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DISCLAIMER: THIS INFORMATION IS EXTREMELY OUT OF DATE.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

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.