In May I saw a panel in which a young woman gave the advice to other women wanting to get involved in #FOSS that when first interacting with a new project they use a male-presenting ident until they're out of the "newb" period wrt that project. So that with their real ident they're ramped-up & competent on day 1. Because sexist assholes.

I hate that this is probably good advice. It's such an indictment of our community. And I've been thinking about that more and more.

#FreeSoftware

Just noticed the #DND 5E title #font (Penumbra) on my bag of potato chips.

Now that the association has been made, I'm just giggling about imagining a hippie stone golum saying "live better, eat boulder".

Last week, I contributed to a #foss project without writing a single line of programming code. How? I corrected and completed the translation for the programme.

I just wanted to mention this, because writing, updating and correcting translations (often referred to via i18n (meaning internationalisation) or l10n (meaning localisation) is very important for the non-english user base of #foss and can’t possibly be done by the programmers (alone).

It’s also very low threshold work. But it can be intimidating when you’ve never done it before. Also, beware: The tutorials I found on YouTube are ridiculous.

In the end it boils down to the following steps:

• Find the repository (there’s almost always a link under Help or on the project website)
• Look for .po files in your language (e.g. de.po for German or pt.po for Portuguese)
• They’re basically a list of ‘bit of text in the original’ and ‘translation for that bit of text right below’
• Contact the developers if you don’t know their process of submitting changes and let them know you’d like to help.
• Once you’ve got the green light, edit the text file with a simple text editor and submit as discussed.

Note: None of this is particularly technical. I guess the biggest issues might be what a text editor actually is and the lingo-divide between you and the developers.

My experience is overwhelmingly positive (but I’ve got a technical background).