I've decieded to do status updates.
June has been a fun month for me so far. A large chunk of my time this month has been behind the FOSS club at our college. I and a few other friends of mine were the ones who kept it going and around 2020 everyone just had a lot to deal with both personally and with regards to everything that was happening. I had started freelancing and then went on to work full time 1. This lead to a lack of any activity for over a year. But now I was passing out and I kinda didn't want the club to end with me. So I gathered a few kindred spirits and decieded to conduct a few events for the new batches to give them a feel for what a FOSS club is suppose to be.
As of 2021, most clubs and student organizations in our colleges are subsidiaries of and provided for by other larger organizations and for profit companies outside the college that tries to benefit from such nodes in colleges. FOSS clubs are not like that and they shouldn't be. They exist purely out of love for freedom, knowledge and sharing (and in turn humanity).2 This is the reason why I like FOSS clubs and volunteered my time for the one at our college.
Apart from that I spent some time comming up with a minimal Emacs configuration that gives emacs all the necessary feaures one would expect from a modern IDE but at the same time remaining true what Emacs is. This was a very enlightening experience for me. I helped me realize that you really, really didn't need a lot to write code comfortably. The said configuration I'm working on is currently less than 400 lines of code and is very close to being complete.
This month I really got into the Ruby ecosystem, it's partly for the new job I'll be starting next month and partly to help with my work at Debian. I would be lying if I told you I am not worried about how much I will be able to contribute to free software projects now that I am going to have to go to an office to work next month onwards. I guess we will have to see.
Also Debian Bullseye repositories enetered the freeze stage this month. This
will be the first Debian release to have packages packaged by yours truely.
About 27 packages in total most of them are libraries that will benefit
sysadmins and distribution engineers but if you're a ruby developer who uses
rbenv then you will be using a package with my name in it's final changelog.
You can get Debian Bullseye set up and running on a test server and prepare for
the eminent migration you will have to make in the near future or just play
around with all the new stuff. I use Debian Testing as my daily driver and
honestly kind off hate the freeze but it is necessary for the greater good.
That's it for this month. Until next time!
In case you are one of those people who is reading this and wondering how I was working full time while being a college student, well most of the credit goes to the pandemic because not only did it take my Dad's job away but it also led to the colleges going online giving students like me a lot of flexibility in terms of how they spent their time. Honestly at that point in time I really did need a break from everything too. Universe in it's own way does indeed provide I guess.
It certainly helps to have organizations to support the activities you do but that shouldn't come with the cost of you having to push their products and services in the student community. That kind of to use and to be used isn't good for a community.