A newbie's perspective towards Debian!

utkarsh2102

Debian Maintainer

$ whoami

➣ 19 y/o Debian Maintainer;

➣ 2nd-year undergraduate student;

➣ Community-taught programmer;

➣ PSF Member and a Contributor;

➣ GSoC'19 with Debian;

➣ utkarsh2102 across the web;

And in my free time, I love poking my Linux system ;)

Why this talk?

A wise man told me..

And that's the hope! :)

The Original Reason?

Well, solely because things went haywire :/

And that's where it all started!

I started contributing to a couple of open source projects, mostly because open source was *a thing!*

But then hopping from one project to another didn't really benefit much; still barely knew anything.

And weirdly enough, other sectors of my life started slipping, too :(

Who Helped?

Nothing made sense to me, so I visited a therapist. She helped a bit.

Met Raju, about to be a DD now, he offered help for making me contribute to Debian!

And back then, I was an Arch Linux user; mostly because, Arch Linux was a *thing* :P

He helped me learn packaging, and helped in knowing Debian in a better way!

And then..

I met *the* Pirate Praveen!

By the end of the first month and a half, I had done over 84 packages, working 14 hrs a day :)

Solved a good amount of bugs, learned the SysAdmin skills, et al.

It was an adventurous month, though I did horrible mistakes \o/

I also got to know Xavier (yadd)!

The Philosophical Side

It all started when I uploaded my master private GPG key to Google Cloud \o/

Learned GPG and it's significance;

The meaning of Debian changed here; learned what's different than other OS.

And finally, I was told I could apply to be a DM; that was on the 71st day!

Mini DebConf Delhi

...and the Key Signing party! :D

And as a result..

➣ Became the youngest Debian Maintainer in India;

➣ Solved more bugs and CVEs;

➣ Uploaded my own packages and sponsored a few :D

➣ Doing GSoC'19 under Debian;

➣ And more;

But most importantly,

Got a chance to attend DebConf 19 \o/

DebConf 19!

➣ Finally met people who I really adored;

➣ IRC nicks finally have faces now \o/

➣ And a fanboy moment..

(Meeting gregoa :D)

A huge thank you to Debian!

Of course, a huge thank you to all the people who have been there, all this while;

And to all the people who kept me going;

Debian has really been an amazing journey, an amazing place, and an amazing family.

See you at next DebConf(s)!

~ utkarsh2102