Alper Nebi Yasak

I'm a weirdo from Turkey who likes to learn things thoroughly and to do things "the right way".

How I came to using Debian is that the software I used during my engineering degree being better to work with on Linux systems. I chose Xubuntu then by chance, which led me upstream to Debian. Parallel to this, my search for an as-free-as-possible computer led me to ARM Chromebooks, and I bought one that I felt was going to be great in that perspective, and I started tinkering on it to solve the many problems that I had.

My "right way" urges me to generalize my solutions and push them upstream. This kickstarted my involvement in Debian by helping enable graphical installer support for the ARM64 architecture, and doing hardware enablement work on the kernel and initramfs-tools packages for various Chromebooks. I developed a Python tool that handles the bootloader specifics on Chromebooks and packaged it for Debian, and co-maintain it as part of the Debian Python Team, with the aim of streamlining installing Debian onto Chromebooks with the Debian Installer. Beyond that, I have also contributed to many other upstream projects to fix kernel and userspace bugs that I encounter on these devices, and try to develop UEFI-capable free platform firmware for these weird devices.

I like working on software development tooling, automation, reproducibility, and programming language design in general. I'm also interested in modernizing the installer, but could not find time-energy to drive the effort so far.