which is pretty incredible after we’ve all been doing a lot more of our own thing for the last three years or so.

Here’s to friends!

I demand a re-count :p

Although I’m sorry to not have gotten a place on the Fedora Board, my sincerest congratulations to those who have been elected. You all do excellent work for the project currently, and I have complete faith that you will continue to now that you’re elected (maybe even working harder!). Congratulations, Seth, Jesse, Tom and Jef

Even though I didn’t get elected, I feel just running has been well worth my time: some people have taken this opportunity to say such kind things to me and about me that I’m extremely flattered and proud. To all those who have said such things to me, thanks! I may well run again in the future, but perhaps not until I finish my degree …

In the mean time, I plan to start making to-do lists and start crossing off a number of Fedora items that have been swimming around in my head for too long now.

Updates

Lots of things I want to comment on, sorry for sticking them all in one post!

Learning To Code (Python)

We’ve now got a group of three together and have decided on Python as our language of choice, with a few more potentially interested in joining us. We’ve also picked up some tips from others about the best way to proceed, so we’ll get off to a good start Still looking for a mentor, and if you’re interested in fulfilling this role and meeting us via IM/IRC/VoiP once every couple of weeks or so then drop me a message – or even if you’re wanting to learning with us send me a message and we’ll get you involved!

In the mean time, I’ve been playing with Python and put together a really simple command line feed reader – was lots of fun to do and I think I might use it as a way to try out new techniques and ideas as I progress.

FUDCon

Wish I was there! Reading all the posts on planet has been great so a huge thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to write up their experiences. I think there’s loads of exciting things happening in Fedora at the moment, particularly interesting to me is all the work on making Fedora the very best place for contributors to be, but also there’s some cool sounding stuff going on with tools like Func.

The best post I’ve seen so far though was Jeremy Katz’s summary of Jim Whitehurst’s talk. Sounds like Jim Whitehurst has his head screwed on tightly and is a great guy to have leading Red Hat. Also interesting was a report I saw on Paul’s state of the union, and the news that we’ve gone from 2000ish Fedora account holders to 7000+ since FAS2. Congratulations to everyone who helped make FAS2, now we all need to make sure that as many of these new account holders as possible get integrated into the project and become great contributors!

Fedora Websites

Looks like we might have our work cut out for us :p Mairin Duffy did a trail usability test at FUDCon and the feedback was mixed but it certainly highlighted a number of areas we really need to improve. The next Websites Team meeting should be interesting as Max will be reporting on the spins hackfest which I hear was over 5 hours long!

Fedora Board Election

Firstly, I wanted to say I was flattered to see both Jeremy Katz and Nigel Jones mention me in their blog posts Re: the election, and I’m extremely flattered by the kind comments they made about me.

There’s not long left to vote, so if you haven’t done so yet, DO IT! And of course, feel free to vote for me

General Life

I’m spending the next three weeks on a work placement in a local secondary school, and I can tell you at this very moment that teaching is not for me! Still, the money will be good, and it’s a new experience which is always worth while.

I went to a shop with my brother and his fiance yesterday to pick out suits for his wedding which is in September. The suits look awesome, and Matt and Sarah both seemed really pleased with them Slightly worrying was having my waist measured, and it turns out I’ve lost quite a bit of weight lately but then a number of my family have been pretty slim in the past so I’m not too worried.

Ah, and I go back to Exeter this week to pick up my exam results and clear out my room properly. Hopefully the exam results won’t be too bad, I think Hebrew went really well but I’m less sure about the others – will wait and see. Foruntately it’s only the first year so it doesn’t count towards my final degree, all I need to do is pass!

Fedora Classroom?

If you’ve ever read Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society you might have thought about similar ideas to this before, but I’d love to hear people’s feedback.

Basically, I’d like to learn to write code, even if I never become very good at it (which is quite likely, my mind doesn’t really work in the right way) I’d like to have a better understanding of how things work and perhaps be able to contribute some simple fixes or scratch a few itches of my own. I know a lot of people learn to write code on their own, but I think I’d do better and have more fun if I do it with a group of other people. We could work remotely over the net, collaborate on finding resources, writing notes and checking each others work as we progress. Tools like Gobby, IRC, VoiP, wikis etc all make this sort of collaboration really easy to do.

