… or, how I finally got off my butt and became more involved with the open source community.

It was not long ago, during one of my recent rants about open source not always being open to non-contributors, that I first heard of Stephan Hermann. He had written something that really clicked with my way of thinking, and shortly after exchanging some emails/posts replies I was convinced that it was about time I got more involved with the community. I didn’t want to be one of those individuals who talk a lot but doesn’t do anything about it. It was thanks to Stephan that I finally joined the Ubuntu Brazilian (Portuguese) Translation Team in Launchpad and started translating documents and applications for the upcoming release of Ubuntu. Granted I couldn’t spent much time every day on it, neither could I hang out in #ubuntu for my company blocks all ports, I still managed to squeeze a few minutes here and there… and it was a great feeling knowing that my work will benefit hundreds of Portuguese speaking people to use Ubuntu in their native language! And every time I couldn’t work on it, I wished I had more free time to contribute more!

Today I read yet another inspirational post by him. Once again his words inspired me to come up with other ways to help out more! Though I’m a developer with several years of experience, I don’t know a thing about packaging applications for Linux or how to create/apply patches, etc. This lack of knowledge was my excuse for not doing more… I’m not ashamed to say that it has been my excuse for quite some time. I really want to change this… I want to be able to make a difference in this world! I hope to be able to take my first steps towards this goal over this long weekend… and if I succeed, it will be thanks to people like Stephan!