Diederik de Haas

My first encounter with Free Software was with id3lib. I was then a Windows user and had learned myself Visual Basic. I also had an extensive mp3 collection and used quite a bit of different programs as they all seemed lacking in one way or another (and/or had bugs). So I created my own music program (in VB) to contain all the functionality I wanted. I didn't know how to write the id3 tags into the files and was also afraid I'd destroy my mp3 files by doing it wrong. I then found id3lib which could do it for me. I found it amazing that 'someone' just gave the code away. Because I had the source code, I could fix some bugs and it helped me achieve my goal.

Fast-forward a few years and at work there was a 'Linux guy'. I don't remember which distro he used, but I do recall how enthusiastic he was. Not long thereafter I tried out a Linux distro. That was probably PCLinuxOS and I was quite impressed by it. I also briefly tried out Ubuntu as that was 'advertised' as beginner friendly. I quickly learned that most of it actually came from Debian, so I switched quite soon thereafter. I think I started with Etch and IIRC I rather quickly switched to Lenny when that was still Testing. I also wanted to learn all about my Debian system and changing to Testing was better suited for that (for me). When I learned about Iceweasel, I was delighted. In my perception (accurate or not), Debian (Developers) were willing to take on a(n imo) huge amount of work for the single reason that they otherwise weren't allowed to change a single picture/logo ! I knew then that Debian (community) were my kind of people and that I had made the right choice in selecting Debian as my OS.

With the recent re-launch of the Debian forums I found out that I had created an account there in 2007. Having learned some more, I began looking for ways to contribute (back) to Debian and AFAICT the first bug I filed was #510452 on 2009-01-02. Later that year I switch to using the email address I'm currently using (including for my GPG key). The first bug I filed with that email address was #547708 and according to it's metadata I was already running Sid as my daily driver back then. I realized that "I'm good with computers" and was pretty confident that when I got "to keep all pieces", I would be able to recover from that. So far, that turned out to be true. And that allowed me to encounter bugs and report them so that others wouldn't have to encounter them. From around that year, I also started participating in Mailing Lists and joined various IRC channels. I also had an account on alioth and was part of the "Owncloud for Debian" team (as junior developer iirc).

Outside Debian, my most involved contribution is with https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst/ where I submitted my first PR on 2014-04-01. Soon thereafter contributed some more at which the original creator and then maintainer asked me if I'd like to help maintain it and soon after that whether I wanted to take it over completely. Which I did and worked for quite some years on that and learned a lot about RPi's and what it's like being a maintainer. When I found out that there was already work being done inside Debian to run pure Debian on RPi's, I started contributing to that. After some time, 'kibi' suggested that I should become a DD too and 'gwolf' agreed with that. I began to grow a (strong) dislike of the RPi Foundation, so I bought a Pine64 Rock64. That wasn't well supported by the Debian kernel at the time, so I worked to fix that. Since then I helped the Debian kernel team by triaging bugs and submitting MRs. I also started learning more about packaging in general and contributed to several projects.

As a DD I want to contribute to QA work by bringing more packages up-to-date. That is useful in itself, but I expect that it will also lower the barrier to entry for (potential) new contributors. I also want to contribute to infrastructure and process related 'things'.

Cheers, Diederik