William Blough

I started using Debian in approximately 2000. I had pre-ordered an empeg-car mp3 player, which ran potato (I think) on ARM. So I installed Debian on a spare system to start getting familiar with it, as I wanted to modify and hack on the player when it arrived.

Well, that led to me eventually multi-booting my main system with Debian, and then later to reinstalling only Debian (no multi-boot).

Some time after, we decided to spin up some Linux servers at work to start testing some things, and before I knew it, we were running the majority of our infrastructure (60+ VMs) on Debian. After Samba 4 came out, we even phased out our Windows-based domain controllers.

So you could say that I "drank the kool-aid" (in a good way).

Suffice it to say, I have gotten a lot of value from Debian over the years, both personally and professionally. However, I decided that filing an occasional bug report wasn't doing enough to "give back", so I began to look for other ways to contribute.

In 2013, I began maintaining the xalan package. Over the next couple of years I learned a lot more about Debian and the Debian way of doing things (though I still have a lot to learn). In 2015, I also began maintaining xerces-c, soci, and passwordsafe.

I'm somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades, so I have a lot of varied interests. But between work projects and personal projects, and personal interests not related to either, the list could include C, C++, php (and Drupal), python (and Django), XML (and SOAP), general system administration (including backups and monitoring), and security (both blue team and red team).

So I feel there are probably a lot of places that I can contribute. Certainly with maintenance of additional packages, but likely with other things also (if needed).

I don't have a lot of Debian-related goals right now, other than continuing to do my best at maintaining the packages I'm responsible for, and helping out whenever the opportunity arises. Though, I hope to grow my skills and knowledge enough to someday become a Debian Developer.