Steve Meliza

My first experience with Debian was when I purchased a boxed copy of 2.1, the one that came with a demo copy of Myth II in it. I was hooked immediately - on Debian, not the game. Apt was a breath of fresh air after having dealt with RPM dependency problems on Red Hat. Over the years since I have always had Debian running somewhere and it is now my go-to distribution whenever setting up a server or workstation.

I started to contribute to Debian in 2020 when a package that I was using was about to be removed from Testing due to a bug that the maintainer had not resolved in time. This lead me to making an NMU and I was again hooked - on contributing and helping make Debian just a little bit better. This has lead to me joining in on other packaging efforts to get new packages added to Debian or assume the maintainer role from some packages that were up for adoption. It gives me satisfaction to know that my packaging efforts are of benefit to others, especially when I can make a change to enable a feature or move to a newer version that gives others what they need to complete their work. The largest packaging effort that I have been involved with to date is swiftlang, the Swift language compiler. I am also eagerly looking forward to packaging the Ladybird browser, which will eventually need a Swift compiler.

My day job is an as electrical engineer in the battery powered embedded space. I make the hardware and I write the code for it. Writing code for 8-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers doesn't always scratch my itch for software so in my spare time I try to keep up to speed on the PC software side of things. Packaging helps with that a little as I have to learn to debug and resolve build errors and make adjustments to keep the resulting package in compliance with Debian Policy. Some day when I have more free time (I have young kids) I would like to be able to contribute more to Debian and upstream projects.