Self-introduction: Dallas Hall.

[Dallas Hall]

Hi all,

I am interested in helping out with testing for Fedora.  I have been using
Linux on and off since the late 90s, I played around a bit with Red Hat and
Debian in the 90s but never got far though.  I have been using Ubuntu on
and off since the mid 2000s, spent a couple of years using Arch Linux as my
main OS in the late 2000s, but I got sick of fixing things constantly so I
went back to Windows.  I did start using Ubuntu Gnome as my main OS about 2
years ago but I very recently (this week!) installed Fedora 24 and will use
that as my main OS.  The reason I changed is because I felt I would learn
more about Linux in general by using Fedora and also I liked the security
aspects of Fedora over Ubuntu.

I consider myself a Windows power user but still a beginner to intermediate
Linux user.  I just finished the Linux Foundation Linux 101 course on edX
and I would like to continue learning more about Fedora and Linux in
general and I figured doing software testing is a good start.  I have done
some software testing before through work, mainly supporting developers and
testers as an ICT Business Analyst but I have also written and executed
test cases.  I do work full time in ICT doing data extraction and
manipulation with SQL and Regex.  I am also doing a computer science degree
part time, which I am about a third of the way through.  I haven't done
much programming yet in the degree but in about 6 months I will be doing a
lot of programming.

Unfortunately because of my current commitments I don't have a great deal
of time but I feel I can definitely allocate 30 minutes a day 7 days a week
to Fedora software testing.  My IRC nick is blindcant, but I just have to
configure Weechat before joining the IRC channel.  I would eventually like
to help out the Fedora Project by writing documentation and also
contributing code, but my knowledge isn't good enough on Fedora or Linux or
programming to do that just yet, so again, I think software testing is a
great place to start.  I am looking forward to working and communicating
with you all.

Dallas aka blindcant.

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2016-08-24 at 17:38 +1000, blind cant wrote:
>  Hi all,
>  
>  I am interested in helping out with testing for Fedora.  I have been using
>  Linux on and off since the late 90s, I played around a bit with Red Hat and
>  Debian in the 90s but never got far though.  I have been using Ubuntu on
>  and off since the mid 2000s, spent a couple of years using Arch Linux as my
>  main OS in the late 2000s, but I got sick of fixing things constantly so I
>  went back to Windows.  I did start using Ubuntu Gnome as my main OS about 2
>  years ago but I very recently (this week!) installed Fedora 24 and will use
>  that as my main OS.  The reason I changed is because I felt I would learn
>  more about Linux in general by using Fedora and also I liked the security
>  aspects of Fedora over Ubuntu.
>  
>  I consider myself a Windows power user but still a beginner to intermediate
>  Linux user.  I just finished the Linux Foundation Linux 101 course on edX
>  and I would like to continue learning more about Fedora and Linux in
>  general and I figured doing software testing is a good start.  I have done
>  some software testing before through work, mainly supporting developers and
>  testers as an ICT Business Analyst but I have also written and executed
>  test cases.  I do work full time in ICT doing data extraction and
>  manipulation with SQL and Regex.  I am also doing a computer science degree
>  part time, which I am about a third of the way through.  I haven't done
>  much programming yet in the degree but in about 6 months I will be doing a
>  lot of programming.
>  
>  Unfortunately because of my current commitments I don't have a great deal
>  of time but I feel I can definitely allocate 30 minutes a day 7 days a week
>  to Fedora software testing.  My IRC nick is blindcant, but I just have to
>  configure Weechat before joining the IRC channel.  I would eventually like
>  to help out the Fedora Project by writing documentation and also
>  contributing code, but my knowledge isn't good enough on Fedora or Linux or
>  programming to do that just yet, so again, I think software testing is a
>  great place to start.  I am looking forward to working and communicating
>  with you all. 
Welcome Dallas, thanks for volunteering! Glad to have you along. Just
one thing I'd suggest: one of the best ways to learn things is by doing
them. If you're interested in improving your coding skills, one of the
best ways to learn is to go beyond just finding bugs and filing them.
When you find a bug, see if you can do anything to figure out why it's
happening, and if you can, see if you can fix it. This will be hard at
first, but the more you try, the easier it'll get, and there's no
penalty for failing.

If you try this for a bug but can't figure it out, a good thing to do
is follow the bug and if it gets fixed, find the fix (you can usually
follow the information in the bug report, the update, or the package
changelog to find it - if not, you can ask the maintainer), and examine
it and try to figure out how it fixes the bug and why the developer
chose to fix it in that way. This is a pretty good way to learn about
how bugs get fixed and how development works.

Good luck! :)

[Dallas Hall]

Hey Adam,

Thanks for the sponsorship and advice.  The bug tracking concept sounds good and I will
check out some bugs on Bugzilla.  Also, I will start setting up my testing environment
this week and get myself acquainted with the tools everyone uses.  I am planning to use a
VM for testing as I don't have a spare physical machine.  Is there any particular
programming language that is used the most with Fedora?  I would assume C but I thought I
should ask to be sure.

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2016-08-28 at 01:15 +0000, Dallas Dallas wrote:
>  Hey Adam,
>  
>  Thanks for the sponsorship and advice.  The bug tracking concept
>  sounds good and I will check out some bugs on Bugzilla.  Also, I will
>  start setting up my testing environment this week and get myself
>  acquainted with the tools everyone uses.  I am planning to use a VM
>  for testing as I don't have a spare physical machine.  Is there any
>  particular programming language that is used the most with Fedora?  I
>  would assume C but I thought I should ask to be sure. 
Well, the software in the distribution is written in all kinds of
languages, of course. The most common language used for things actually
written as part of the Fedora project itself is probably Python; most
of QA's tools are in Python, as are most of the packaging-related
tools.

My personal take - as someone who had no coding background at all - is
that the language isn't always the most important thing; there are
actually a lot of commonalities between well-run projects no matter
what language they're written in, and I tend to find the general
process of figuring out why something goes wrong and how to make it
stop going wrong is more about understanding those processes, and
various different conventions between different projects and types of
project, than particularly to do with the language that's used. You'll
often find you can broadly understand what's going on with a bug
without any formal grounding in the language at all. Just my
perspective, though! Good luck again :)

[Dallas Hall]

Awesome sounds good, thanks again :)

[Christopher Meng]

On Sunday, August 28, 2016, Dallas Dallas <blindcant(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Awesome sounds good, thanks again :)
>
>  
Just a friendly note your name associated with your email address seems
incorrect based on your self introduction...


-- 

Yours sincerely,
Christopher Meng

http://cicku.me

[Dallas Hall]

Thanks for pointing that out, it was correct initially and I am not sure why it changed. 
Anyway I changed it back now.