GHOP students 2007-2008/Max Shinn

Hello! My name is Max Shinn (trombonechamp).

I am from Minnesota, United States.

I love writing music and Free Software. I use GNU/Linux as my desktop OS, and am in the process of getting my school district to use GNU/Linux on some of their computers as well. I am trying to teach myself more advanced PHP/Javascript. To practice, I made BernsteinForPresident.com. It is the website that wants to elect Leonard Bernstein as the president of {insert your home country here}. I made it to teach myself PHP, Javascript, and HTML, but I now use it as a homepage. It would be so much easier and the site would be more powerful if I used Joomla!, but Joomla! makes it too easy. I wouldn't learn anything about scripting languages if I used Joomla! :D

When I heard about this "contest" (why is it called a contest?) on lxer, I joined immediately. I have always wanted to help out the FOSS community on a larger scale than doing a lame PHP script. The first project I looked at was Joomla!. I used Joomla! 1.0.x earlier that year for a student council website, and fell in love with it. I looked down the list until the word "Compose" caught my eye. "I claim[ed] this task" and started my Joomla! journey.

It has been a lot of fun working with Joomla!. The community built around it is amazing. Many of the other FOSS projects I have seen have nothing but a couple people on a -dev mailing list.

I would love to see sub-forums. One for documentation, one for outreach, one for coding, etc.

This was a great experience. Thank you for giving me this chance of a lifetime!!!