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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Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson
I talked with CL Kao and Dori Wilson for an episode of their new Data Renegades podcast titled Data Journalism Unleashed with Simon Willison. I fed the transcript into Claude Opus 4.5 to extract this list of topics with timestamps and illustrative quotes. …
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries November 26, 2025Pluralistic: Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" (25 Nov 2025)
Today's links Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" : An enshittified search monopolist meets the worst health care system imaginable. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disaster fantasi…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow November 25, 2025Digital asset treasury companies are running out of steam
Convincing traders to pay $2 for $1 of bitcoin worked — for a while. As premiums evaporate, an unwind could be painful.
via Citation Needed November 25, 2025Generated by openring