Don Watkins (He/Him/His)

16903 points

Franklinville, New York

Educator, entrepreneur, open source advocate, life long learner, Python teacher. M.A. in Educational Psychology, M.S. Ed. in Educational Leadership, Linux system administrator.

Open Source Star Best Interview Award 2016 Best Interview Award 2017 Moderator's Choice Award 2018 Moderator's Choice Award 2019 People's Choice Award Social Sharer Award 2014 Conversation Starter Award 2015 Author Comment Gardener Open education 100+ Contributions Club Contributor Club

Authored Content

How Linux rescued precious audio files with FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a highly versatile tool that supports a range of popular formats like MP3, MP4, and AVI. You can also use it to convert files between different formats.

What's your favorite Mastodon app?

Mastodon is an open source social networking platform for microblogging. Here are my favorite Mastodon clients.

9 resources about open source for educators and students

Open source helps educators, scholars, students, and lifelong learners explore new horizons.

My favorite open source alternatives this year

Default to open in 2023 by swapping out Adobe Creative Suite, Office 365, Slack, and many more proprietary tools for open source applications.

9 resources for educators and students

Open source helps educators, scholars, students, and lifelong learners explore new horizons.

How to write a web service using Python Flask

Learn Python: 7 of my favorite resources

Over the years, I've honed my Python skills thanks to these open source resources.

Contributed Content

2019 Opensource.com summer reading list

13 books to inform and entertain you during the long, lazy days of summer.

Authored Comments

Don Watkins

21 Apr 2023

How I teach Python with open source tools

Anderson that was my segue into Python. I learned LOGO when I was in graduate school in the late 1980's and then taught it In our elementary school. A friend of mine introduced me to Python and then demonstrated the 'turtle' module and my connection with LOGO, Seymour Papert and helping students to have fun with Math was rekindled.

Don Watkins

5 Apr 2023

How I learned the hard way to keep my website updated

Thanks David for a good reminder to keep Wordpress updated. I don't host my own site but just yesterday I did a security check on the site.