.. link: http://dgplug.org/summertraining/2013/posts/thyarmageddon-introduction-20130709-040309.html .. description: .. tags: .. date: 2013/07/09 04:03:10 .. title: ThyArmageddon Introduction 20130709-040309 .. slug: thyarmageddon-introduction-20130709-040309 Introduction ------------ I don't personally share a lot of information about myself on line but let me share what people know about me on line. My name is Elijah and I'm a computer geek. I started using Linux around 7 years ago because I wanted to try something other than *Windows* on my **old slow laptop** at the time. I started with no help whatsoever from anyone, and did not have anyone to help me either. I had to rely on myself to learn and fix my own problems. The *more I learned*, the *more eager* I became to **learn even more**. I moved from distribution to distribution until I found Gentoo. Seven years later, here I am a Gentoo contributor with my own overlay and some packages in the Gentoo tree. I test packages for stabilization on Gentoo, write *ebuild* scripts to compile and/or install packages on Gentoo and contribute to the community as much as I can. I know a bunch of different programming and scripting languages. I also know hardware descriptive languages but that's not the point of this introduction. I hope the point was made clear of what one person with Google can do all by themselves. Thoughts on the training sessions --------------------------------- Oh boy, *Kushal* wanted me to be "*brutally honest*" so that is **exactly** what I'm going to do. Let's start first with *Kushal*. Unfortunately, *Kushal* is a very nice guy and has a lot of patience, much more patience than I could ever have. Being a nice guy is *usually* considered to be a good thing but in this exact case it isn't. A lot of the time spent in the sessions is wasted on answering questions that should have either been obvious or found with a simple Google search **before** the session. If I were to be him, I would *moderate* the channel during the session and take questions at the end of the session. I'll move on to talking about the **laziness** shown in this summer training sessions so far. Every member who joined the training sessions signed up by their **own** will. I hope that nobody forced you to sign up and I'm pretty sure that nobody did. *You*, the members, took the decision to sign up for it so you have to stand up for your decision and give the time and effort to learn. If you expect to sit down and relax the whole session without doing any effort at all and end up knowing python then you are mistaken. Well, *mistaken* is a small word to describe this, maybe "you missed the point by a **light year**" would be more appropriate. Since the beginning of the sessions and until now, without any exaggeration, I've noticed that nobody reads anything. When I say anything I mean **nothing**. Users are still making the *same mistakes* over and over again even after being corrected so many times. I have this impression that people are not even reading what's been said in the channel during the sessions even. It saddens me to find *Kushal* and others working as hard as they can to provide these summer sessions and everyone attending not bothering to appreciate their work. If I were to be *Kushal* I would take that behavior as an insult. That is disrespectful. The mailing list is a **mess**. Every *mistake* written or unwritten has been broken and not even once. After I sent my email of the mistakes done by the users, **including myself**, I look at the mailing list and I feel like there is no hope for some of the users. Some users did not even bother reading the email *Kushal* sent. Three of us were on IRC helping him out to make sure the email is perfectly clear to everyone and works for everyone on all distributions. We even *made* him add the following to make **sure** people wouldn't email the mailing list: :: reply to this email directly to me with your username. The outcome was people emailing the mailing list and the worst part is none of those emails were correct. Now I have no idea where *Kushal* gets the strength to put up with this. Let me give you an idea on how much time was lost during the previous sessions on *useless*, *irrelevant* and *painful* stuff. After *mbuf*'s sessions at the beginning of the sessions, I stopped attending some of the sessions and read the logs later because I couldn't stand being there. Every 1 hour session took me 5 minutes to study. I also expanded my knowledge by reading some more about the subject for 55 minutes on the web. That's 55 minutes lost on someone who doesn't know how to use the shell, which was explained previously, or how to create a file, also explained previously, or how to install a package on their distribution. If someone opened the terminal once everyday for half an hour and practiced doing stuff with it we could've saved ourselves **half** of the sessions lost which, by itself, is sad. People should start doing their homework at home and work more on their knowledge before getting to the sessions and losing other people's time. During yesterday's session, for example, people gave a list of the programming languages they knew. Then during the session, a lot of *useless stupid* questions were asked and I felt so good that *Kushal* did not answer them, mostly. I'm bringing up this topic to show something that no one should do; making claims they can't prove. I'm not going to mention names, but they know who they are. One who claimed to know programming asked what **** is. Now, what one should do with such a person ? How could you possibly answer such a question ? After I forced myself to calm down, another person asked what the **#!/usr/bin/env python** at the beginning of the file is. That someone claimed to know python (if I'm not mistaken). There is no amount of words to explain this behavior. If I were *Kushal* I would've banned that person. That's **exactly** why I was avoiding some of the sessions. Now to clarify things as a conclusion, I'm not perfect. No one is perfect, we all make mistakes, I make mistakes. Making mistakes is human but not learning from your own mistakes when corrected is not the path to learning. That's a big tell that that person is not willing to learn anything and is losing their and other people's time with these sessions and by attending them.