Hi Mac! Great question. When I got involved it was through this super cool group called Debian Women (debian.org/women/). It was new at the time and a lot of really great Debian contributors were involved! They were super welcoming and actually found it super exciting that I was so young—as an example, one of the women in the group, Erinn Clark, found it exciting to have a "teenage ch1x0r" involved. I even wrote a blog post about this at the time! blog.spang.cc/posts/__35__debian-w...
The community also asked me what they could do to make Linux more appealing to teenagers, and I wrote a post for that as well: blog.spang.cc/posts/Linux__44___Op...
Pretty fun to look back at the stuff I posted in 2005. :) I can't speak to other communities, but I felt in general that open source was above average in terms of ignoring age in favour of demonstrated abilities.
Hi Mac! Great question. When I got involved it was through this super cool group called Debian Women (debian.org/women/). It was new at the time and a lot of really great Debian contributors were involved! They were super welcoming and actually found it super exciting that I was so young—as an example, one of the women in the group, Erinn Clark, found it exciting to have a "teenage ch1x0r" involved. I even wrote a blog post about this at the time! blog.spang.cc/posts/__35__debian-w...
The community also asked me what they could do to make Linux more appealing to teenagers, and I wrote a post for that as well: blog.spang.cc/posts/Linux__44___Op...
Pretty fun to look back at the stuff I posted in 2005. :) I can't speak to other communities, but I felt in general that open source was above average in terms of ignoring age in favour of demonstrated abilities.
That's really great to hear! Thank you for sharing this.