Theodore Tucker

Hi, I'm Theodore Tucker (tti0), a software engineer and STEM undergraduate from Manchester, UK, and a sponsored contributor to the Debian project starting in February 2026.

I have been a user of Debian since childhood, first being introduced to Wheezy and the FOSS community at school. Despite releasing many of my hobby coding projects (using embedded and web technologies) under open source licences, starting to write software as a job made me realise the importance of paying back to the larger projects at the core of FOSS ecosystems, especially so that they remain free for the hobbyists of the future.

My contributions to Debian so far have been around updating the buildstream package (a build integration tool used in the Freedesktop-SDK, Flatpak, GNOME and KDE communities) to the upstream-supported 2.x series. This required packaging two new dependencies, buildbox and python3-pyroaring, as well as an NMU to update a second-level dependency, croaring. I have enjoyed this work greatly, particularly taking responsibility for the initiation and ongoing quality of my work, having a few opportunities to fix bugs in dependencies and upstream, and learning to track the moving parts of Debian’s build and quality-assurance system.

While I am most grateful to the Debian Developers who have sponsored my uploads so far, I would like to apply to be a Debian Maintainer so that I do not burden them with the frequent uploads of my packages’ upstreams and to have a base on which to make my next contributions to Debian.