Blogs

This blog post summarizes the discussions and action items from the Infrastructure and Release Engineering workshop held at Flock 2024 in Rochester, New York, USA. This post is also an experiment in using AI-generated summaries.

To all Outreachy May 2024 applicants to the Fedora Project, Today is May 2nd, 2024. The Outreachy May 2024 round results will be published in a few short hours. This year, the participation in Fedora for Outreachy May 2024 was record-breaking. Fedora will fund three internships this year. During the

The contribution phase of Outreachy can be intimidating. Check these best practices for mentors organizing a non-coding Outreachy internship.

In this moment, I am here, one with the breath of the wind, dissolved into the colors of the spring afternoon.

A poem to describe love from a constantly suspended state of waiting and wonder. "And the stolen moment, promises eventually for eternity."

When I was a student, I wrote about what I learned, but I stopped writing regularly. Now I want restart my storytelling habits again in 2024.

Can white privilege and identity become superpowers for love and justice? If I can't wait for that story, maybe I have to take the first step.

"Digitalism" is a poem I originally wrote in August 2022. the poem's birth came from being stuck between the analog and digital worlds.

Friend, are you okay?

Brené Brown suggests seven elements to trust in her book, "Braving the Wilderness". You can remember these elements as an acronym: "BRAVING".

The answer to solve my dilemma of two split paths was to find the middle path. Those two separate paths were my personal life and my career.

Recently, I came across three product roadmaps from Proton. They did a great job creating transparent product roadmaps. Here is what they did.

A brief meditation on why you should write yourself into obsolescence and also what kind of writing matters most when documenting yourself and your responsibilities.

Should we be too quick to discard negative, harmful responses in a community survey? This short review considers a time when an Open Source community is evaluating its community with a survey. What did we decide to do in the end?

In 2021, CHAOSS initiated a review of its diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. This post summarizes progress made by the team in 2022.

This post describes my coaching and mentoring work with the UNICEF Venture Fund in 2021-2022 on the Digital Public Goods Standard.

A poem that found me while riding my bicycle in the early evening hours of Georgia.

On 6 February 2022, the CrystalCraftMC forums officially closed down. This announcement shares history and why the decision was made.

How do we understand sustainability when we talk about open source investments? Here are four CHAOSS metrics to help you measure it.

A story in which I visit the Fedora Council ticket tracker and find an important opportunity to advocate for contributors from Iran.

The UNICEF Innovation Fund offers a unique Open Source mentorship programme. This article looks back at the highlights of 2020/2021.

There are moments I reflect back on my life when I met someone who interacted with me in an impressive way. Though unknown to me then, I feel now that they perceived my authentic, true self when I was still searching.

Open Source communities often turn to a committee model for governing their projects. Sometimes it works, but other times it does not. Why?

This is a story about how I learned to say "no", when the pressure to say "yes" was so great. Learning how to say no became my new superpower.

Nostalgia is cyclical at times. Nostalgia keeps us in the past but sticks with us in the present, much like blogging and blogs in the 2020s.

What if dependencies took a human-centered, or community-centered, approach? We describe dependencies in machine terms, but we miss something.

Language is powerful. Words are subtle building blocks to how we imagine the world around us. So, with the goal of pursuing more equitable language, I propose the end of accommodations.

Përshëndetje nga Tiranë, or hello from Tirana in Albanian. I am residing for a short time in Tiranë (pronounced Ti·ra·na), Albania.

2020 saw the launch of a formalized Open Source Mentorship programme for the UNICEF Innovation Fund. Learn more about it in this reflection.

Recently a Spotify playlist curated into my feed. The playlist was a perfect match for my soul when I needed it most. This led me to wonder, who or what curated this playlist? What caused it to appear in my feed that day?

