Thomas Vincent

I am a 30 years old research engineer in Nantes, France.

I started using GNU/Linux around 2005 at university during computer science classes. Shortly after that, I installed Ubuntu at home and the main reason for that was to work in the same environment, but the more I discovered about how it works and the free software philosophy, the more I liked it and the more I used it for everyday use. At the beginning of 2006, I used exclusively free software.

Then, in 2009, I spent one semester abroad and had to use an old laptop and it was a pain as Ubuntu had become too heavy for it. So I gave a try to Debian and it was a revelation, firstly because of how lightweight and stable it was/is, and then because of the social contract.

Time passed again and I started to feel indebted to the community and looked for a way to contribute with the little free time my PhD left me. During my search, I stubled upon the slides of a talk [1] given by bubulle and it convinced me to help with l10n work.

I joined the l10n-fr team in early 2011 and started to work on package descriptions and reviewed translators submissions to the ML. Soon enough I started to translate as well and as people got tired of uploading my translations, I created an account on Alioth and asked to join several teams in which I was until then remotely involved. This is how my Debian activities expanded to website pages (primarily security advisories), publicity (DPNs and announcements) and documentation (release notes), mainly for french l10n, but I also try to help editing and proofreading english documents. During DebConf13, besides making a lot of new friends, I did some volunteering in the video team which was a lot of fun (especially an epic talk when nothing went as expected) and I joined the subtitles team.

Needless to say, all of this has been a little more time consuming than what I was originally expecting but I was really rewarding and fun. So here am I, applying to become a non-uploading DD. :)

In the near future, I plan to continue my current tasks and invest more time in the subtitles team. My goal in this area would be to have a painless and fast workflow to transcript, sync and translate subtitles, which is not at all the case at the moment and discourages a lot of people. I would also like to discover some other parts of Debian, like QA or accessibility, but I am not yet sure as every area looks so interesting.

[1] : http://www.perrier.eu.org/debian/talks/foss-in-2007/contributing.pdf