I noticed that my blog is not mobile friendly, so I changed my Pelican theme to use Bootstrap version 3, which has a responsive design. I am now using pelican-bootstrap3 with the Bootswatch United theme.

Attracting new contributors and making projects accessible to newcomers is an important issue to many open source organizations.

I will describe my experiences becoming a new contributor to open source. I hope that this will be useful to 1) people trying to improve the open source newcomer experience and 2) people who have never worked on open source and are interested in becoming contributors.

DISCLAIMER: THIS INFORMATION IS EXTREMELY OUT OF DATE.

Ceilometer is a fairly new component of OpenStack, so I thought it would be helpful to document how I install Ceilometer and DevStack. Ceilometer monitors and gathers data on other components in OpenStack. For example, one could use Ceilometer to measure CPU usage in order to bill customers.

In this post, I'll go through how I install Devstack and Ceilometer on a Vagrant virtual machine running 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Your host machine should have enough memory, so that it can run a virtual machine with 2 GB RAM.

Recently, Anne Gentle, the OpenStack Outreach Program for Women coordinator, told me it would be interesting to know what made OpenStack appealing to me personally. I'll try to answer that question here.¹

DISCLAIMER: This information may be out-of-date. This post was written using Pelican version 3.2 and the themes and plugins in July 2013. However, last I checked (August 2015), almost everything still works.

I thought it would be useful to go into greater technical detail about how I went about setting up Pelican.¹

My machine is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

I just finished up my stint as a helper at Software Carpentry's Women in Science and Engineering boot camp, also known as WiSE. The event was held at Microsoft's space in Cambridge Center near Boston from June 24 - 25.

A couple years ago, while I was in physics graduate school, I found out about an organization called Software Carpentry. My advisor sent me a Nature article about poor software practices in science and it quoted Greg Wilson, the founder of Software Carpentry. Around the same time, I also heard that Software Carpentry was running an online class to teach scientists software skills. I signed up and really enjoyed the class -- which covered Python, shell, version control, object oriented programming, regular expressions, testing, and databases.

Today is the first day of my internship in the Outreach Program for Women¹ (OPW). I'll be working on the Ceilometer component of the OpenStack cloud computing project under the guidance of my mentor, Julien Danjou, who is the project technical lead of Ceilometer. I'm also supported by two more mentors, Anita Kuno and Julie Pichon. Anne Gentle is the coordinator of OpenStack's OPW internship program, and Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Karen Sandler are the coordinators of the entire Outreach Program for Women. I'm grateful to them all.

When I was setting up this blog, I initially started with Wordpress, but then I discovered that many (tech-savvy) people were using static site generators.

It took me some time to understand what that meant. Most of the common blogging platforms generate websites dynamically. Wordpress requires SQL to manage a database containing your blog content. When someone loads your blog URL, Wordpress generates the requested webpage. Wordpress must be installed on your webhost/server for this to work.

The idea behind static site generators is to have software on your local machine that creates webpages and then upload these pages to the webhost. The webpages have fixed content, hence the description "static site." You don't need to install anything on the webhost.

This past weekend, I participated in Hack for Western Mass as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.¹ This was my first hackathon and initially I was skeptical that you could accomplish much of anything with strangers during a weekend. But I turned out be wrong.