This first appeared on the Open Source Initiative Wiki. In light of the election update this year, I am republishing my statement of intent on my personal blog. No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive. Mahatma Gandhi I believe in the value of upholding the Open Source

When I first saw the letter asking for Richard Stallman and the FSF Board of Directors resignations with merely five signatures, I knew I had to sign. Not because I knew it would be the popular thing to do. But because it was what was true in my heart. Only

Read more of my poetry on my blog. I put on our playlist,Pure poetry to untrained ears. My heart taken by the hand,But led back to the Atlantic blue,Wondering if I am singing your tune?

Four years ago, on March 13th in 2017, I woke up for breakfast in the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia & Herzegovina. As I ate breakfast on the morning of March 14th of 2021 in the seemingly eternal era of COVID-19, it struck me.

When I launched my blog, I always envisioned writing cute snapshots of insight into my life. As much as I would publish them for the Internet, I was also publishing for myself. Or so, it started off this way.

What major changes await Free Software and Open Source in the 2020s? Flory shares three emerging trends that could shape the next decade.

Mozilla published the "Open Source Archetypes" in 2018. This article recaps how the report influences the UNICEF Innovation Fund.

An amateur license review of the Cryptographic Autonomy License version 1 (CAL-1.0). What makes the CAL-1.0 different from other licenses?

Hacktoberfest 2020 is here, and TeleIRC has issues ready to help you get your Hacktoberfest t-shirt or tree. Check out what there is to do!

Trigger warning: Grief, police violence, death. This blog post was first written on August 28th, 2020. Today is a sad day. Chadwick Boseman is dead. At 43 years old, he lost a terminal battle with stage IV colon cancer. As his great light dims, I am left to wonder what

El Ten Eleven released their self-titled debut album in late 2004. This review by Flory shares hidden background and trivia on El Ten Eleven.

Trigger warning: Grief, death. Two years passed since we last met in Bolzano. I remember you traveled in for a day to join the 2018 Fedora Mindshare FAD. You came many hours from your home to see us, and share your experiences and wisdom from both the global and Italian

This is the story about the facilitation of the Principles of Authentic Participation. This blog post is a story, or perhaps open source lore.

There are many new changes in TeleIRC v2.0.0. This post explains major changes for TeleIRC v2.0.0. Read on for the release highlight reel.

After almost eight months of work, the TeleIRC Team is happy to announce General Availability of TeleIRC v2.0.0 today. Thanks to the hard work of our volunteer community, we are celebrating an on-time release of a major undertaking to make a more sustainable future for TeleIRC. Download TeleIRC v2.0.0 now!

Happiness Packets are an open source way to say thanks to others. Take the 2020 #HappinessPacketChallenge to spread cheer from 27 April to 3 May!

This post is a follow-up to FOSDEM 2020, pt. 1: Play by play. This post summarizes the talk given by me and my colleague, Mike Nolan, at FOSDEM 2020. FOSDEM 2020 took place from Saturday, 1 February, 2020 to Sunday, 2 February, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium (shortly after Sustain OSS

Grief is a strange emotion. Today, my memories and heart are on my former roommate and friend Hannah / Honor Loeb.

The Free Software movement is rooted to origins in the 1980s. As part of a talk I gave with my colleague and friend Mike Nolan at FOSDEM 2020, we analyzed how the Free Software movement emerged as a response to a changing digital world in three different phases. This blog

CopyleftConf 2020 took place on Monday, 3 February, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. This event report summarizes key takeaways and thoughts from CopyleftConf.

Once upon a time, I volunteered in the Minecraft open source community with Bukkit and Spigot. This is a story about FOSS and young folks.

The RITlug TeleIRC team is working on TeleIRC v2.0.0. This is an update on what is coming in TeleIRC v2.0.0, our progress so far, and what to expect next.

This blog post is an essay response from a class I took at the Rochester Institute of Technology, WGST-357: Communication, Gender, and Media. This course was taught by Dr. Nickesia Gordon. The essay prompt encouraged us to reflect broadly on the role of media in society. I liked my response

I attended FOSDEM 2020 on behalf of RIT LibreCorps to represent our engagement with the UNICEF Innovation. Here is a play-by-play recap of FOSDEM 2020!

