An attempt to create a local Kernel community

Since the day I had my first class of Operating Systems (OS) in my engineering course, I got passionate about it; for me, OS represents one of the greatest achievements of mankind. As a result of my delight for OS, I always tried to gravitate around this field, but my school environment did not provide me with many opportunities to get into the area. To summarize this long journey, I will jump directly into the main point, on November 15 of 2017, I joined to a conference named Linuxdev-br [1] which brought together some of the best Brazilians Kernel developers. I took this opportunity to learn everything that I could by asking lots of questions to developers. Additionally, I was lucky to meet Gustavo Padovan. He helped me a lot during my first steps in the Linux Kernel.

From November 2017 until now, I did the best I could to become a Kernel developer, and I have to admit that the path was very complicated. I paid the price to work from 8 AM to 11 PM, from Sunday to Sunday, to maintain my efforts in my master and the Linux Kernel at the same time; unfortunately, I could not stay focused only in the Kernel. However, all of these efforts were paid off along the year; I had many patches accepted in the Kernel, I joined the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), I traveled to conferences, I returned to Linuxdev-br 2018 as a speaker, I joined XDC2018 [2], and many other good things happened.

Now I am close to complete one year of Linux Kernel, and one question still bugs me: why does it have to be so hard for someone in a similar condition to become part of this world? I realized that I had great support from many people (especially from my sweet and calm wife) and I also pushed myself very hard. Now, I feel that it is time to start giving back something to society; as a result, I began to promote some small events about free software in the university and the city I live. However, my main project related to this started around two months ago with six undergraduate students at the University of Sao Paulo, IME [3]. My plan is simple: train all of these six students to contribute to the Linux Kernel with the intention to help them to create a local group of Kernel developers. I am excited about this project! I noticed that within a few weeks of mentoring the students they already learned lots of things, and in a few days, they will send out their contributions to the Kernel. I want to write a new post about that in December 2018, reporting the results of this new tiny project and the summary of this one year of Linux Kernel. See you soon :)

Reference

1. linuxdev-br
2. XDC 2018
3. IME USP