Debian

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

I'm not going to talk about Debian politics; if you want to know about that, read this (please note: 4th comment is excellent, read that far if you're going to read at all). I'm going to talk about my personal involvement, which is actually very little.

I first brushed the edges of Debian with my friendship with Chris. Chris was a developer, and through him I met Wookey, and at Chris' funeral, Wookey introduced me to a man who struck me as kind, sensitive and interesting. Reader, I married him.

So far, so good. By the time we got married, Colin was already working on Ubuntu, a Debian derivative, I moved to Ubuntu for my personal machines, and didn't think a lot about it, really. Then in 2009, Colin, who has until that time been going to the annual conference alone, suggested that we might like to join him in Caceres, so we did, and we hung around the edges of the conference, sight seeing and meeting people. Since then, we've missed on DebConf, and gradually got more involved in that; I feel like part of the community to the extent that when I went for breakfast the first morning this year, I looked around and the only people I didn't know where students of the university whose halls we were staying in.

Gradually I've come to feel like I want to contribute - I get so much out of Debian. It's given me a husband and family, friends, my mortgage gets paid, not by Debian, but by a Debian derivative and a job which Colin wouldn't have were he not so well known in Debian. People have offered me other roles, which largely don't interest me - I want to programme. I enjoy not so much the blank slate panicky feeling but the point where I have a bunch of gibberish which I shape into a thing that does something.

So in what limited free time I have, I'm slowly (very extremely slowly) with lots of stops and starts, hoping to work towards contributing, and occasionally I stop and listen to talks to keep up my enthusiasm, and I talk to people, and I read Yakking to keep me going until I can actually do something that I enjoy that will benefit the wider community, both those I know and those I don't.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

That's how you and Colin met? I never knew!

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Yes. It sees weird because we'd been at the same parties, pub meets etc for ages before that, but I mostly talk to people I already know so we never actually spoke and we didn't recognise each other.