Linux advocate of the first hour, Machtelt Garrels has made many contributions to the Open Source community and has been working for over fifteen years on the wider acceptance of Linux and other Open Source products. At the Linux Documentation Project she initially found a fertile ground for making her work read throughout the world. She writes whenever she has the time, closing gaps in existing documentation and taking the opportunity to simplify it when necessary, always keeping in mind that practice is the only way to learn.