Mike Miller

I have worked with free software for about 15 years, through most of my education and professional career. I turned to free software as I learned more about computers and started to realize that commercial software would only allow me to get me so far. I had first heard of Debian in the mid-1990s, and finally had the time and resources to give it a try in 2001. Since then it has been my primary OS for home use, and for many years I had wanted to get more involved in some way. I wanted to contribute to Debian, both to help improve it in what ways I could and to try to learn something along the way. In 2010 I started working with bug reports and patches and began learning how packages are put together. In 2012 I started taking over maintenance of several packages and became a Debian Maintainer.

My main contributions to Debian so far have been in packaging, starting with the openconnect and network-manager-openconnect packages. I needed to be able to connect to my company’s VPN, the openconnect maintainer at the time needed help, so I offered to adopt the packages. I've since worked on a few other packages that were up for adoption and that I had an interest in, such as cdargs, createrepo, and rlwrap. My education background is in electrical engineering as well as computer science, and so I have an interest in scientific and engineering software in Debian. I am a member of the Debian Octave Group, where I have contributed with patches and discussions on bug reports. I have also joined the Debian Science Team, where I have yet to contribute, but I hope to find ways to help out with bugs and packaging in the future.