Richard (Ricky) B. Elrod
I am a Linux enthusiast, who recently decided to find an already-active Open Source community to participate in. Because of that, I recently joined the Fedora Infrastructure Team. I'll talk a bit about that below, but so far I really enjoy it.
My Life
At some point I can probably just link to my portfolio, but right now it's a bit specific to the class that I had to develop it for. After I graduate High School (two weeks left, as of this writing), I will remove some of the class-specific elements of it, and link to it here.
Basically, I have been using Linux for nearly 5 years now. Started out with Freespire, moved up to Ubuntu, then to Arch. Then I stopped for a while, and went a different direction: Into the world of the BSD's. I really liked FreeBSD for some time. The ports system was excellent, and the community was very helpful. However, there were some things that irked me a bit, and made me want to try something new.
That's where Fedora comes in. After playing around with Fedora for some time, I decided that I'd like to give back to the community a bit. The Infrastructure Team was very accepting of me, and User:mmcgrath helped me get started. He gave me my first job, which is to create an automated script to make Fedorahosted projects and repos, as needed, by parsing out Trac tickets from a template. For the full concept, see the ticket here: http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2131. This is still a work in progress.
I hold an amateur radio license, KB3LLM, though I am very rarely active on the bands anymore. As mentioned above, I graduate High School in two weeks, and plan on entering the University of Akron, to major in Computer Science.
I am active on IRC, on Freenode (irc.freenode.net) and a small network I help run, Ninthbit (irc.ninthbit.net). On both of them, I use the nick "CodeBlock". That is probably the best way to contact me, or via email, at codeblock@fedoraproject.org.
Thanks
And finally, I just want to say thanks to the Fedora Infrastructure Team for allowing me to be a part of it, and letting me help out. I have yet to see another Distro's infra team be so open to people helping.