(post
 :title "My First Real FOSS Contribution"
 :date (make-date* 2013 06 15)
 :tags '("foss" "mediagoblin" "python" "federated" "decentralized" "wsu")
 :summary "I added a small feature!"

 (p [I spend a lot of my free time writing code. I usually work on my own
personal projects that never really go anywhere. So, I decided to take
a detour from my normal hacking routine and contribute to an existing
free software project. My contribution was accepted awhile ago now,
but I wasn’t blogging then so I’m rambling about it now.])

 (p [It’s wise to find a project with a low barrier of entry. An
active IRC channel and/or mailing list with people willing to help
newcomers is ideal. I remembered hearing about
,(anchor [GNU MediaGoblin] "http://mediagoblin.org")
at LibrePlanet 2012, so I decided to check things out. MediaGoblin is
a media sharing web application written in Python. Their bug tracker
marks tickets that require little work and don’t require a deep
understanding of MediaGoblin as “bitesized”.])

 (p [I chose to work on
,(anchor [this ticket] "http://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/453")
because it didn’t require any complicated database migrations or
knowledge of the media processing code. I added a new configuration
option, ,(code [allow_comments]), and a small amount of code to enforce
the setting.])

 (p [Eventually, the ticket got reviewed and
,(anchor [Christopher Webber] "http://dustycloud.org")
(MediaGoblin’s friendly project leader) merged it: “Heya. Great
branch, this works perfectly. Merged!”])

 (p [It was a very small change, but I was happy to ,(em [finally])
have some actual code of mine in a real free software project. I have
a strong passion for free software and the GNU philosophy, so it’s
really great to participate in the community. My job as a professional
software developer eats up a lot of my time these days, but I hope to
find the time to continue hacking and contributing.]))