As an OpenHatch board member, I do occasionally get nice feedback from people about what we’re doing or what’s on the website. Occasionally. I assume that our Executive Director Asheesh Laroia, who spends much more time in our IRC channel and is at nearly all of our events, gets feedback nearly every day. For me it is still a pleasant surprise to have people come up to me and say, “OpenHatch! I love you guys!” or more frequently and a bit less effusively, “You’re with OpenHatch? Cool.”

In February, I was at the 11th Southern California Linux Expo, aka SCaLE, in Los Angeles. SCaLE happens to be one of my favorite free software conferences. On the opening night, I spoke for five minutes about GNU MediaGoblin, a decentralized media-hosting project that I work on. I happened to be wearing my OpenHatch t-shirt. Afterwards, Tom King came up to me and asked if I was involved with OpenHatch. He was curious because his son would be mentioning us during his talk the next day. I decided to attend this talk.

Justin King

Justin King is eleven years old. He stood on a box to address a room mostly full of kids and parents — the podium was a bit too tall for him. He gave a whirlwind talk describing how anyone can get involved in open source at any age. He personally likes shell scripting and making short animations in Blender. He recommends asking questions, but reminds the young audience to never give out their phone number when contacting people on the internet. He also recommends OpenHatch as a resource for folks who are new to free and open source software.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but our training missions are clear and on-topic. There is nothing about the OpenHatch website that precludes it from being used by young programmers. This isn’t always the case. Take a minute and think about where you go when you’re looking for help. Stack Overflow? Slashdot? linuxquestions.org? I’m certainly not knocking any of these sites, but I would hesitate to suggest them to a young person.

After the talk, I had a great conversation with Justin’s dad about other training missions that could make OpenHatch even more of a resource for young programmers. He had lots of ideas. If you have suggestions or want to write a training mission or two for young programmers, I’ll hope you’ll let us know!