Why another blog?
To be honest
I thought that blogs were a relict of the 2000s that had died a long time ago. I my life I have read only a handful of blog-posts but never followed a blog regularly, and I definitely never thought that I would start writing my own blog one day.
However...
This blog is part of a project I started recently. I think it must have been a @nixcraft tweet, that wrote about an online summertraining from the Linux User Group of Durgapur, that offers training to anyone who is interested in contributing to F/OSS projects, and introduces them to the most important tools and guidelines to prepare and advice them for contribution in any software project of their choice. From what I understood, the course is lead by Fedora developers, mostly, plus some guest speakers from other known projects.
Q&A with a group of experts
It's just been one week of training now, but I already got hooked; I've been coding for quite some years now, but I'm coding alone. I always wanted to do projects in collaboration, but none of my colleagues at work could join me (we're a very small company). Switching to Linux fully a few years ago and learning Python brought me closer to the F/OSS world, and I am fascinated. I'm using and enjoying free software and admire everyone who spends time and effort in developing these great tools. Like so many other people, I depend on a lot of free software in my daily routines, and I think it's time to give something back to the F/OSS world by contributing myself.
An IRC classroom
...is very much like a real classroom. So far, I've used IRC only sporadically; from my experience, the channels were often full of users but hardly anyone typed back if I had a question I could not find answered elsewhere. This summertraining is definitely different, and I'm usually smiling from class begin to class end. There is a teacher speaking and there are students ... speaking, of course. Some students join late, barging in, asking what they missed so far, some will never stop chiming in asking questions that have been answered many times before and some are just trolling around. I feel like I'm in school again and I really missed that feeling. It's hilarious to follow discussions between students and experts and I really appreciate the patience of the teachers; while I'm learning a lot about communication, I'm having a lot of fun at the same time.
So why a blog?
I don't think that many people (if any) will read this blog, but that's not important. During the last week of summer-school, the sessions included communication & netiquette, touch-typing and vim. Often, some links with further information and documentation is provided to read for homework, but this Friday we were advised to start and write our own blog, mainly as tool to track our own progress and projects. I'm not absolutely sure what I will write about, though. But I will definitely try to document my own progress of getting into contribution of a free software project of my choice. Writing down my experiences and progress may really be helpful for me; so far my documentation consists of my git commit messages and my (quite infrequent) comments in my code. Maybe this blog will help me tidy and sort my thoughts and accelerate my progression.
