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
- 2025
- Ladybird on Debian Stable
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Great Lakes, Illinois
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Pluralistic: bunnie's piggyback hack (09 Jan 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
- A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Bandcamp is Taking Slop Head On with Unequivocal Ban, to the Cheers of Music Lovers Everywhere
’Tis But Some Quick News for January 16, 2026 Bandcamp read the room. It is the hero we need in our hour of darkness. Amidst an onslaught of horrendous AI-generated slop pretending to be music (Spotify is rife with this garbage, though they keep claiming …
via The Internet Review January 16, 2026Pluralistic: Catch this! (16 Jan 2026)
Today's links Catch this! Email is good, actually. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: LDS excommunication; King Foundation v "I Have a Dream"; "Lat-stage capitalism" v "Christ, what an asshole"; Pelosi …
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow January 16, 2026Liberating the ASUS CX1100CN Chromebook with OpenBSD
Liberating the ASUS CX1100CN Chromebook with OpenBSD 2026-01-16 I’ve always enjoyed the idea of having a portable, lightweight, 11 inch laptop for my personal use for around the house and small trips. A device that I wouldn’t have to be concerned about just…
via btxx.org RSS Feed January 16, 2026Generated by openring