CHAOSScon EU 2020 took place on Friday, January 31, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. This event report is a play by play recap of the sessions and conversations.

An event report from Sustain OSS 2020. I learned about community-first governance and co-created blueprints for Principles of Authentic Participation.

DevConf CZ 2020 took place from Friday, January 24th to Sunday January 27th in Brno, Czech Republic: DevConf.CZ 2020 is the 12th annual, free, Red Hat sponsored community conference for developers, admins, DevOps engineers, testers, documentation writers and other contributors to open source technologies. The conference includes topics on Linux,

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) I never intend to adjust myself to injustice. “I’m proud to be maladjusted.” https://t.co/TFBiWBy6Xc — Be A King (@BerniceKing) December 12, 2019

In 2006, Bruce Byfield asked why open source was not on activist agendas. Have things changed in 2019? What did Byfield get right? What did he leave out?

Containers are slowly taking over the world. Does this include the high-performance computing (HPC) world? As of July 2019, the answer might be yes!

Do you frequently write comments or READMEs in Markdown? Learn how to make your Markdown images more accessible with this one simple trick. No gimmicks!

Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) is a genetic disorder that has a huge impact on those living with it. But what is it and what can you do about it?

On April 20th, 2019, the TeleIRC developers released TeleIRC v1.3.1. This explains what's new and offers a development sprint retrospective.

The RITlug TeleIRC developer team celebrated the v1.3 release on March 3rd, 2019. Looking ahead, the team is mapping out next steps for quality-of-life improvements in v1.4. What’s coming in TeleIRC v1.4 TeleIRC v1.4 is the next feature release of TeleIRC. The targeted release date for v1.4 is by the

This is an unfinished draft from the end of my 2017 study abroad semester in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It includes a parting memory from Sarajevo, Bosnia.

What is a community and what does it mean to belong to one? What makes a community so important to someone? Read more to understand what community is.

On Feb. 2nd, 2019, the Teleirc community held the first developers' meeting. Contributors planned the next sprint for Teleirc v1.3 expected in March 2019.

Since June 2015, Fedora is working to ship modular versions of packages, known as Fedora Modularity. This article analyzes why Modularity failed in 2017.

Do you write documentation with Sphinx? Check out this template repository with ReStructuredText docs, Travis CI testing, and readthedocs.org publishing.

A quick recap of the Sustain OSS 2018 conference, covering topics such as human aspects of governance, financial sustainability models, diversity, and more.

I learned more about a man named Seth Vidal by chance. For Fedora Appreciation Week, I wanted to share a personal story surrounding his life and passing.

What was Queen's secret to success? With help from MusicBrainz, a team of students from the Rochester Institute of Technology try to answer the question.

What is a world that goes with or without? A world of access to free information like Wikipedia? What does privilege afford and take away from all of us?

Does Python not exist for you in a Fedora Vagrant virtual machine? You might run into this problem using Ansible in Vagrant with Fedora. Here's the fix.

What parts of our culture make us proud and content or disappointed and shameful? I started to wonder about my identity and what it means to be an American.

Managing an open source project is hard work. Learn how to make your open source project more transparent and organized with GitHub project boards.

Similar to last year, I am putting forward a note of planned absence from the Fedora Project community from May to August 2018. Transparency is important to me. I wanted to make this announcement ahead of time to set clear expectations for the upcoming months. I am returning to Chicago,

Six months ago, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Along the way, I learned a few lessons on creating a healthy diet of media and pop culture consumption in a world of constant connectivity and endless media reservoirs.

Abysma by Geotic is a cross between electronica and indie pop that pushes us to introspect on ourselves, acknowledge our worst qualities, and recognize they can be overcome. Justin W. Flory reviews the album in his music column, Tergiversate.

My flight to NYC from Dublin was canceled and I had an extra day to spend in Ireland. I didn't know it yet, but I would learn about the influence of Irish women in medicine and write a Wikipedia article on one of them. What a layover!

Ever wondered how to dynamically grow your infrastructure to handle increased traffic and load? Figure out how with Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling.

