Ben Cotton

5063 points

Lafayette, Indiana

Ben Cotton is a meteorologist by training, but weather makes a great hobby. Ben works as the Fedora Program Manager at Red Hat. He is the author of Program Management for Open Source Projects. Find him on Twitter (@FunnelFiasco) or at FunnelFiasco.com.

Open Sourcerer People's Choice Award Moderator's Choice Award 2017 Author Comment Gardener Cloud Linux Open science Python SysAdmin Community Manager Creative Commons Developer Fedora Contributor Club Open Organization Ambassador

Authored Content

The case for educating judges on open source licensing

"Open source code is problematic because anonymous people on the Internet design it, and 'holes' are not fixed by vendor updates." Is this FUD from some proprietary software…

IndiaHacks online code sprint includes month-long open source track

Open source software contributions often spring from passion—the passion to give back to the community, or simply the burning desire to create something new. The same passion…

10 helpful tools for a sys admin's toolbox

Sys admins, no matter what platforms they work on, are awash in great open source software tools. In this article, we highlight well-known—and not-so-well-known—tools that…

Hacktoberfest campaign leads to nearly 50K GitHub contributions

In 2014, cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean decided to encourage contribution to open source software projects, so they sponsored Hacktoberfest. More than 500 participants…

Two different business organization charts

You might want to hug this book: a review of 'Git for Teams'

Git for Teams by Emma Jane Hogbin Westby is a good technology book, but it's the non-technical parts that make it excellent. Git has a bit of a reputation as being difficult…

Stronger than fear: Mental health in the open

Developers, like everyone else, often struggle with mental health issues. And like everyone else, these struggles are often left unspoken. In 2013, Ed Finkler decided to…

Authored Comments

bcotton

5 Jul 2018

How do you keep your Linux skills strong?

I learned most of what I knew about Linux from breaking my computer. Thankfully, I do that a little bit less these days.

bcotton

2 Jul 2018

My first sysadmin mistake

My first "oh no, Benjamin, what have you done?!" was when I was moving data around to upgrade disks on a storage array. I did an `rsync --delete`....in the wrong direction. Fortunately, it was on the newest of our arrays, so it only impacted a dozen or so users (me included, which helped with the apology). It took the better part of a day for all the restores to finish.