Edmund Lodewijks

Hi!

I am in my 40's at this time of application (2026), and a computer hobbyist since my early childhood. I've played with MS-DOS, Windows 3.1-7 (worked on higher versions where required). I always loved tinkering with the OS's, settings, configuration files. One of my earliest "wild" memories is a game that a primary school friend gave me on a floppy disk, which didn't work with my EGA 16 colour card. I opened the file in a hex editor, found where it said VGA, changed it to EGA, and it suddenly started! I was perhaps 8 years old?

Since the early 2000's I have dabbled with (first a little, then always more) Linux and some of the BSD's (mainly OpenBSD and FreeBSD). For a long time, Windows stayed around for gaming (lots of WoW got in the way of Linux tinkering at some time... Ooops!) I have been running Linux as my daily driver for a good 15 years now; my wife and business are also run on Linux, and, as far as possible, on open source software. On the server side: I have been running a few Debian and Ubuntu servers for my business (my wife and I run a company making wooden toys and collectibles, employing a good ten'ish people), as well as a private mail server, and some toy projects.

Most of the IT stuff I know come from self-learning, apart from a few Microsoft System Admin and networking courses through a previous employer on an IT help desk. I have dabbled with programming (Q-BASIC, C, Java, HTML, CSS, a little Lisp, and a little Rust), and I have written and extended a number of Shell scripts. Nothing to write home about, but enough to be comfortable going through (especially C) code, understand what is going on, follow the flow, and triage issues.

In the various countries where I have spent some time, I have often advocated, and occasionally been able to install Linux for people, with varying success (the installing went fine, showing them how it worked went fine, but their having to use certain word documents in team setting did not work well). My favourite distributions to install were Debian, Linux Mint, and, in earlier days, Ubuntu.

During the years I have had great interactions with the FOSS community, be it on forums, via email, and github, or occasionally on IRC, if I would log on there. Since I do not have a formal IT background, I felt not good enough to give back to the community for the longest time. This changed as I became older, and left that attitude more and more behind. I became more and more involved in Arch Linux (my daily driver at the time, for some 10 years), on the forums, Wiki, packaging for the AUR, occasionally on the Bugzilla.

For some time now I have been wanting to contribute to Debian, my first Linux distro, and the one I have come back to even on the desktop. I used a recent opportunity to contribute to the cyrus-imapd package, which I use on my mail server, and one thing lead to another. I have been reading the Guide for Debian Maintainers, I have been perusing the bugs list (especially the RC bugs), and I have generally been having a great time diving into some bugs to track them down and provide patches. I have filed an ITA for cunit, a package that has a couple or rdeps (one of them being cyrus-imapd), and I am looking forward to contributing more, and meeting more and more people (mostly online).

I have been sending a message or two to the Debian South Africa mailing list (I currently live in South Africa), but it seems that the few DD's from South Africa live in different parts of the country from where I stay (and there don't seem to be enough to have a big Debian party anytime soon). Alas!

Besides all the tinkering on the computer, I love to learn about, and work on my car; I love sailing; reading; hiking; music; (cycling when I lived in Holland - flat as a pancake!) and more. de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no accounting for taste), so I left out what kind of music and books ;)

That's it, folks! Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Kind regards,

Edmund