Facebook developer advocate Christine Abernathy attended the Rochester Institute of Technology in November to talk about the Facebook open source program.

In December, I received the happy news of an offer for a internship position at UNICEF in the Office of Innovation. The Office of Innovation drives rapid technological innovation by rapid prototyping of new ideas and building full-stack products to make a positive impact in the lives of children. This

2017 was a fully-packed year for me. This post walks through my last year and reflects on the experiences I had. Would you believe my passport is running out of pages?

Demon Days is the second studio album released by Gorillaz in 2005. Demon Days is officially classified as alternative hip hop, but it's better described as a fusion of styles and genres, rolled together.

2017 was a busy year for the Fedora Project. Help share the story of what your sub-project or team in Fedora was up to by writing a Year in Review post on the Community Blog!

FOSS@MAGIC and the RIT Linux Users Group (RITlug) teamed up to exhibit at the Rochester Mini Maker Faire in 2017. See what we brought with us!

Music is a key part of my life. I spend a lot of time listening and analyzing music. However, music is as much a personal experience as it is a social one too. In music, an artist shares their perspective and experience with the listener. The listener, in turn, shares

My independent study to work on ListenBrainz comes to a close. I talk about my work in the last month and reflect back on my original objectives.

On November 7, 2017, members of the RIT community came together for the annual Election Night Hackathon held in the Simone Center for Student Innovation.

My independent study with ListenBrainz progresses with new contributor documentation and exploring user statistics further with Google BigQuery.

The world of digital devices alters modern experience of reality. Time no longer asserts priority or influence over a moment because of a smart phone.

I needed a tool to change my laptop backlight brightness. After discovering there was no RPM in Fedora, I set out to package my first RPM for Fedora.

Last week was busy with new changes and documentation for ListenBrainz. I also picked some new tasks and will participate as a mentor for Google Code-In!

After deep consideration, I am resigning from the Fedora Council at the end of the Fedora 26 release cycle, opening a new Council seat for Fedora 27.

Learn how to set up a ListenBrainz development environment to start working and contributing to the listenbrainz-server project.

This semester, I'm taking an independent study where I contribute to ListenBrainz. By the end, I hope to accomplish three goals for ListenBrainz.

The municipality of Tirana, Albania recently migrated to NextCloud, an open source private cloud solution for the 600 employees of the municipality.

InfluxDB is a time-series database by InfluxData that lets you work with large amounts of time-series data quickly. Learn more about the TICK stack tools.

IRC doesn't have to be complicated anymore. Introducing Riot, an open source IRC client based off of the decentralized and open Matrix protocols.

Start playing with CoreOS Tectonic by installing a simple web app to Kubernetes. You'll get hands-on experience with some Kubernetes concepts in this guide.

A new round of Fedora community leadership elections are coming up. Consider this point for the Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee (FAmSCo) election.

Following along in the Kubernetes series, this article shows you how to deploy CoreOS Tectonic to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build your infrastructure.

Open source software is nothing new in 2017. But what about open source design? The Ura Design team brings open philosophies and practices into design work.

This tutorial builds on basic Kubernetes knowledge and shows you how to use Minikube to build a single-node cluster on your own desktop and deploy an app.

For containerized applications at scale, there are many challenges to consider. Kubernetes is one way to build resilient and scalable infrastructure.

The Open Labs Hackerspace in Tirana, Albania is passionate and empowered about open source and its ability to influence change in the region.

Originally published on 19 April 2017 at Medium.com.Republished on 25 October 2021 at jwfblog.wpengine.com. Many times, I’ve sat down to write this. The same number of times, I never finish and delete it all. Many times, I’ve wondered how to say the things I want to say. I’ve been doing

The 2017 Fedora Diversity FAD (or team sprint) took place during the weekend of DevConf, 27-29 January. We worked on three major goals with our team.

Are you a REAL open source fan? Happiness Packets are one way to say thank you to others in open source. Take the #HappinessPacketChallenge right now!

