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.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- 2024
- 2023
- Ladybird on Debian Stable
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
- My AI Adoption Journey from Mitchell Hashimoto
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Keeping sponsor lists up-to-date
Keeping sponsor lists up-to-date across multiple READMEs and websites is tedious - so I wrote a tool to automate it.
via Carlos Becker March 25, 2026Code as a Tool of Process
Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incre…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog March 24, 2026Paris's Bicycle Mayor and the Hormuz Shock
Why Energy Independence is an Enduring Antidote to Trump's Demented Chaos
via High Speed March 24, 2026Generated by openring