For nm.debian.org, at 2020-05-30:
I've been assigned Nicolas Mora (without a h, don't make the mistake, it'd
bother him :p) as an applicant by a magnificent FrontDesk member (#humbleness).
I've spent the last 14 days to exchange with him by email, and these exchanges
have been of great quality: Nicolas has good social skills, is really curious,
has a good understanding of the project, its philosophy, its procedures, and
has a clear technical skill regarding packaging, while still being eager to
take advice and ask questions when he doesn't understand a thing.
As he stated in his biography (pasted below), he's passionate and involved.
In a nutshell, Nicolas looks to me as a great person, who would have a great
added value to the project. So I agree with his advocate, he can and should be
a Debian Developer, uploading, right now.
Nicolas biography:
I live in Québec City, Canada. I was born in France and moved to Canada 9
years ago. I now work in the Assemblée Nationale du Québec (the Québec Province
Parliament for non French speakers).
.
I heard about GNU/Linux when I entered the University, in the late 90's. Out
of curiosity I dug a little deeper in this topic, and fell in love with the
open-source philosophy. At that time I tried most of the biggest Linux
distribs: Redhat, Mandrake, Slack, Debian, even *BSD. I stayed with Mandrake
for a few years. Now I use Ubuntu in my computers with a screen.
.
A few years after starting using Linux systems, I started self-hosting my
online services, such as e-mail, web and DNS, I installed a fresh Debian
Potatoe because I tried it once and found that the default configuration is
very useful, and it didn't come with mandatory huge window applications to
configure the system, which is what I'm looking for in a screenless system. I
never stopped using Debian in my servers since.
.
In parallel, I'm interested in lots of computer domains, hardware, software,
admin, design, etc. I embraced a Software engineering career but kept getting
interested in the other aspects.
.
I'm convinced that the C language is underrated. Most people talk about it as
difficult, with lots of pitfalls, very good for low-level programming but not
so good for common IT use. It was one of the first programming language I
learned at the University and I found it very beautiful, concise and clean.
.
A few years ago, I got interested in nano-computers like the Raspberry Pi, and
also the Arduino board. I loved their design and philosophy. I gave myself a
challenge: building a house automation system as a REST API service, in C
programming language only for the backend. My proof of concept worked, so I
kept going. My intuition that C is underrated was right!
.
One thing led to another, now I'm the upstream programmer of a set of libraries
and applications written in C. [1]
.
One day, Thorsten Alteholz contacted me to make minor changes in one of my
project, Glewlwyd, an OAuth2 SSO server, to make it compatible with the DFSG (I
forgot to include js libraries human-readable source files). We started to
exchange messages about my project and Debian and he convinced me to get
involved in the Debian Project to package software.
.
I wasn't hard to convince, and I decided to give it a try. I started by
packaging my own projects in Debian, because I know them so it was easier to
start with. I added a few other packages in my list, like libical or
libtomcrypt. I also entered the js-team to package javascript applications and
libraries. I prefer packaging softwares or libraries in a language I use and
I'm confortable with, in C or javascript, it's better to pinpoint problems. If
I have to package a program I don't use in a language I don't know, it would be
like robot-packaging: not interesting for me, and potentially boring for users
and packagers who would use my package.
.
Also, I was a mentor during the Google Summer of Code in 2018 for the Debian
project: "Design and implementation of a Debian SSO solution". Which was a
very cool experience!
.
So I intend to keep going that way with Debian, help improving the Debian
distribution with packages, helping users and developers, and getting involved
in other aspects of the Debian project if I can, like improving internal
projects, mentoring new maintainers when I feel ready for it.
.
[1] - https://github.com/babelouest
[2] - https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2018/projects/5454727449935872/
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peb |
2020-05-30 |
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