Jean Baptiste Favre

I'm working as SRE in an web company in Paris, France. I'm mostly working on containerized architectures, both on premise or in Google Cloud Platform. Before that I've worked in an hosting company. That's mostly where I've learned to know Debian.

On the philosophical side, I love free softwares' preeminence in Debian, which I believe is essential for people to be able to control their computers' usage instead of being controled by them. At the same time, I find it great that Debian made contrib & even non-free sections available. It empowers users in giving them the choice. It also helps Debian to be fully runnable on some hardware (thinking of proprietary wireless drivers for example). In my opinion, it helps to fulfill the Debian base line: "The universal OS".

On the technical side, I really appreciate the way packaging is done and the quality requirements before any stable release, which brings confidence when upgrading.

Times passing, I was more and more confident about my Debian's skills and started to dig into packaging. Most of the time, it was related to backporting new versions of softwares we used internaly. Example are: zabbix, redis, and more recently trafficserver. Some time later I realised that I should contribute to the project with theses changes, instead of maintaining them in my own corner. I therefore started to offer some packaging improvements for trafficserver. Next step was to offer new trafficserver version packaging, trying to take all modifications into account.

Everytime I could, I also tried to fix build issues while forwarding patches to upstream.

In the meantime, I started packaging two Python modules we used at work, one of which I'm the author. I then became Debian Maintainer to be able to manage package release for my Python modules. I also learned to work in the Debian Python Team. It's still a work in progress though, I can't say I perfectly know all the rules.

Nowadays, I'm maintainer for python-vertica & python-protobix packages through the DPMT, and uploader for trafficserver. I try to advocate and support Debian, attending meetups in Paris as well as conferences like Fosdem. I'd like to fully integrate the Debian project to be more efficient, because being more autonomous, on my packaging work. And since I've much appreciated the advices I got from experienced Debian Developers to help me achieve good quality packaging, I'd also like to be able to mentor people and help them in their journey through Debian. Of course, that might be in the future, when I feel enough legitimate for the responsibility.

Outside of the Debian project, I also support some projects like Tor or La Quadrature de Net, a french non-profit association that defends rights & freedom of citizens on the Internet.