Mohammed Bilal

Hello, I'm a 21-year-old free software enthusiast from India. I became interested in GNU/Linux after attending my first-ever hackathon, where I was inspired by seeing people randomly entering commands into the terminal. I was also a fan of the web series 'Mr. Robot.' These two things motivated me to try out a GNU/Linux system. So, the first thing I did when I got my own laptop was to install Ubuntu. Then I switched flavors and moved to KDE, and later I tried different window managers. It's been a wonderful learning experience ever since.

Then, I happened to attend DebConf 21, where I got to know more about Debian and the values it upholds. I attended a packaging workshop conducted by Pirate Praveen (DD), and shortly after, I packaged the simplest node module I could find and filed an ITP without knowing that it doesn't make sense to package a single file with a few lines of code. It was rejected right away, and later Praveen helped me start packaging actually needed software in Debian, sponsoring most of my initial packages.

Since then, I have contributed to many ruby teams, and I have also helped in backporting three security patches for Puma to the stable release. I was inspired by the effort that the community and developers put in maintaining an entire OS voluntarily. I would also like to uphold this principle and volunteer for the Debian Community.