Utkarsh Gupta

Hi,

I am Utkarsh, a 19 y/o undergraduate student, pursuing Computer Science and Engineering.

I started using Debian (and it's other derivatives) a few years back and I simply loved the freedom it gave me. I did a lot of system poking and ultimately started chaos engineering :) After learning a lot more about the Linux systems (and in particular Debian), I wanted to know how "apt" worked and what software packaging is; and was also curious to set up my own repository like apt (but didn't know how, back then).

Seeing this, Raju (a long tine Debian contributor and a soon-to-be DD) reached out to me and helped in learning Debian packaging (there were other reasons as well which I talked about in my DebConf19 talk). And soon enough, I learned the importance of free software and how it all started! And shortly after, I became a Aaron Swartz fan (after getting inspired by his work). And all of this aligned with the Debian philosophy as well. And that is when, Debian became my new favorite! And of course, the wonderful family it is; this DebConf, I fell in love with Debian over again :)

About my Debian work: TL;DR: I have worked on around 300 packages so far, organized a couple of MiniDebConfs, was a part of different teams in DebConf19, spoke about Debian in many conferences, and gave packaging workshops in India. I'm mostly a part of Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, Golang, and Python teams. Helping in packaging, tooling, and other things.