 Um, I hope that everybody's having a really good release party and anniversary celebration Of course due to time zones. I wasn't here for the early parts of today, but I'm gonna certainly look at the videos later But uh, yeah, it's it's really nice to just get together and share stories and Learn about new things and it's it's always it's like a mini flock For the release party. So it's it's really nice Okay, so uh, I didn't have a lot of time. So I have a bunch of things. I was thinking about talking about uh, so I may ramble along for a while and I may run out of time or I may not because I haven't really practiced this yet. So We'll see how it goes. Um, first of all, uh A little disclaimer up front I'm gonna actually be talking about a lot of stuff that happened In the very early days of fedora. So 15 or 20 years ago now and Of course that was a long time ago and my memory is is not perfect And even if it was perfect at the time, it's probably uh Colored by my perceptions or whatever. So I may remember something not the way it really happened or Other people may remember it slightly differently or or whatnot. But this is my my memory of things Also a little disclaimer that it's been a week. We've had the release this week. Hopefully everybody's upgraded to 39 and Enjoying the release, but there was a lot of work obviously to to get things out the door and all that so This is kind of like been a really busy week. So I uh, haven't got a whole lot of things prepared. So Anyway, um, let me just give you first a little bit of history about how I got into the open source community Um, so I started with eunuchs back in the in the 90s. Uh, so when I say eunuchs, I don't mean linux. I mean Uh, son os. I mean ibm rt 2 I mean, uh iris Old tricks all the big old unicy unices Uh, so at university, uh, I played around with all those a lot and I really enjoyed them I thought there were strengths and weaknesses to various ones and Obviously, I couldn't afford to have any of those machines at home, but Have had them at work and they were very interesting um Then kind of we moved along to uh a bit later this this new thing called linux was coming out and I looked around and I found a A thing called red hat linux 3.03 if anyone remembers that ancient release And so I installed it on a laptop that I had at the time and I was like wow, this is really amazing um, so I played around with it and Um, learned more about the system and how to install and how to get things working I remember in those early days, uh, it's it's a far cry from what we have now You know, you'd get a laptop and you'd try and boot the media on it and then like the cd rom wouldn't even work after After you booted off of it or You know, no sound or you know, lots of lots of issues and we don't have this day In part due to all the the hard work that people put in over the years um, so anyway, I got uh Got into into linux with red hat linux 3 Then a little later, uh, my professional career. I was working for a linux consulting company There was actually not very many of us. There was three of us in the company at first And then we added gradually a few more people, but we did consulting for folks that had linux servers And a lot of them were running at red hat linux for various other variants and at that time Red hat linux was a box set a cd set So you would buy the new version you get the cd and there'd be like tons of updates that would come along And you know at that point the network wasn't that great and it took you forever to download all these updates And so we started I started my own distribution based on red hat linux that pulled in all the updates and just respawned stuff and added a few things On the top and uh, and that was fun. You know got it Our customers could get all the updates and we could install without having to pull down the updates, etc um and That kind of led into Deciding I was somewhat active uh in the in the local community. We had a linux users group Nearby and I would go to that and and talk talk to folks there And I really like the community aspect of things You know, you could ask a problem. You could have people answer you you could contribute things um, and so then shortly around this time Uh, this is now we're talking maybe 2004 2005 Uh fedora extras started up so red hat linux made wait for fedora core and fedora extras, which was the extra packages on top um, and at the time I was using the xfc desktop Which I enjoyed quite a lot and it turns out that the maintainer of that in fedora core Uh was also the maintainer of kde and a bunch of other packages And they just did not have any more cycles to to handle xfc So they wanted to hand it off to extras. So I said well, you know, here's my opportunity to get into a larger community thing and Contribute back and and it learned things and it'll it'll be great So I stepped up. I said, I'll I'll take take our maintenance of this. You know, what do I need to do? And let me stress here that I had no idea what I was doing at this point I mean, I did not know how packages worked. I didn't know spec files. I didn't know How to build things. I didn't I didn't have a lot of Information, but I decided to give it a try. Um, and so I Said I would support it and they said, okay Well, the first thing you need to do is update to the new version. So I said, okay, I'll update to the new version Here, how does this look and you know, I got some feedback some people are like, well This is not right. This is not right, but you can fix those things. Okay, great And so that that went along everything was going good. I was very happy and you know, there's this community There's a mailing list. There's people I can ask and then a new major version of xfc came out and it needed a lot of changes there were packages that were different There was dependencies that were different. There was build stuff that was different And I had no idea about most of this stuff. So I I took a Blind cut at it. I was like here. I think this this is what we need and I got a bunch of critical feedback Some of it productive like, oh, you can't do that or if this is wrong or whatever And some of it not productive like, you know, oh, why are you even doing this? You don't have an aptitude for it. You're probably not, you know, somebody that we want maintaining the stuff And at that point that's when the the first person I want to talk about today stepped into the limelight My sponsor infadora extras at the time Was a person that many of you here probably know Tom spot Callaway Spot has been around forever. He's less active these days, but Spot was my sponsor and he seemed like a nice guy and when The critical comments showed up, you know, saying this guy doesn't have what it takes can't be a maintainer Spot stepped in really forcefully and he said, look, no, that is not the way open source works They're learning we teach them how to do it right. We move on. We don't Tell people they can't do things just because they did something wrong We all make mistakes we make mistakes all the time And we just learn from them and we move on and we get better and we help other people And that really really stuck with me. That was a very powerful thing For me in open source communities, you know, seeing critical comments or seeing critical Ideas coming back and then having somebody push back against that and say no, that's not how our community works We help people we we work with them. We get them to learn from their mistakes And I don't know how many again how many you know spotter have interacted with him But he has been so key to Packagers