You Can Still Contribute to Open Source Projects!

Lately my contribution to open source projects seems lacking. No more time to rekindle my passion on coding. Even my translation efforts suffers. Fortunately for GNOME translation into Indonesian, Kukuh Syafaat has been taking great effort to keep translation percentage 100%. Very big kudos to him!

So when we have a big GNOME event in Gresik, GNOME Asia Summit 2019 on October 11th-13th, I tried to submit paper. I don't have any GNOME specific ideas though :(.

Later, organizing committe also asked me to lead a workshop session, on GNOME translation. So I went to Gresik with two task: GNOME translation workshop on October 11th, and Using Open Sorce to Manage Asian Games IT Security on October 12th.

Interest on open source translation in Indonesia have been difficult to build and maintain. So I have very little expectation on GNOME translation workshop attendees. But aside of not-so-popular Indonesian translation activities, we have a guest from Malaysia who was very interested to revamp Malaysian translation of GNOME. I explained in my workshop session about how to use translation memory to speed up processing of new files. We tried to expand this idea to help cross language translation, since Indonesian and Malaysian have very similar words. So we take fully translated PO files from Indonesian GNOME, feed to PO editor to fill up its translation memory, then try to pretranslate Malaysian ones. Failed. Troubshoot. Problem: those translation memory entries were only usable to the same target language. Well, time to do quick hack. We edit manually language code on source PO files, replacing 'id' with 'my'. Re-feed to PO editor. Try pre-translate again. And success!

It was a very happy moment and quite rare occasion when we can help other translation team effort. Hopefully Malaysian team can quickly reach magic percentage of 80% to be one of officialy supported GNOME languages.

The next day, I present my experience in using various open source application in Asian Games 2018. Ubuntu, Cacti, Nagios, OpenVPN, Snort, .... They were very helpfull, especially when we have very constrained budget, near event execution date. Thankfully, those tools were very helpful for us to manage system availability and overall security.

Presentation on that second day was attended by many, very different to the 'private' workshop class :D

And last but not least, thanks to GNOME Foundation which support me with travel sponsorship!

Hopefully my presentation can share the open source spirits to those attendees, to be a future users and contributors.