Where Illich comes into things is that he proposed life long learning where we find people in our communities to mentor/guide us in our learning. Fedora is a massive community, with a lot of programmers present in it, and what I’d like to ask is if there’s anyone in the community who’d be willing to mentor/guide me in my learning, along with perhaps a small group of others (4 or 5?)?

Having a tight group of other learners who you meet regularly with, discuss problems, find new resources look over each others work etc could really make things a lot easier; like wise, having a mentor/guide who you meet regularly with to pick you up when you make mistakes and keep you moving in the right direction could be really useful.

It happens informally all the time: just the other day, I learnt the basic usage of git and Fedora’s websites thanks to ivazquez walking me through it on IRC. What I’d like, however, is something a bit more formal to last over a slightly longer period of time – say using the summer as the basis for a “semester” (or maybe just an 8 week period).

If you’re interested, either in acting as a guide/mentor for me, or in joining me and learning to code, then drop a comment on this post and let’s see if we can make this work.

Fedora Board Elections

I did it – I decided to run Elections start in about 3 hours time, when I’ll be safely tucked up in bed but I thought I’d take this chance to get a few last words in and encourage people to vote for me! (If you like an underdog, I’m probably your guy – take a look at the other nominees!). I don’t have an engineering background, in fact the opposite – I’m a Theology undergraduate – and so I hope I could bring a slightly different perspective to things. 

The main reason I’m running is because I care about Fedora, the OS and the community that surrounds it, and I want to do all that I can to ensure that it continues to grow in such a healthy and exciting manner. 

I’ve done all sorts of things in Fedora land over the past two years that I’ve been involved, including documentation, developer interviewing, release summarising, minute taking and general handy man in more ways than I can count.

I have plans for what I’d like to achieve in the next year for Fedora, including continuing to work with the rest of the Marketing team to get our Miro channel of to the best start (you’ll hear more about this soon!), keep poking people and helping to get news.fedoraproject.org up, use Fedora in my internship project at the Open Rights Group this summer (it’s going to get distributed to hundreds of MPs), and just to make sure that the community gets the credit that it deserves for all our hard work. 

Any how, feel free to ask me anything you like, and I’ll answer when I wake in the morning Make sure you check out all the other candidates too, and say thanks to Nigel Jones for all his hard work in creating our brand spanking new voting application. 

Fedora Get Help and Video

Ah, fresh from my exams (which could have gone better!) I got one thing done for Fedora today that I’d been wanting to do for ages: a new get-help page for the static site that new users can quickly and easily find, and that more experienced users can point them towards.

I’d written the content for it ages ago, but hadn’t chased up getting it made live. Now that I’m free from uni work for the summer, I had a little spare time this afternoon so I took the time to learn how to use git and find my way around Fedora’s websites repository, making my changes as I went. I couldn’t possibly have done this without the help of Ivaquez, ricky and mmcgrath – so thanks a bunch! Now, you’ll find linked on all the fedoraproject.org pages a Get Help link, and that page immediately gives you a run down of all the most important locations for end-users to go for help, as well as a description of what each is and how to access it for those users who’ve never come across IRC or mailing lists before. The content will probably need tweaking, but it’s a definite improvement I think

That of course inspired me to write up my experiences in a Fedora Websites contributor guide. This is particularly useful as we’re currently trying hard to expand Fedora’s Websites Team, and until now the process was something of a mystery (probably still is considering I wrote the guide!). Still, I’ve submitted it to the websites-list for people to look over, and we’ll take it from there.

As well as this, I took the ideas that have been thrown around lately about starting a Fedora TV video feed in Miro for us to easily share screencasts, video interviews etc with the community and tried to make something more concrete out of it. I created the feed, linked it to some of the already existing videos (thanks to Paul for these, although Herlo and Valent have also created videos lately) and stuck it in my fedorapeople space. All set to upload it to Miro and start the ball rolling when their website started failing Greg’s now picked up the baton, and hopefully in the next few days you’ll be able to find a Fedora TV feed in Miro.

This could be cool, and I’d definitely like to have a go at doing some of the developer interviews over video this release cycle, but that would mean my typing skills will have to improve if I want to keep text versions too (which I’m sure many will want!).