Free Software Contributions in November 2015

This post came in a bit late, because I was unsure of what to write. I’ve been pretty busy this month with work and some family matters, so my contributions were pretty much non existant. Or so I thought. Then I remembered:

Contribution to Free Software is not just writing code, it’s anything you do for the improvement of a Free Software project.

This includes bug reports, translations, meetings, promotion, etc. And I’ve done plenty of those.

Let’s see now: (in what ever order I remember them)

Kubuntu Podcast #6 got out in the 4th of November during UOS (Ubuntu Online Summit). Together with Aaron Honeycutt and Rick Timmis we’ve presented the new Kubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf. We did a install demo and some presentation on how the fresh install is, what’s included and what’s new.

In 17th of November we had an ArLUG meeting, where we’ve discussed about the current state of Free Software in the education system in Romania, and planned to have monthly meetings to revise what we have done, and what we can do to improve it.

In my search for a great Free Software alternative to Trello, I finally came across Wekan. It’s an awesome Kanban tool that is very similar to Trello, and I’ve deployed it at work using Docker. I’ve reported a few bugs on it and replied to some help inquiries in their chat.

I have started using ZSH instead of BASH, and I like it very much so far. I’ve installed OhMyZSH and made a few pull requests to the Bullet train theme which I’m using.

I’ve upgraded my server and have started using Docker for every service I run on it. So, naturally, I’ve searched for a web interface that would help me ease the work. So I came across Shipyard. I’ve tried to deploy it, but there were some problems with the automatic deployment. I’ve attempted at a fix for it, but failed, so I ended up just reporting a bug for it.

Since Maps.me recently Open Sourced their code, I’ve looked a bit into it and started using it as my main navigation system. The app is not translated into romanian yet, so I asked them why don’t they use a web translation platform. I got some insight on how their current translation system work, and I’ll probably look into how it can be improved so they may use a more popular translation system (Transifex, Pootle, or others).

I’ve discussed a lot with the KDE Romanian translators about translations and Pootle deployment.

We’ve had 2 Kubuntu meetings. One was the 16.04 Kickoff meeting during UOS, were we planned the work for that release, and the other happened later this month where we reviewed what work has been done, what needs to be done, and what and how it will get done.

And last (in the last few days of the month) I’ve started a new project. SVN-branch is a utility that helps whoever still uses SVN switch between branches with more ease. We still use SVN at work, and the KDE translations system still uses SVN. So this came in handy for me.

I’ve also worked a bin on building my 3D printer, but that still moves at the speed of a snail with rabies (romanian expression). Some of the pieces have arrived, and I’ve started working on building the main body and the motors holder. Currently mostly learning and drawing in FreeCAD.

This is it, as far as I remember. Wow! They are a lot more than what I thought when I started writing this post. I’m proud of myself, I’ve done something this month.