over the years. I don't know how many people he has sponsored and worked with and taught how to build things and how to To correct things and work through mistakes and so forth and he has always been extremely patient And I think this is this is an aspect That we really want to cultivate we want lots of these people in our community We want people who are patient and willing to help people out and know that you don't know things immediately You don't step into something and just know how to do it. You have to learn how to do it. That means making mistakes That's fine, but we need that kind of Kind of person in our community and spot is definitely one of those for me at least Now there's lots of people I could talk about and I I'm going to here in a moment, but um I just wanted to mention him As as an early contributor as someone just starting out that sort of thing is really important because If somebody had not come along and said no, that's not how we work. Here's how we do things I probably would have said, oh, okay, maybe you're right. I'm not cut out for this by I'll just I'll just go do something else And we've not only lost the contributor, but We've made other contributors look at that and go. Oh, I don't know if I want to contribute there There's there's problems and and they're going to yell at me when I make mistakes So it it's hugely impactful to have that welcoming and patience for new folks Going on I seem to be getting photo bombed here by a kitty anyway, uh so Really quickly. I'll move on to a second mentor that that Was very important to me So I got into packaging and I got pretty good at it and I maintain a whole bunch of packages But then I started getting involved in release engineering and infrastructure tasks Which there were many of course and there The person I really looked up to and many of you Were fortunate enough to work with this person as well And I'm talking of course about uh, Seth Vidal Seth was sadly taken from us way too soon, but He again was someone who when I first started working in a community or asking to contribute Was very patient and very Teaching he would say, you know, here's what you should do. Oh, you made a mistake here Here's how you correct that and and you move on Um, I can't count the number of things I learned from him He was obviously very smart. He had a lot of skills did tons of things Moved us from puppet to ansible. He wrote phone. He wrote yum All these things but he yet he found time for contributors if somebody asked a question He would maybe not answer them immediately But he would answer them and he would be very very patient about it He one of the things he taught me that I always think of is One day we were on IRC and I went off to go have lunch So it was off. I ate my lunch I came back and he had asked me a question and I said, oh, I'm sorry. I was at lunch I couldn't answer your question And he said don't don't apologize for things like that. Don't apologize for something that you're going to do You shouldn't feel sorry for going to have lunch. You should have lunch. You should you should enjoy that You should you should be happy and not not apologize for that and those sort of things You know give you more confidence and make you realize Uh things that you you don't Need to be ashamed of or apologize for or be tentative about So he definitely taught me that one of my favorite memories with him was A fedora activity day that we had Which would have been in 2012 We scheduled a for fedora activity day to work on the two-factor authentication That we wanted to roll out And so we carefully planned it and we planned all the people that we wanted to to get there and we had it in in raleigh um and everybody arrived and we we sat down in this uh conference room and Uh sat just like organized everything. He was like, okay Here's all the things we need to do you do this you do that you do that And you know at a lot of times when a bunch of people are working on something You see a few people working on something and a lot of other people just kind of waiting for them to finish or working on something else or you know not Central to the task But at that fed every single person was working on something that was important that was that mattered to the task at hand You know people were packaging things other people were reviewing those packages somebody was writing a puppet manifest somebody was doing this And it just all gelled. I mean it's like 12 people working Greatly in concert and I think largely it was because of his his ability to just Organize people and get them all moving in the same direction um a final thing I want to mention about him is um he had a way of taking ideas that you would You would have and making them like 10 times better. So you would suggest something you'd say hey Could could we do this or you know, this this might be a good idea And he would look think for a minute and they go well, that's a good idea But what if you did this and this and then your idea is suddenly You know vastly better and you didn't think of those things um, and again very patient Wonderful wonderful person and I miss him all the time um, and I guess I don't know how much time I have left because I'm way over but uh I just wanted to finish up here with a few thoughts about mentoring You know There are formal mentoring processes where you have You know an assignment there are here's a pool of mentors here's a pool of mentees. We assign people etc But in communities you often get these cases where there's a pool of mentors a pool of mentees And they just find each other, you know, they don't there's no assignment going on It's just you know that you can ask questions of this person They'll be patient and they'll respond to you And and answer you and I we definitely need to cultivate that and we need to make sure that our mentees You know realize that after they've gotten started in the community They should start mentoring people too. They should answer questions. They should help people out And it just you know, it snowballs from there and that's that's really how open source works how the community works Especially the four fedora community um And finally, uh, just a last plug if you're looking for a place to contribute There's a ton of places looking for people. Uh, obviously infrastructure We always are looking for folks to help us out with things Uh, but the website's team is always looking for folks to help out The docs team could definitely use some help with folks writing documents helping with the document pipeline that kind of stuff The server working group, uh, these folks, uh, are working on all kinds of things and just don't have some enough manpower and Person power and they they could definitely use some help as well and of course packaging and things like that are always good, but you know, there's just so many places to contribute and you just kind of Dive in and find those people who are helpful to you in those areas And there are people in all those areas that are going to answer your questions They're going to be patient to you. They're going to be a mentor if you continue to contribute in that area Um, so I would urge everybody to to think about it and think about taking that first step and and talking to folks Um, I think that's the bulk of what I wanted to go over. I don't know if anybody had questions for me or whatnot Let's see if I can see Okay, no, I don't think so. So, uh, I think that's that's about it for me I'm happy to answer anybody questions. Uh, if anybody wants to catch me on matrix or IRC or Any medium email, etc, etc