I am stepping out of the Fedora community from May to August 2017 for an upcoming internship. This post is intended to help clarify my future availability.

Open source events happen all over the world. From March 25-26, 2017, students were introduced to Fedora at Linux Weekend 2017 in Tirana, Albania.

During 18-19 March 2017, the Open Labs Hackerspace in Albania organized a 48 hour "open source" hackathon focused on UN Sustainable Development Goals.

2016 was a blur: Bitcamp in Maryland, HackMIT in Boston, WiCHacks 2016, Flock to Fedora in Poland, Vermont with Matt, NYC with Mike, and so much more.

Over 140 students from across campus and across departments gathered together as the election night results rolled in to work on a range of civic projects.

MINECON 2016 took place from September 24-26, 2016 in Anaheim, California. I joined the SpigotMC team one final time to help rock the convention floor.

This post was originally published on OpenSource.com. More and more students are learning about the world of open source through video games. Games like FreeCiv let players build empires based on the history of human civilization while games like Minetest emulates Minecraft in an open source block-building sandbox. Students are

Released in 2007, Texas-based band Explosions in the Sky share an irreplaceable part of human psyche and emotion in All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone.

When starting with GitHub, there are ways to effectively use GitHub organizations to boost productivity and organization. Here's how you do it.

This post is published as part of a personal archival project of my poetry and other creative works. This poem was written in October 2016.

My story in open source started with gaming and Minecraft. Since then, it's been a wild ride full of new adventures and experiences.

This post is published as part of a personal archival project of my poetry and other creative works. This poem was written in October 2016.

Women in Computing @ RIT, Open Labs Albania, and FOSS Wave India are working on organizing a virtual meetup in October and November 2016.

HackMIT is the annual hackathon event organized by students at MIT. This year, the Fedora Project attended as sponsors and mentors during the hacking.

Earlier this month, I received the Rainbow badge in Fedora Badges. Rainbow is the fifth badge of six for receiving "karma cookies" from other users in IRC.

Today, I am pleased to announce my new role as the Fedora Magazine editor-in-chief. I aim to provide my own unique leadership and guidance to the Magazine.

August 22, 2016, marks the end of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016 program. This post is an overview of my participation and a short reflection.

From August 2 - 5, the annual Fedora contributor conference, Flock, was held in Kraków, Poland. This is my report and analysis of the conference.

This week wraps up for July and the final period of Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2016) is almost here. I'm working on the final steps to deploying my work.

The past week of my Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2016) proposal looks at writing documentation, handling upgrades, and putting on finishing touches.

In August 2016, I will travel to Kraków, Poland for the annual Fedora Flock conference. I will be giving a talk and leading a workshop this year.

Ever wondered about the magic behind Fedora Badges? Learn how to push a new Fedora Badge from the perspective of a badges systems administrator.

This week, with an initial playbook for creating a WordPress installation created, my next focus was to look at creating a WordPress multi-site network.

Communicating the guidelines for requesting and creating artwork assets is important for both Fedora Ambassadors and the Design Team. Let's talk design!

This week is the midterm evaluations for Google Summer of Code, or GSoC 2016. This post is a project update on my "Ansible and the Community" proposal.

Learn how to use Vagrant and Ansible together to create local, virtual machines for running and testing Ansible playbooks in a controlled environment.

This post is published as part of a personal archival project of my poetry and other creative works. This poem was written in May 2016.

A lone soldier treks through an empty city. Mystery fills the air. The Halo 3: ODST soundtrack is powerfully engaging, maybe not for the reasons you think!

This summer, I will be working on the Fedora Project via Google Summer of Code (GSoC). I intend to migrate services to Ansible configurations and more.

Over the weekend of April 9th to 10th, the Fedora Ambassadors of North America attended Bitcamp 2016 at the University of Maryland. Open source abound!

On the night of April 15th, 2016, I became a hacker with my friends from the FOSSbox at RIT. Our medium was 1995's movie, "Hackers".

