Wed, 22 Jul 2009
I'm a Debian Developer!
Wow. As of Wednesday morning, I'm a Debian Developer.
It really makes me proud. To me, Debian has always stood out for its unique attention to quality, breadth, software freedom, and community involvement. Now I'm officially a part of that team.
When Debian lenny, the most recent release, shipped, I was also very happy about my contributions. Packages I maintain were shipped with it, and I spent some time fixing release-critical bugs.
All this work on Debian also makes me humbled. I want to send my deepest thanks to everyone in Debian who makes it happen — Developers, Debian Maintainers, other package contributors, users who file sharp bug reports, companies who sponsor ongoing improvements to Debian, translators, web page maintainers, Debian Developers who volunteer for positions to make sure the organization works as well as it does, the Debconf local teams, and everyone else who contributes in another way. Even those outside Debian help make it great; feedback and competition in the long run always improve a project.
Right now, I want to personally thank the key people who have guided me through the New Maintainer process. In order of appearance:
- Daniel Baumann, for sponsoring my packages years ago and providing great feedback on them that made them better.
- Benjamin "Mako" Hill, for being my advocate, sponsoring my packages, and being generally helpful and friendly over the past few years we've known each other.
- Mike Linksvayer and Nathan Yergler at Creative Commons, for letting me contribute to Debian on CC time.
- Christoph Berg (myon), for accepting my application, both at the start and right at the end.
- Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt, for being my Application Manager for a while.
- Steffen Joeris (white), for finishing handling my application as my final Application Manager.
- Bernd Zeimetz (bzed), for helping at the Debian New Maintainers Front Desk and marking my application as completed.
- Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel), for actually creating my account.
People are what make Debian great. Everyone involved across the New Maintainer process deserves thanks, too! These are just the people who stuck out in my memory of my own experience.
Now I will stand on my laurels and help make the next great Debian release!
