A video bawse at FSOSS

Hey Everyone,

I volunteered as a videographer at FSOSS recently and it was a wonderful experience. I feel pretty happy that I was able to be a part of it and that I got to meet some 'big wigs' in the industry.

Apart from that I also video taped three presentations and watched five. The first one I watched was given by the founder of Red Hat Linux named Bob Young. His talk was really interesting to listen, I really enjoyed the way he spoke and his use of body language. He repeatedly labelled himself as just a typewriter salesman, but in essence is much, much more.

The next talk I watched was of a classmate name Kieran Sedgewick who talked about Webmaker's Tech: The Future of Web Development. He did an excellent job and his presentation was nice to watch, he also handled the questions well.

After that, lunch happened and I had a man named Dan Hodge a senior solutions architect middleware at Redhat. It was a fun and inspiring chat that went well.

After lunch the next speaker was Chris Aniszczyk presented Friday Keynote Presentation. His talk was quite insightful and gave me a better understanding of the people inside the machine. I also found his description of the fail whale during the 2010 world cup quite humorous. 

After that I watched two more presentations then I got a free t-shirt! How Exciting!

Cheers,

James Laverty

A 'bug' story: Part II

Hey everyone,

The Webmaker bug was a success! The biggest problem I encountered was definitely setting up the dev environment. I ran into several errors on different computers, most of the time it was with the npm install to get gulp up and running. After I overcame those obstacles, I ran into a weird one (another bug perhaps?) where after logging into the localized version of my project it would not log me in aka the gulp dev. I tried it on Chrome, then moved onto Nightly, both to no avail. I eventually created a new log in and BAM, success.

After that I talked to a few people and got some help on where to begin, xmatthewx on github suggested that I use the how to template to help put it together and a few other sources put me on the right track. I learned a little bit about JSON and eventually got a template put together.If you want, you can take a look at my pull request! This is my initial request, I plan on getting a little feedback and updating my patch after.

This is a fun process and I get to have communication with professionals, how exciting!

IRC was also an interesting experience, for the most part it's petty quiet, but it seems useful if you ask the right questions.

That's all for today,

Cheers,

James Laverty

A 'Bug' Story

Hey everyone,

Bug Tackling!

I've decided to try and tackle a bug in the Webmaker app! It seems cool and fantastic.
The bug I'll be doing is to make a template for a blog(Blogger, he's lookin at you kid). Me and my friend Rafid are gonna be helping each other out with our separate bugs trying to en capture the essence of Open Source development.

Aside from that, life's getting fun! Learning about +Twitter ,and +FireFox, developing an Android app and many other things!

It seems upon initial inspection that fixing bugs is a daunting task, it's like climbing Mount Everest after only doing indoor climbing. The basic techniques are there, but looking up, the challenge seems way bigger than you (I'm an avid indoor rock climber).

This will be challenging, frightening,  and I'm sure, super rewarding!

You can follow me on twitter @0neSanctum (I'll get better I promise)

Cheers.

James Laverty