BrickHack 2016 recently happened at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I attended as a Fedora Project Ambassador. Read up on BrickHack 2016!

In the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development course at RIT, we submit a quiz in the form of a blog post. This is Spring 2016, Quiz #2.

Our final project for the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development course (HFOSS) is PyCut, a pizza-making puzzle game for 4th graders.

The Pizzelle badge is awarded after receiving 50 "karma cookies" in IRC. I recently received my Pizzelle and want to thank those who helped me in Fedora.

For the Community Architecture (CommArch) project for the HFOSS course at RIT, our group chose to analyze Tahrir, an extension of OpenBadges, by Fedora.

Fedora contributor Bee Padalkar wrote an analysis on Fedora's impact at the FOSDEM conference in Europe. Learn more about her analysis and what is next!

WiCHacks is an annual hackathon put on by Women in Computing at RIT. I registered as a volunteer and ended up discovering an incredible community.

In the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development course at RIT, we submit a quiz in the form of a blog post. This is Spring 2016, Quiz #1.

This post documents the project proposal for the HFOSS Community Architecture (CommArch) project at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Spring 2016.

I originally began drafting this post 900 miles away from my current location. It was an hour until the New Year and I was trying to put together a rough outline of the things that made 2015 such an incredible year for me. However, for reasons I don’t really know,

For the next assignment in my HFOSS class, we were tasked to run a one hour smoke test on the XO laptops we were assigned to use for the semester.

For this week's homework, we are tasked with finding an open source project, looking at known bugs or finding new ones, and submitting a bugfix.

Does your software project have licensing? Learn why the most important part of your project may not even be a single line of code and how to use licensing.

I review "What is Open Source?", Chapter 3 by Steve Weber as part of an assignment in my Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development course.

Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development (HFOSS) is a course that I am taking at RIT. This marks my first flight into FOSS education.

The Speak Up! badge is awarded to anyone who says something in an official Fedora IRC meeting. It's easy to get involved and meet other contributors!

The Vacation badge is awarded to contributors who mark when they will be unavailable in the Fedora Calendar app. This helps others know when you'll be away.

Using WordPress cron, CloudFlare, and SSL can sometimes break WordPress cron. Fortunately, there is a simple and easy fix to get it back up and running!

The Science badge is awarded to Fedora contributors that help test the kernels in Fedora by running a script and uploading the log file to a website.

Last.fm is a service connecting friends with music similarities. In 2015, Last.fm redesigned their site to poor reception. What's going on with Last.fm?

Today, the Fedora Elections for December 2015 officially began. Voting is one of the greatest ways you can have an impact in how Fedora runs. Be informed!

The Extra! Extra! badge is awarded to Fedora contributors that write an article for the Fedora Magazine, the premiere publication offered by Fedora.

Mumble is back! The popular Voice Over IP (VoIP) program, Mumble, is being repackaged once again for Fedora 22 and 23. Learn how you can help test.

Netflix system administrator Brendan Gregg published an article on the Netflix blog about what they do in the first 60 seconds when analyzing performance.

Telegraphist is awarded to Fedora contributors and users who map the names of their favorite upstream projects to actual packages available in Fedora.

Parselmouth is awarded to Fedora contributors who assist in porting Python 2 packages in Fedora to Python 3. Learn how you can Parselmouth too!

Introducing a new series - "Gotta Badge 'Em All!" This series aims to the hundreds of Fedora badges that can be earned by members of the Fedora community.

Over the past few months, I have worked closely with the Fedora Community Operations (CommOps) team. It's exciting work and moving quickly - try to keep up!

I am a user of open source software. I am a contributor of open source software. There are three reasons I love open source and what it stands for.

I have stumbled across a single communication platform that exceeds the standards of any other application I've used before: Telegram. But why use Telegram?

Is 2015 the year of the Linux desktop? As this year begins to come to close, it isn't looking too good. But why is this the case? What limits the desktop?

I am learning a lot as I become more involved and active with the Fedora Project, and I could not be more happy to begin my journey.