I am chemical engineer as background and I work at the intersection between IT and process engineering; and making use of a lot of open source tech while at it. That’s where most of the urge to give back comes. The other motivation is to get in touch with skilled people and learn.
I watch all Debian packages we use at work (such as python-bottle, buildbot, ansible, psycopg2, getfem++, doxygen …) and try to help the maintainer keep the link up with upstream.
My Debian contributions started with packaging numdiff (a niche diffing tool for people who do QC of numerical libraries) and triaging bugs for doxygen.
Next I got involved in pkg-javascript-devel and started packaging node-* stuff. Of course I have no interest in all those tiny packages as such, but my mid-term goal is to get them in so that we can have the actual useful stuff in the archive, such as etherpad, yarn and buildbot 0.9. The JavaScript ecosystem is a mess, but it’s in the process of settling; and these are either development tools or server-side components that really should be shipped by a distribution such as Debian.
I am chemical engineer as background and I work at the intersection between IT and process engineering; and making use of a lot… Expand