I was selected to work with Fedora on the Fedora Happiness Packets for GSoC 2018! A shout-out to Jona and Bee for helping me with the proposal and initial PRs!

About me

Hi there! My name is Anna. I go by the username Algogator on IRC and elsewhere.

  • I study computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington.
  • Python is my favorite language. Been using it for everything for the past 6 years.
  • Huge open source fan. I started a Firefox club at my university. Currently president of the Python user group at UTA (PyMavs).

What I’ll be working on and why

The Happiness Packets is an open source platform to spread gratitude and appreciation among contributors in the community. For Fedora Appreciation Week 2018, having a Fedora themed Happiness Packets site will encourage and make it easier for people to send positive feedback to their peers (anonymously if they like). I’ll be mainly working on integrating fedmsg (to award a Fedora Badge for sending a message) and adding authentication (for FAS) to the Django project. Read more about my work on Fedora Happiness Packets over the summer on my personal blog.

I picked this project since I have coded web applications in Python (Flask) before, worked on implementing an SSO solution (SAML) to authenticate with ADFS, and created a Bonusly replica while working at my previous company.

Gratitude is a muscle. Open source communities work because of the time and effort put in by volunteers and a heartfelt thank you or pat on the back can go a long way.

Community bonding period

During the community bonding period, I spent some time collecting these adorable Fedora badges to get my feet wet. It’s a fun way to learn about the community and set up your account before you start contributing. I recommend getting the Involvement and Crypto Badger badges first. And voilà!

You’ve taken your first step into a larger world

Joining the CommOps team

I started working my way through the Join Community Operations list.

Introduced myself on IRC and the CommOps and Diversity mailing lists. Attended the weekly meetings. And made a user page on the wiki.

In the initial call with Jona and Bee, Jona went over the various Fedora sub-projects and what they do. There are different ways you can contribute to Fedora based on your skill set.

Research

I spent most of the time googling, saving and organizing links that I thought would be useful.

fedmsg

From the fedmsg website:

“fedmsg (Federated Message Bus) is a library built on ZeroMQ using the PyZMQ Python bindings. fedmsg aims to make it easy to connect services together using ZeroMQ publishers and subscribers.”

auth/Openid connect