Today is Day 5 of Fedora Appreciation Week and the final day of published Contributor Stories. To help celebrate the Fedora Project, our fifteen-year anniversary, and the community of people that make Fedora what it is, the Community Operations team collected Contributor Stories from the community to feature here every day of Appreciation Week.

Have someone you want to thank? Do you want to share your appreciation with Fedora? See how you can celebrate 15 years of Fedora and participate in Fedora Appreciation Week over on the Fedora Magazine.

Some new stories came in during this week. Today, there are five stories to read from four people: Bhavin (bhavin192), Giannis Konstantinidis (giannisk), Eduard Lucena (x3mboy) and Dhanesh Sabane (dhanesh95).

Inspires and Motivates Contributors

Contributor Story #22 from Giannis Konstantinidis (giannisk)

I first met Christos about nine years ago at an IT exhibition. Christos helped me get started with contributing to the Fedora Project. More importantly, he has inspired and motivated me to further advance my contributions to free open-source projects. I have had the pleasure of collaborating with him during several Fedora and Mozilla events. Thank you, Christos!

Giannis Konstantinidis – contributor-stories#22

Fedora_Community++

Contributor Story #21 from Bhavin (bhavin192)

It all started with installing Fedora 24 on my laptop. When I saw it during a workshop, I was really impressed by the interface and after that, it has been Fedora everywhere.

As me, akshay196 and few of my classmates were only users of Fedora at our university, we started to promote it among other students. It is fun to organize release parties and help others to install Fedora on their laptops. Later I started contributing to Transtats (tool to help g11n related tasks of package maintainers easy) with help of suanand. I learned a lot of new things while doing that.

I started participating in various test days. I learned a few things related to RPM packaging from pnemade and kushal.

Thanks to sinnykumari, I felt really welcomed when I attended CoreOS and Silverblue APAC meetings. Hopefully, I will contribute to those projects in some way.

cverna helped me to get started in picking up issues from Container SIG. As containers are something I really like, this is super fun for me 😄

Bhavin – contributor-stories#21

Receiving a big responsibility

Contributor Story #13 from Eduard Lucena (x3mboy)

“I was looking for something to do inside the community on 2016, I wasn’t a developer or a designer, my work was on the telecom industry, so I just start looking the teams and joining IRC rooms. At some point I found the Marketing team, the work was to design strategies, that sounds really good because it wasn’t technical. I join the first meeting and with a little of fear I raise my hand and say: “I think I can do that”. Then Justin without any hesitation wrote:

#action x3mboy will send the email to the teams asking for the Talking Points.

I was totally afraid, it was my first interaction in the community and I was sending emails to the working teams that make this awesome distro to work. But his confidence in assign this task to me in my first meeting teaches me something awesome: You gain trust by working, the opportunity is there, just take it.

After a while, Justin start to be too busy with other teams and personal stuff and I just start to lead the marketing team. After that, we became personal friends, and I’m really proud of it.

Thanks so much for that first opportunity and thanks for being my friend.”

Eduard Lucena – contributor-stories#13

Encouraging crazy ideas

Contributor Story #14 from Eduard Lucena (x3mboy)

“As part of the Marketing team we share some ideas and I came up with the idea of doing a podcast. It was a target that was a little explored in the past, but not with the Fedora Brand officially. I met Brian in person at Perú doing some Ambassadors stuff and I ask Brian: “Hey I have this idea of making a Podcast, nothing too big like the Command Line Heroes from Red Hat, but something to reach that public and introduce the Fedora Community with some interviews”, and his answer was so incredible: “What do you need?”

I started to think, well, I have no experience with this, but probably a hosting, and after I pay myself for this service and reach my first interview, Brian ask me: “Why are you doing this alone? Let’s allocate some budget, pay for the accounts you need, maybe getting you a Microphone, also a good idea is to have subtitles or something written.” His support was awesome and it makes the Podcast so successful.

Thanks Brian for encouraging us to work, you’re an inspiration for us.”

Eduard Lucena – contributor-stories#14

Help will always be given at CommOps to those who ask for it.

Contributor Story #5 from Dhanesh Sabane (dhanesh95)

“I was in the third year of my CS graduation course when I started exploring Open Source communities and Fedora in particular. As someone who was completely new to almost everything, it was tough to get started. After creating my FAS ID back in September 2015, I remained a spectator for the next few months all the while trying to find some ground. At the end of my semester, April 2016, I decided to take action and joined the CommOps group – my first step towards being a Fedora contributor. I dropped by at one of the meetings and that’s when I met Justin and Remy. Both of them helped me understand the way CommOps works and I was fortunate enough to get assigned a task at my first meeting itself. (Thanks Justin and Remy for trusting a complete newbie 😊 ) As it was my first task, Remy was always around to help me and answer all of my newbie questions.

Over the next couple of years, I worked on quite a few things in CommOps and a couple of tasks in Marketing, all thanks to Justin. He also helped me with an IRC bouncer which I very much rely on for all my communication related to Fedora. He always has this positive energy around him and his zeal to always do more for the community really inspires me. We, in CommOps, always joke around about Justin having minions to help out with all his tasks because he is always ahead of everyone in the team. He is the kind of person who’ll always stay true to the “Friends” foundation. The kind of person you can look up to and feel free to ask for any kind of help.

If I were to wish for something, I’d wish to get as much knowledge as Remy and the same enthusiasm as Justin’s. Thank you Remy and Justin for everything!”

Dhanesh Sabane – contributor-stories#5
A spontaneous Fedora Project meet-up in Pune, India. Left to right: Justin W. Flory, Amita Sharma, Sumantro Mukherjee, Dhanesh Sabane
A spontaneous Fedora Project meet-up in Pune, India. Left to right: Justin W. Flory, Amita Sharma, Sumantro Mukherjee, Dhanesh Sabane