Ten years as a Debian developer

Ten years ago, I joined the Debian project as a developer.

At that time, I was 18 and in my first year at university, hanging out with the TuxFamily system administrators, which included 3 french Debian developers (sjg, igenibel and creis).

I was learning Debian packaging while working on VHFFS, and decided to package one or two non-yet-packaged software for Debian. My friends pushed me into the NM process, and less than 2 months later I was a Debian developer. One have to admit that back in the days, the NM process was really fast if you were able to reply to the questions quickly. :-) I think I became the youngest developer among Debian’s ones.

That was my first steps in a Free Software project, and it was really exciting.

In 10 years, I’ve been doing a lot of different things for Debian. Sure, I’ve been using it all the years long, but let’s recap a bit what I did, from what I recall.

My first Debian only project was apt-build around 2003, and later rebuildd in 2007.

I built the Xen packaging team in 2005, I’ve been a Stable Release Manager for a year in 2006, and did heavy bug squashing to release Etch that same year.

I also was an Application Manager in 2006 and managed the application of 2
Debian developers (Jose Parrella and Damián Viano).

I admit I’ve been less active in Debian after 2007, mainly because I was busy working on awesome, GNU Emacs and others software.

Since 2011, I joined the OpenStack packaging team and I’m working on OpenStack on a (almost) daily basis.

I don’t know how many packages I touched, managed or updated, but that should be one or two hundreds. I still maintain 53 of them.

After all, the adventure has been really pleasant, and I had the chance to work with and meet fabulous and smart people. I always liked this project and what it’s trying to do.

After all these years, I’m definitively staying! See you in another 10 years, folks! :)