I went to Kansas Linuxfest this weekend and had a fantastic time. I decided to post my notes to the website just in case they’re useful to anyone else. This won’t be a great post to “read” but, if you’re curious about the kind of topics and things you can learn at a Linuxfest this will give you a pretty good idea. The Git Historian by Aaron Sumner Take Aways git log –grep searches commit messages git log -S searches changes / code in commits git log has a ridiculous amount of other ways to search You can use git log with any pager Use rebasing to reduce commit noise and combine many commits that you didn’t mean to separate git commit –fixup git commit –squash git rebase –autosquash Project Caua by Jon Maddog Hall Jon “Maddog” Hall is starting Project Caua, which allows young people in Latin America to use their entrepreneurial talents to build a business and sell it to fund their schooling and the next generation of project Caua students.

This post is for people wanting to start a FOSS project. Specifically a FOSS project which is bigger than a weekend hackfest. Though most of the advice applies there pretty nicely too. I’m going to assume that you have some idea of what you want to build. If not this post will still have some value as it will give you ideas of how I came up with building Praelatus. The Why What makes you want to build something? Change the world For fun To replace something you hate To satisfy your own itch To learn a new technology To make money Why are you making whatever you’re making? A large part of my day job right now is supporting a JIRA instance and I hate it with a passion. It’s slow buggy and I spend an inordinate amount of time reverse engineering it to fix it.

I got to give my first talk at Ohio Linuxfest this year and it was very meaningful to me on multiple fronts, not the least of which I was giving my first talk at the Linuxfest that first inspired me to get more active in Open Source in the first place. OHLF is one of the smaller LinuxFests out there nowadays but it will always be my favorite I think. The staff / volunteers always do an amazing job and I want to shout out to all of them for making my first time as smooth and easy as can be. In this post I’m going to give you a text version of my talk revised a bit based on feedback I got at OHLF but if you want an actual recording of my talk one of the audience members was gracious enough to record and shoot me a link when it went up on youtube.