From Fedora Project Wiki
- Your name: Tiago Lam
- FAS Account: tiagolam
- Fedora userpage: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/tiagolam
Contact Information
- Email Address: tiagolam [AT] gmail [DOT] com
- Blog URL: http://tiagolam.blogs.ua.sapo.pt
- Freenode IRC Nick: tiagolam
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please answer following questions
Why do you want to work with the Fedora Project?
- Starting with a little bit of background, Fedora has always been my main reference when it comes to Open Source. I started using it back in July/August of 2008 when I installed Fedora 9. My main reason for switching from Windows to Linux was my curiosity/fascination for the Open Source world in general - and also, at the time, I just got tired of all of that Vista slowness. The other reason was that I was going to University (to take a Computer Science course), and I just felt it was a good opportunity to become friends with the penguin.
- In Fedora, I've seen how much computer people can give to the community without wanting anything back. A simple 'thank you' or 'kudo' suffice, and honestly, I can identify with that. Doing a project that you like, seeing it flourish is by itself a great reward. I know that the same morals exist in pretty much all of the other Open Source Projects, but the reason I want to work with Fedora in particular, it's because of the efforts that the community makes to always try to include the most recent and up to date tools/programs (which sometimes breaks things, but I guess that's a consequence of being at the edge).
Do you have any past involvement with the Fedora project or any other open source project as a contributor?
- No, I haven't had any opportunity to work on any open source project yet.
Did you participate with the past GSoC programs, if so which years, which organizations?
- No, unfortunately I haven't participated in any of the previous GSoC.
Will you continue contributing/ supporting the Fedora project after the GSoC 2013 program, if yes, which team(s), you are interested with?
- Definitely. That's one of the reasons why I'm participating in GSoC. Not only to contribute to an Open Source Project, but also to introduce my way into Fedora, so I can continue later, not only as a package maintainer, but also help with new ideas for the Fedora Project and developing those ideas - hence my purpose of participating in the Infrastructure team in the future.
- I may add that I've been reading the main mailing lists (Devel, Announce and Test) for almost 6 months. Although I haven't participated or introduced myself (which I will, in a near near future), my main reason to subscribe was to gain some internal knowledge about how Fedora works - some things could be read of the wiki (which I read), but in my opinion, some other things can only be understood with real problem/solution scenarios. The other reason was that I also want to become a package maintainer, as I said in the previous paragraph. I have started - and finished - the packaging of a program called mitmproxy, which is a SSL man in the middle HTTP proxy. I am in the process of making my final self-review of the package (to see if I missed something), and then also package a dependency, netlib, which is not in Fedora repositories either. Then I can submit my first two packages for review, and finally introduce myself.
Why should we choose you over other applicants?
- I have the necessary knowledge prerequisites:
- I've done projects in C and Python, and although I am familiar with Python extension (let Python call C), I've not yet worked with embedded Python (letting C call Python), but to fill that gap I've already started looking into Python ctypes.
- In those projects I used SVN and Git as a SCM and so, setting up a distributed environment for developing/contributing isn't going to be a problem (In my University we use an internal storage server for hosting all our Git/SVN projects, but I have already a GitHub account).
- As a final point, although I've never participated in a real Open Source Project I believe we have to start somewhere, and I have the necessary knowledge and character to easily adapt myself.