New week, new plans (2023.06.25)

For most of the readers it might be strange, but our week starts on Sunday and our weekend in Friday and Saturday.

Weekend

Friday started very well. I managed to add a few good pages to the Rust slides about the Handlebars templating system. I found a small bug in the example, sent a pull-request and within 3 hours it was accepted.

I participated in Friday "open source party" of the Maakaf community. Where had the opportunity to show people how to find a project in some random technology on GitHub that might be good to contribute to. Something that was recently updated but does not have too many stars. Meaning the owner/maintainer is around and made some changes, but it is not very popular so most likely there is still a lot to do and most likely there are relatively low hanging fruits.

I also managed to show them the pull-request I sent showing that you don't need to make a big change. Small changes also help.

After the meeting was over I even recorded a separate video showing this pull-request.

I think one of the biggest challenges for someone who has not contributed to an open source project is the fear. Will I mess up? Will people like the changes I made? Who am I (a junior) to offer my help to these experts.

I think this is what people need to overcome in order to get started. And then also to continue.

I continued exploring Zulip. I figured I could ask for their sponsorship for my community. A day later they approved my request so now I can put a lot more energy trying to get people join it.

The OSDC Zulip instance now has a public face and 2 additional members.

I also made some changes to the OSDC web site allowing the C to be both Course and Community.

I spent some time watching testimonies of Holocaust survivors speaking in Hungarian. A couple of month ago I started to feel the need to watch some of these stories to understand better where I came from.

Today

In the afternoon I am going to Tel Aviv to meet a friend with whom I worked about 10 years ago. She works at Google now. Then later on I will go to a Meetup of the GithubUser group Tracing the Open Source Revolution & Tracing the Git Revolution.

I am now a bit unsure what to do next. I need to start promoting the Open Source Development Community and the Zulip server, to get things moving, but it is Sunday morning, the slowest time on the Internet.

I am getting excited to record the presentations of the OSDC as a series of short videos making them more digest-able, but I think I should not abandon the Rust series either. Maybe what I need to do is a bit from both of them, but it is much easier to focus on one thing.

The Rust videos I record in Hebrew, get a few tens of views. Not many, but I guess I can't really expect a lot given there are only 389 subscribers in the channel and Rust is far from the most popular languages. On the other hand my main goal is learning Rust and preparing, creating the Rust Digger and my teaching material.

Another thing I need to do is start promoting my courses again to companies in Israel.