On Wed, 2016-08-24 at 17:38 +1000, blind cant wrote:
Hi all,
I am interested in helping out with testing for Fedora. I have been using
Linux on and off since the late 90s, I played around a bit with Red Hat and
Debian in the 90s but never got far though. I have been using Ubuntu on
and off since the mid 2000s, spent a couple of years using Arch Linux as my
main OS in the late 2000s, but I got sick of fixing things constantly so I
went back to Windows. I did start using Ubuntu Gnome as my main OS about 2
years ago but I very recently (this week!) installed Fedora 24 and will use
that as my main OS. The reason I changed is because I felt I would learn
more about Linux in general by using Fedora and also I liked the security
aspects of Fedora over Ubuntu.
I consider myself a Windows power user but still a beginner to intermediate
Linux user. I just finished the Linux Foundation Linux 101 course on edX
and I would like to continue learning more about Fedora and Linux in
general and I figured doing software testing is a good start. I have done
some software testing before through work, mainly supporting developers and
testers as an ICT Business Analyst but I have also written and executed
test cases. I do work full time in ICT doing data extraction and
manipulation with SQL and Regex. I am also doing a computer science degree
part time, which I am about a third of the way through. I haven't done
much programming yet in the degree but in about 6 months I will be doing a
lot of programming.
Unfortunately because of my current commitments I don't have a great deal
of time but I feel I can definitely allocate 30 minutes a day 7 days a week
to Fedora software testing. My IRC nick is blindcant, but I just have to
configure Weechat before joining the IRC channel. I would eventually like
to help out the Fedora Project by writing documentation and also
contributing code, but my knowledge isn't good enough on Fedora or Linux or
programming to do that just yet, so again, I think software testing is a
great place to start. I am looking forward to working and communicating
with you all.
Welcome Dallas, thanks for volunteering! Glad to have you along. Just
one thing I'd suggest: one of the best ways to learn things is by doing
them. If you're interested in improving your coding skills, one of the
best ways to learn is to go beyond just finding bugs and filing them.
When you find a bug, see if you can do anything to figure out why it's
happening, and if you can, see if you can fix it. This will be hard at
first, but the more you try, the easier it'll get, and there's no
penalty for failing.
If you try this for a bug but can't figure it out, a good thing to do
is follow the bug and if it gets fixed, find the fix (you can usually
follow the information in the bug report, the update, or the package
changelog to find it - if not, you can ask the maintainer), and examine
it and try to figure out how it fixes the bug and why the developer
chose to fix it in that way. This is a pretty good way to learn about
how bugs get fixed and how development works.
Good luck! :)