Isoken Ibizugbe: Thinking About My Audience

Thinking about who I am addressing is a challenge, but it is an important one. As I write, I realize I’m speaking to three distinct groups: my friends and family who are new to the world of tech, newcomers eager to join programs like Outreachy, and the technical experts who maintain and sustain the projects I work on.

What is FOSS anyway?

To my friends and family: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) refers to software that anyone can freely use, modify, and share. Think of it as a community garden, instead of one company owning the “food,” people from all over the world contribute, improve, and maintain it so everyone can benefit from it for free.

To the Aspiring Contributors

Contributing to an open source project isn’t just about writing code. It could involve going over a ton of documentation and understanding a specific coding style. You have to set up your environment and learn to treat documentation as a “source of truth,” even if it’s something you help modify and improve later.

Where I come from, this world is fairly unknown, and it seemed quite scary at first. However, I’ve learned that asking questions and communicating are your best tools. Don’t be afraid to do your part by investigating and reading, but remember that the community is there to help you grow.

Why Quality Matters

For the past few weeks, I’ve seen the importance of checking software quality before a release.

Imagine you download a new desktop environment, try to open the calculator or the clock, and it crashes or refuses to start. How annoying is that? Or worse, you download software and can’t even install it successfully. My work on creating tests for Debian using openQA is aimed at preventing these experiences. We simulate real user actions to make sure that when someone clicks “Open,” the application actually works.

Closing Thoughts

In general, FOSS has empowered people to access and build technology freely. Whether you are here to use the software or you have the expertise to modify and explore it, there is a place for you in this community.

I’m writing this for you, whichever audience you belong to, to show that complex systems become less intimidating when you begin by asking questions.