Jedi Knights, when they achieve a certain level of maturity in their craft, are told to build their own lightsaber, as one of the final steps of their training. Software developers have similar feats to accomplish at least once in their coding life, like building their own Linux kernel, writing a rant about Microsoft Windows in their blog, submitting a patch for some open-source system, or even starting and managing their own company or open-source project.
Today I’ve compiled my own kernel from scratch, thanks to the instructions given in the Ubuntu forums. And I feel like I’ve done another nice, big, useful step in my career. I can only thank all of those who write how-tos and instructions in forums, which is one of the factors that make Linux so great; you can find information about how to do pretty much anything, with incredible levels of detail. I hope that my small contributions might be useful to others! This, for me, is a way to give back to the community as well.