Becoming a Debian Developer
I’ve been using debian for as long as I remember. I’ve always wanted to play a more active role in debian development but for whatever reason I never got around to it. Now that I am 30, older, wiser, I am starting a new push to become a debian developer.
So far I have gotten involved in the debian-qa team. Specifically I have been working on fixing some of the newcomer bugs on the distro-tracker project. It’s actually been really fun. The code base is django which I am pretty comfortable with. For the first time in many years, I have been rushing home after work so that I could keep hacking on the bugs that I am working on.
Code contributions are one thing. The thing that I am going to need more practice on is debian packaging itself. This is pretty complex process and I think that becoming someone who can debug and perform packaging issues would bring a lot of value to the project.
I am going to start working on some of the RC bugs (which typically involve at least re-packaging software) to get more comfortable with how other folks have been doing packaging.
In the next few months I would love to bring a new package through it’s full lifecycle.
I hope to be able to look back on this blog post in the future and see how far I have come.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
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- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
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- Sit On Your Ass Web Development from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Issue 91 – GDP on the blockchain
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We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture. First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year. This is a delightful new format for a mu…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 27, 2025Generated by openring