Diego M. Rodriguez

I'm Diego, a Spanish software engineer currently dabbling into data science. I was fortunate enough to be exposed to GNU/Linux in my early teenage years, back in the floppy-disk era, and settled on using Debian around the Potato days (it was a different world back then!). Since then, Debian has been integral part of all my digital and professional life (local and remote), and it has gone hand-in-hand with the development of my technical expertise and my understanding of the Free Software movement and philosophy.

As part of "giving back" to Debian and free software, I started with sporadic contributions in the programs that I was using at the time, starting with the translation of the manpages of a window manager and following up on bugs in the BTS. My formal introduction to Debian packaging was introducing a dependency to beets, a media library management system that I was contributing to that also exposed me to the Debian Python Modules team. Later on, I undertook an effort on packaging one of my previous companies open source Go project into the repositories (ultimately unsuccessfully), and recently I have been attempting to help the DPMT in different packaging needs and I'm in the process of updating one of the Science team packages (qiskit). Other than packaging-related activities, I have been actively recommending and introducing (and supporting!) Debian to friends, family and colleagues, as a sincere effort on showing and reaping the benefits of a free software distribution and philosophy.

My primary areas of interest are diverse: from the technologies perspective, the Python ecosystem as a whole (with an emphasis on science-related software) is one of the main ones, being a strong part of my most recent projects. I'm also interested in the efforts on internationalization and reaching out to the Spanish collective in particular, attempting to minimize the language barrier. By taking this step I'm looking for a stronger commitment of my time to the Debian project, in an attempt to continue giving back: my goals are to continue keeping Debian as a quality distribution for end-users, helping getting the archive up to date with the tools they need just one "apt-get" away, and eventually be able to help the project in other ways that suit my abilities.