After this point, I started meeting with Jessica pretty frequently, and she began to tell me about the open source community. What I learned is that, on a fundamental level, open source is about fellowship and collaboration. It works so well because no one is excluded.
And for me, someone who struggled to see where they fit, what I saw was a very basic form of love—love by way of collaboration and acceptance, love by way of access, love by way of inclusion. And my spirit yearned to be a part of it. So I continued my education with Python, and, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get more tutorials, but I was able to draw from the vast wealth of written knowledge that has been compiled by the open source community. I read anything that even mentioned Python, from paperback books to obscure magazine articles, and I used the tablet that I had to solve the Python problems that I read about.
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Then, on August 17, 2018, I got the surprise of my life. Then-Governor Jerry Brown commuted my 27-years-to-life sentence, and I was released from prison after serving almost 19 years.
But here’s the reality of my situation and why I believe that programming and the open source community are so valuable. I am a 37-year-old, black, convicted felon, with no work history, who just served 18 years in prison. There aren’t many professions that exist that would prevent me from being at the mercy of the stigmas and biases that inevitably accompany my criminal past. But one of the few exceptions is programming.
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