Striving for greatness

App developers and end users both like bundled software, because it’s easy to support and easy for users to get up and running while minimizing breakage. How could we come up with an approach that also allows distributions and package-management frameworks to integrate well and deal with issues like security? I muse upon this over at my RedMonk blog.

I just posted a video and write-up on how to recruit open-source contributors over on my RedMonk blog. It’s based on my years of experience as admin for Gentoo’s involvement in the Google Summer of Code, where I’ve greatly increased our ability to recruit students as long-term developers. Check it out.

I gave an introductory talk on Gentoo at a local BarCamp called MinneBar a couple of months back, and the videos were just posted online. The sound isn’t perfect but it’s perfectly understandable. Oddly, this is the first time I’ve ever given a formal talk on Gentoo in nearly 10 years of working on it.

The slides are pretty tough to read from the video, so I also uploaded them to Slideshare. I updated and heavily customized the same “Intro to Gentoo” slide deck that’s been floating around for years. It still could stand to lose a whole lot more text, and hopefully I can optimize it further if I give it again.

Students, this Friday at 1900 UTC is the deadline to apply for this year’s GSoC. It’s an awesome program that pays you to work on open-source projects for a summer (where you == a university/college student).

It’s by no means too late, but start your application today. You can find more information on Gentoo’s projects here (click on the Ideas page to get started; also see our application guidelines) and on the broader GSoC program here.

Good luck!

Over at my RedMonk blog, I wrote about how a new tool called Wolfram|Alpha Pro makes it easy for anyone to do basic data science. If you have any interest in data analysis, doing data science, or anything along those lines, check it out.

To my European readers: if you care about the impact of social technologies like Git (and GitHub) & how they’re transforming software development, or the impact of social technology on communities, and you enjoy good beer, you need to be at Monki Gras. I just posted over at my RedMonk blog about how the previous conference in the series, Monktoberfest, was the best conference of my life. And I’ve been to many.

Monki Gras is Feb. 1–2 in London. The timing’s perfect to stop by just before FOSDEM (and that’s exactly what I’m doing). Registration is dirt-cheap, speakers are universally top-notch, and you’ll also get some world-class beers in the package.

I just published an article over at LWN called “The state of Gentoo.”  In it, I talk about Gentoo’s progress over the past few years as well as its current problems, how they’re affecting Gentoo’s user and developer communities, and how to begin fixing them.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our developers on the article so I’m confident that it’s generally a fair representation of where things stand today. However, Alex Legler (a3li) kindly told me our security team does much more behind the scenes to report vulnerabilities and get updated packages stabilized, even if we don’t see the results in the form of GLSAs.