9:37 p.m.
Hi all – my name is John Kizer, and my interest in contributing to the Fedora Project
really just stems from a personal appreciation for the product that it creates, and a
belief in perhaps “old school Internet” ideals that having a bunch of people working
together across continents to solve problems in new ways is one of the greatest imaginable
human achievements.
Before September of this year, the closest I had gotten to anything FOSS-related was
getting a Linux book as a youth that included an install CD for, IIRC, Slackware. I was
too nervous about wrecking the family computer to get past the warnings about how disk
partitioning would wipe out our data, so I never ended up installing, and went on blindly
enjoying my childhood.
I changed majors more often than I changed my toothbrush in college, but my flirtation
with Computer Science ended when I dropped the Intro to Operating Systems course before I
could officially flunk it. In my work life (which, thanks to my B.A. in History, began as
an answering service operator), I gravitated toward chances to expand the little snippets
of CS exposure that I had in college, and after a couple of programming-lite job
assignments (homegrown case management for emails using Outlook/Access/VBA), started to
build experience in business analytics. The exposure in that role led to my first
management opportunity, and I spent the majority of the next decade in various levels of
business process and data/analytics team management, typically doing quite a bit of
hands-to-keys work myself.
All that is to say, I think my most useful skills would be:
• Developing business process performance metrics
• Building dashboards / reporting packages for the contributors, owners and
stakeholders of those processes (end-to-end, from data integration approaches to dashboard
visual design)
• Executing and providing well-structured user feedback on technical test scenarios
• Laying out problem-solving decision trees and developing content to assist in
diagnosing causes
This reads a lot like a job application or something – sorry, some of the habits of the
corporate world don’t break easily, I guess, and hopefully/maybe some of them can be used
for a positive purpose?
As far as communication platforms go...honestly the last time I can specifically remember
interacting via a mailing list, my mental image is of the Eudora email client, so...I’m a
bit rusty!
Time wise...it’s tough to say when exactly the time would come, so honestly the most I can
give a firm commitment to right now would be about 3-4 hours/week, until existing work
(part-time assistant for my wife’s accounting/bookkeeping business) and life (full-time
spouse and dad to two kids, ages 8 and 5) settles into a bit more of a routine.
If you read all the way to the end of this...sheesh, please let me know something long and
purely personal of yours that I can read to return the favor!