Hi! I’m Lorenzo Barretta, a 18-year-old Computer Science student based in Italy. I’ve been using Fedora as my main OS for a year after many others of distro-hopping. What I like about this distro is that it is accessible enough to be easy to use for a newbie, while still giving you the freedom to change anything you want with the help of the community and its documentation.

Regarding about my past experiences with Open Source, I can say that I helped my country improve the APIs for a website they use to recruit volunteers for their projects ( https://github.com/italia/developers-italia-api/pull/195). I’ve done other less-significant work on other projects, but most recently I’ve been doing some contributions to DNF5 ( https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf5/pull/484, https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf5/issues/485). I’ve loved these experiences, and this is the reason why I’d like to become a stable volunteer for the project.

The languages I feel safe to say that I’m confident with are TypeScript, Go, Java and Python. I have some experience with C/C++ - even though I don’t write code with them regularly. I’m currently studying Rust in my free time and PHP + SQL at school. The languages I’d like to code in are those that I don’t know well, so I can learn while doing something useful. I strongly believe in learning while doing practice, and even though I understand that this is not always the best approach I’ve found to work quite well in many cases. Of course, I am also available to do things I am already familiar with.

Talking about non-software-related experiences, I enjoy writing and I’m quite good at it in my native language (Italian). I also did some volunteering with a local foundation with the aim of providing assistance to people in need of psychological and financial assistance. These activities consisted in organizing events where we helped those we assisted to take part in courses that would help them regain the independence they lost in their periods of difficulty, learning new skills they would hopefully be able to use in their future working environments. Another experience I took part in was the NAO Challenge, which is a competition held each year in Italy where students use humanoid robots to create knowledge about social themes. This year, our team developed a vocal assistant which uses the OpenAI API and the Electrical Operator API to help people save energy in order to reduce their Carbon footprint. A team can have several roles such as Social Media Managers, Videomakers, etc. I was the Leader and Developer of the team.

I have never used mailing lists before, so it is surely something I’ll have to learn as the time goes on. I am available to dedicate 6-10 hours weekly on the project (I am not able to give an exact estimate due to school being a priority since it is my final year before the University), of course dedicating more whenever it is needed and possible.