Ten years already!
(actually, please set your calendars to the day before yesterday — I had a mental tab on this, but it seems watching mental tabs is a low-priority task for brain.sched)
Ten years ago today, I got that long awaited mail telling me I had passed all of the needed hurdles and was accepted as a Debian Developer. We were at the first third of a very long release cycle, and the general spirit of the project was clearly younger — both as in “things moved easier” and “we were much more immature” — Try to follow the mailing list discussions we had back then, and even with all the vitriol that’s every now and then spilled on debian-whatever@lists.debian.org, it’s clear we have more experience working together.
And yes, the main change that ten years bring to a group of people is social. I was at DebConf in Oslo when the now-historic presentation that prompted the birth of the Debian-Women group was given — Surely, Debian (and Free Software) still is by far predominantly male and white — But I fel it’s no longer a hostile group, much to the contrary.
Over the years, I was first active (as was the norm by then) as a “solo” maintainer. When Joachim Breitner started the pkg-perl group in 2004, I joined, and was part of the group while an important part of my work was based in Perl. I joined pkg-ruby-extras, and slowly migrated my technical work from one to the other. For several years, I also maintained the Cherokee webserver. I started getting involved in DebConf organization in 2005, and (except for 2008, as I took a vacation from many topics due to personal issues). Back in 2009, I became an official delegate! I joined Jonathan McDowell handling keyring maintenance. One year later, another delegation: With Moray Allan and Holger Levsen, the three of us became the DebConf chairs.
This last couple of months, I have been quite inactive in most of my Debian work. I took up teaching at the univerity, and have been devoting what amounts to basically a full time job to prepare material. I expect (hope!) this craze to reach back a “workable” level by late May, when the course finishes, and I can retake some of my usual Debian tasks.
Anyway — 10 years. Wow. This project is one of the longest commitments in my life. I am still very happy I joined, it still thrills me to say I am part fo this great project, it still makes me proud to be accepted as a peer by so many highly skilled and intelligent people — But, as I have repeatedly stated, I see Debian more as a social project (with a technological product) than as a technical one. And as such, I am really happy to have made so many good, close friends in this project, to have the opportunity to work and exchange points of view about anything, and have this large, highly disfunctional but very closely regarded family of friends.
So, guys, see you this August in Switzerland. I will be among the group celebrating we have been there for half of the project’s history!
Comments
Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer 2013-04-19 06:38:26
Funny thing is…
… I think I remember this. By that time I was a nearly 5 months-old Debian user, looking at what Marga, Maxy, Des and Tincho were doing (on IRC, because I haven’t personally met them by that time).
Ten years as a Debian user. Wow.
Manuel Rabade 2013-04-18 21:48:58
Congrats! I just realized how
Congrats! I just realized how long I know you and how much I have to thank you about what I know about FOSS/Unix/Whatever. I send you a big hug.