[Freedombox-discuss] Coming on board

[Bob Girard]

Greetings.  My name is Bob Girard, I live in Sedona, AZ, and I'm signing
on to the FreedomBox project, to help at least initially with anything
related to testing, code analysis, and continuous integration (CI), if
that's somewhere the project would like to go.  I expect that task #1
will be to help build up the unit test inventory for Plinth, and maybe
get an automated testing infrastructure in place.

I've been a software developer for the past 30 years, using a variety of
languages (BASIC, COBOL, X86 assembly, C, C++, C#, Java, SQL, XML, XSL)
in a variety of business domains (bank check processing, hospital
accounting, embedded medical devices, online library card catalogs, and
entertainment payroll processing).  However, for the past eight years,
I've been primarily focused on implementing, administering, evangelizing
about, and mentoring on CI environments for multiple development teams
running dozens of projects.  So I've learned a lot about writing unit
tests, evaluating and applying various code coverage and analysis tools,
generating custom HTML reports, and automating the build process in
general.  Now that I've retired, I finally get to work on what I want,
and the FreedomBox is perhaps the worthiest project that I'd be able to
find.

On the downside, I'm new to FOSS, Linux, git, and Python, so I hope
you'll bear with me while I get up to speed.  The consolation, at least
for me, is that there's a bunch of cool new stuff I get to learn, I get
to work with a bunch of sharp, motivated people, and working on testing,
coverage, and code analysis will allow me to be as productive as
possible as quickly as possible while getting familiarized with the
codebase.

I'm also posting this message to the #freedombox IRC channel under the
username “bobg”, and I hope to hear from other project participants.