Introduction

Hey there, earthling! Welcome to my series of blogs/tutorials (I hope to make many of them… at least enough to call it a series e.e). I plan to share the knowledge I’ll be gathering along this long journey as I contribute to the open-source world, specifically to Mesa-Turnip project.

I’m very excited to start this path. I’ve wanted to get involved in this world for quite a while, but for some reason or another, I just didn’t. But hey, here I am, better late than never! :)

Who It’s For

The world of FOSS moves fast, really fast. As time passes, it moves faster, which can be a bit scary (for me and probably for other people too). This makes you not know where to start, what to do, how, which project to pick, etc.

My hope for this series is to help and inspire others who want to contribute to FOSS. I want to share my own path, showing how I started, where, my mistakes, my victories, and hopefully, my first real contribution B). In this case, focusing specifically on Turnip. This series is also for me; sharing my journey helps me stay motivated on this long path by charging my mana to keep going :3.

Goal

Like you can see in the title, my goal is to make my first merge request into the Turnip driver project from Mesa. Obviously, I want to make a relevant one, like a bug fix or some tool that can help others, not just a typo fix (without discrediting those fixes!). I know this is an ambitious goal for someone that never contributed to Mesa(since it’s not easy at all e.e) or GPU drivers in Linux in general…, but I’m very excited to get into it :), so I will use that spark of curiosity and excitement as my mana e.e.

Where We Stand

Well, since the goal is related to Turnip and Turnip = Android + Drivers + ComputerGraphics + Linux I don’t start completely from 0, since I’m a Graphics Programmer with some years of experience and I also have experience in Linux, but for the other part…the part of GPU drivers, I got really interested in the last year, so I have some reading of blogs and articles on my back, but 0 experience and Android… -1. Why do I tell you this (which you probably don’t care :v)? Well, I just want to be honest about where I’m starting from. My hope is that maybe you find yourself in a similar position as me, so maybe you will feel motivated if you are someone like me or are in a similar position trying to do the same. If I can achieve this starting from here, you can definetely do it too :).