What is the Fedora Project?

The Fedora Project is a community of people working together to build free and open source software platform and to collaborate on and share user-focused solutions built on that platform. It makes an operating system and make it easy for people to do useful stuff with it.

Actually, they produce several operating systems, or editions. The one that new contributors are most likely to be interested in, and focused on, is Fedora Workstation. Fedora Workstation has a wide range of software that’s suitable for almost anyone. All of the software provided with Fedora is open source and free to download and use.

What kind of people can participate in the community?

If you want to take an active hand in making Fedora even better, there are many ways you can contribute. Fedora does not differentiate anyone on any basis, may you be a student, newbie to free/open source software (FOSS), or even an experienced developer, you are highly welcome. These are some of the fields you can choose to join

Fedora Happiness Packets!

Fedora Happiness Packets project is quite different from the rest of the Fedora projects. It aims to give back to the community. Fedora Happiness Packets is a simple platform to anonymously reach out to the people that one appreciate or to whom someone is thankful in the open-source community. Messages can be sent anonymously if felt uncomfortable to share the name with the recipient. Of course, it is encouraged to share name, but it’s completely optional!

Why Fedora Happiness Packets?

People are generally much more loved than they think they are. Especially when things don’t go according to plan, other people almost never think as harshly of you as you might think of yourself. It’s easy for us to complain when bad things happen, and yet we’re often fairly silent when things are good. Open-source communities are no different, especially when our main communication channels are textual and virtual.

Having personal experience of how bad days can be dark, I have deeply understood the value of slightest of appreciation and appraisal. When I was surfing through projects, during my application in Outreachy, I was so driven by the very thought of a project so connected and relatable. The feeling that you made a difference, that your work matters and has value, and that the people you work with are happy to work with you, is an awesome feeling. With Fedora Happiness Packets, that feeling is spread.

What have I learned?

Starting from being a newbie at Django, I am now comfortable in developing applications using it. I have learned writing test cases (using Pytest) for unit testing. I discovered some of other Fedora Projects like Fedora Bootstrap and Fedora-Infra.

Though my journey from shifting from stack consisting of JavaScript to python wasn’t easy but, my mentors supported me at my hurdles

Key note to newcomers

If you are interested in joining the Fedora Community and start contributing to their project,s then choose an area of your interest from different categories of Fedora projects. Fedora has different channels in IRC, where you can introduce yourself to the community, which interest you. Fedora is an active participant in programs like Outreachy, Google Summer of Code, and Google Code-in where you can also participate. Check out some of their awesome projects here. You might also like Fedora Magazine, featuring often-updated articles of interest to Fedora users from beginner to expert, and from Raspberry Pi to the desktop to servers to the cloud. Still confused? Don’t worry! Whatcanidoforfedora.org is on the rescue.

Follow Fedora on Twitter for recent updates.

You can send your feedback at alishapapun@fedoraproject.org and follow me on Twitter 🙂