My first week at the FOSSBox has already been a series of new experiences and opportunities. I am running Fedora for the first time (and loving it!), I began working on my first open source project for Red Hat, and I attended my first (civic) hackathon.

For this first week a lot of time was spent setting up my laptop and the many accounts that I needed, and registered to attend and to give a 45 minute talk about my Gource project at Flock to Fedora. Hopefully I will be selected to speak, but no matter what I am really looking forward to (hopefully) attending. I haven't been using Fedora on my laptop for very long but I am becoming a huge fan and I love the open source culture. I think attending the conference will help me meet a lot of new people and start to become more a part of the Fedora community.

As a way to start contributing more to the open source community and learn more about how projects get started, I attended my first hackathon this weekend at RIT for the first National Day of Civic Hacking. The hackathon went from 3pm Saturday to 3pm Sunday for a full 24 hours of hacking on projects for the good of our community. I was able to work on an awesome project called Food Desert Mapper, created by John Kennedy, a very recent RIT graduate. Food Desert Mapper is an application for crowd sourcing data on the availability of certain food staples at stores that accept SNAP benefits in order to determine "food deserts" or areas where obtaining these staples with SNAP benefits is difficult or impossible. You can see live project here, so be sure to check it out.

John Kennedy had already started the project during his last year at RIT, but was kind enough to catch us up and help us contribute to the project. I mostly worked on new styling for the markers on the map, implementing AwesomeMarkers instead of the default CartoDB