Fedora Onboarding
I’m relatively new to the Fedora community. Even more recent are my contributions to badges, logos, wallpapers, and other design work. Recently I’ve been working on an onboarding reevaluation (issue #21) that called for trying to contribute to Fedora. This is more difficult than it first seems it turns out.
The below walkthrough uses SOZI, the excellent prezi-like tool for free software, that allows you to create a visual walkthrough of an inkscape svg file for the browser. This was perfect to walk through the mental state of someone (me!) trying to figure out how to contribute to Fedora from start to finish.
Since I’d recently taken this journey towards contribution before (and found it painfully confusing and difficult) I wanted to take the opportunity to traverse the path again to help make the journey easier for those that followed. It turned out that I wasn’t even aware of how confusing the pathways actually were. This particular journey ended without contribution (or even getting to the contribution-centric tools―which are themselves confusing). Even so, the journey was harder and more confusing than it needed to be. I’m confident some streamlined pathways will come out of this. At any rate, enjoy the below. Feedback welcome!
SOZI: a welcome return
note: if you’re not able to see the below iframe click here to see the full screen presentation
Other bits
Since I’ve been working on things for the Fedora project I’m pleased to share small things I’ve learned to make the process easier (whether specific to Fedora contributions or more generally) about processing and creating the work I’m doing there. Below are two quick items I found helpful.
Full Webpage Screenshots in Firefox to Clipboard
Creating the above walkthrough of webpages in SOZI required taking fullpage screenshots from the browser. While there are many plugins that one could install to achieve the desired endpoint I always prefer to use software I already have rather than install something new if it can be avoided. Who knew that firefox has its own terminal-like framework that allows for a number of things including full page screenshots.
In firefox: press shift+f2 (it’s a shortcut to “tools –> web dev –> Dev Toolbar”)
$ screenshot --clipboard --fullpage # enter into command bar at bottom of browser
Grep search text in files and output filenames
I feel like I’m going to lose my resident IT expert card (the bar has been low) for not fully understanding a simple grep search until now. At any rate, I’ve been using HUGO to create this particular blog for a little while and one of the difficulties with having all your created drafts and posted content in a single directory is figuring out which have posted or not when you return to work on unfinished drafts. The below command will search through the header material to look for ‘draft = true’ in each *.md file and return the filenames that are drafts.
grep -n 'draft = true' *.md