Self Introduction: Matthew Daniels

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

On Sat, 2008-09-20 at 12:50 -0400, Matthew Daniels wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> My name is Matthew Daniels and I'm an undergraduate studying Physics
> and Astronomy at Clemson University, although my hometown is
> Charleston, SC.  I've been using Linux as my primary OS for about 5
> years now, and I've been using Fedora since FC6 came out in '06.

Welcome Matthew.

> I actually have done a little bit of contract programming, and my
> coding skills are mediocre.  I'm comfortable is Perl and Java, and
> can, for the most part, hold my own in C and Python.  But, this is
> probably not sufficient for making large-scale contributions to the
> Fedora Project.  However, I regard myself a pretty good writer, and I
> recently realized that I actually kind of enjoy writing program
> documentation.  So, since Fedora -- and Linux, in general -- have been
> so good to me, I've made it one of my personal goals as of late to
> start trying to give back to the OSS community.  I felt that actually
> joining a project and getting my hands dirty would be a good way to do
> it.

You'll be surprised where even a little coding and Linux admin
experience can take you around the Fedora Project, and I'm pleased
you've chosen Docs as a place to become a contributor.  We'll try to
keep your interest around here. ;-)

> Accordingly, this is my first time contributing to a project like
> this.  In the future, I think I may also wish to become a Fedora
> Ambassador and try to push Fedora with Clemson's Linux User Group,
> since they're sorta just stuck on Ubuntu right now.  But for now, I'd
> like to take things one step at a time, and contribute to the
> fedora-docs group as much as possible.  Hopefully, you guys have
> something I can do; even if it's just cleaning up broken links for
> now, that's fine.  I just want to help.

David pointed you at the new task lists, and I want to encourage you to
be bold.  For example, in addition to updating the content from F8 to F9
for the User Guide, we can write new content that covers other parts of
the desktop for the user.  I don't think we want to grow forever, but
there is certainly more to cover.  Covering the three desktops is easier
than ever now -- you can boot a virtual instance or switch desktop
environments for a different user on the same machine and use fast user
switching.

Your writing here seems coherent and clear enough.  You'll find our
style guide to be a good help, it has long been pretty good, and
Elizabeth Ann West has just begun to take it over the top for something
pretty great:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/StyleGuide

For questions, this list or IRC are good places.

cheers - Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, Sr. Community Relations Guy
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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