Over the past little while, I’ve lost my job, hunted for (and found) a new job, consulted to fill in the gaps and a bunch of Fedora projects over Christmas.  What did this entail?  Well, sit back and relax and I’ll tell you!

New Job

Well my new job is setting up nicely as a Web Developer/System Administrator at StoryRock.com.  We do yearbook and scrapbooking software.  I’m in charge of the website and infrastructure here, and so far there are a lot of good problems to solve.  I’ve been introduced to Ruby on Rails and am getting the hang of it as well.  I’ve implemented a new Firewall and OpenVPN tunnel, configured a new staging server and dealt with a disk space issue on our  web server, all in about a week and a half.  I still have plans to finish implementing an openfire jabber server (mostly complete thanks to help from another great Guru, Aaron Toponce).

Consulting

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a fellow by the name of Trevyn Meyer.  He owns a little consulting firm in Orem called ESource, They have been giving me steady web work for the past few weeks.  I’ve been able to do things from wordpress themes and plugins to  migrating bugzilla.  It has brought in a little cash I needed just to get me through.  This has been a great experience.  Because of ESource, I was able to publish a fairly useful plugin because of its benefits to the community.  I plan to get it on wordpress’ codex at some point in the future.

Fedora

Over the Christmas break, and mostly because I am not overwhelmed at work (yet).  I was able to spend some time creating a few tools to benefit the project.  First was the Fedora Ambassador North America (FAmNA) Resource Requests Tracker.  With the help of Jon Stanley, we now have a way of tracking requests from North American Fedora Contributors for things like T-Shirts, Media, AmbassadorKits, Stickers, etc.  I anticipate this being a very busy site and that we’ll be getting more requests as the word gets out after the holidays and FUDCon.

I took the time this weekend to build a prototype of the Fedora Media Box.  It’ll be part of what is to become the AmbassadorKit.  We’re having a hackfest to design and finish the AmbassadorKit so we can start shipping it out.  Look for this as a new option on the FAMNA Requests trac instance.

Speaking of FUDCon, along with Chris Tyler and probably a few other people, we are planning to stream and record audio and video for much of FUDCon F11 Boston.   I was able to purchase a wireless lavalier (aka lapel) microphone this week and it should arrive in time for me to bring it along for presenters.  I am seriously excited to get the audio and video out to more people than ever.  If you have a camera, or recording devices, please bring them.  If you don’t have equipment, but want to help, let us know.

Cheers,

Clint