Q4.11: Participating in the Linaro community

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Tips for joining and contributing to an open source community

Participating in the Linaro Community

Work on ER team. Two goals help new engineers and help community.

This was inspired by Paul M and Tixy.

Also got ideas from Zach P, James T, Jesse BThey all spoke about common problems that happen when you go from proprietary to opensource.

Introduce each other

I've used Linux since 1998, but after working at IBM for 11 years on everything from J2EE to embedded. I was in for surprises when I joined Linaro

Agenda

Saying Hi to a 1000 people

The Learning Curve

How You Can Help

Submitting Your Work

printf(Hello World\n);

One of the hardest things to do when joining a community like Linaro can be simply saying hi.

Not necessarily the first hi, but the first real time you need to communicate.

There's a few reasons:* intimidating my 4th day involved speaking for 10 minutes on Git. There were git experts in the crowd.* how to even do it, ie email/irc/bug-report

Communication is Different

ProprietaryOne to One/Few

Instant messaging / Targeted Emails

Open Source e-mail etiquette

Open SourceOne to Many

IRC Channels / Mailing Lists

I didn't realize how important IRC and BIP were

In small companies and even my experience at an extremely large company, communication is limited to small audiences.

At linaro much of the communication is one-to-many. You're no longer sending an instant message to bob or a build-team. You're now talking on a large mailing list or IRC channel.

Email etiquette: https://fedorahosted.org/rhevm-api/wiki/Email_Guidelines

Tixy's Tips for Saying hi

Lurking

Studying

Find your opening

Tixy is a great example of how to get involved in a community. He started as a community member we didn't know, and now works for Linaro.He started by lurking on the mailing lists and IRC channels. Meanwhile he studied the websites. Specifically wiki.l.o. He focused on the area of a specific engineering team.Then started listening in to weekly irc meetings etc.Find your opening and email the TechLead of the relevant team with a quick introduction and offer to help.You may not be fortunate enough to get your pick of things to work on but there will likely be tasks you can help on, or new related work that you could suggest.

Working From Home

Scheduling

The Daily Routine

Physical Organization

Avoiding Distractions

Managing E-mail

Leave Your House!

https://wiki.linaro.org/Internal/Resources/WorkingBetterFromHome

In short: treat it like a jobMaintain consistent work hours so people know when they can find youTreat it like going to the office. eg put on clothesTry to have a real workspace. Don't work from your bed. ErgonomicsE-mail use filters to help deal with mailing list volumesImportance of getting out

The Learning Curve

Linaro encompasses a lot (kernel, ubuntu, android...)

Help may not be face to face

http://www.linaro.org/getting-started - several use cases (kernel, toolchain, android, etc)

We've got topics like linaro-general-restructuring-the-linaro-web and wiki madness

If you are just started visit linaro.org/community

Finding Things

Finding who's who:https://wiki.linaro.org/MeetTheTeam

Finding things on the Wiki:CategoryHowTo

Search (text and title)

Google site search

Searching old mailing list archivessite:lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev pre-built images andy

I put Homer Simpson on this slide because ...

https://wiki.linaro.org/WikiVideo/

Title: pandaBy Text: blueprint naming conventionsSite search: blueprints

How You Can Help

You don't have to be in Linaro to helphttp://www.linaro.org/community/

Now that you've figured out how to say hi and how to find things you are ready to help!

Key take-away: anyone can help

How You Can Help

Testing images:http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev/2011-September/007817.html

Help improve the wiki

Answer questions on Ask Linaro.

File a bug even better include a patch

Submitting Your Work

Snakes

Public Speaking

Death

LKML

Levels Of Anxiety

This may be the most different thing about open source of all.

Keep in mind: Most likely people won't know you. You'll have to earn their trust.

Coding Tips

Readability

Think small, targeted chunks

Be ready for revisionsThe RFC

Tools to help:stgit/quilt

rebasing

Open source projects like the kernel have their source read MUCH more than it is written, so readability is really stressed.

Many companies, even when code is reviewed, allows submissions of big changes in a single chunk. Open source code reviewers like submissions to be a series of small chunks. Bisectability

You will inevitably wind up doing more than one revision so plan for it in your dev-env from the start. Don't worry even top contributors go through multi-revisions sometimes

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Technology

Q4.11: Participating in the Linaro community