Hello World,

Recently, 5 NMs made it to Debian Developer. These are:

Laurent Bigonville
Gregory Colpart
Timo Jyrinki
Adriaan Peeters
Sonnenburg Soeren

Laurent:
--------
My name is Laurent Bigonville, I'm 25 years old and I live in
Brussels, Belgium. I've started using Debian and GNU/Linux in
2002 when I entered at the university and made my first package
(acr38) for Debian in 2006. I'm currently working with the
telepathy team (IM framework over D-Bus). I also maintain
several other packages. About working on other packages, I've
helped in the split of the pidgin package (this was needed for a
telepathy package) and made some small patches. I'm also trying
to forward ubuntu patches and bugs to the debian BTS. I'm an
ubuntu MOTU since fall 2007.
As a DD I would continue my work on packaging software (mostly
telepathy related) and help to make Debian and derivatives rock.

Gregory:
--------
I'm 26 years old french engineer, living in Marseille (South of
France) with my girlfriend and our 4 children. I was studying in
ECM (Ecole Centrale Marseille) in mathematics and computer
science. Now I am working for 4 years as manager and system
administrator in Evolix, a french "free software startup".

I discovered computers with playing on Amstrad CPC 6128 about 20
years ago. I remember I wrote few lines in BASIC language but not
really more. And I discovered Internet with a two-months-free (as
free beer ;) offer of Compuserve ISP and modem 14.400 bd about
15 years ago. But my principal use was online chat with people
around the world in Compuserver channels :-)
My real experience with computers began in 2000 when I bought my
own computer. I tried to use Microsoft Windows 98 but quickly I
installed also Mandrake 7.2 to have similar environment I had in
the computers of my school. I was very enthusiastic with Linux
and I spent a lot of my time to install/test/remove softwares, to
test exotic hardware (graphic cards, USB modems...). But I felt
me limited by Mandrake and particularly in packages management
and somebody encouraged me to switch to Debian. It was in 2002
(just before Woody was stable) and then I install it (and I still
use it, as you can see output of 'ls -l /var/log/uucp.log' command:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2002-05-30 02:11 /var/log/uucp.log).
It was so fun because my screen had identical appearance I had in
the computers of my school (the famous blue wallpaper by default
in KDE 2.2) and my system is ready for C programming. Other
students wanted too this fabulous operating system and I helped
installing Woody on some computers with various hardware. I had
few problems with drivers or with proprietary scientific
softwares and I became aware of the importance of concepts of
free software. After playing with some desktops tasks (testing
several window managers, multimedia softwares, etcetera) I learnt
sysadmin tasks. I set up my own Debian gateway (PPPoE connexion,
Iptables, Squid, IPv6) and my own server with mail services
(SMTP, POP(S)/IMAP(S), webmail), files services (NFS, Samba), web
services (HTTP, (My|Postgre)SQL, PHP) and other tools. I like
a lot syadmin work and then, in 2004, I created a startup with
two friends to offer free software services (particularly
Debian support) and I installed several dozen Debian servers for
various structures. Naturally I became interested to social and
devel sides of Debian: reading devel mailing lists, learning how
packaging, helping with french translation, meeting DD.
I sent my first ITP in december 2005 for horde-sam package.
Because I use Horde webmail on my mail servers, I take part of
pkg-horde alioth team and I co-maintain now some horde packages
(chora2, gollem, horde-sam, horde3, ingo1, kronolith2, mnemo2,
nag2, sork-forwards-h3, sork-vacation-h3 and turba2). I maintain
also some PHP PEAR packages (php-auth, php-file, php-date and
soon php-log) and a tool to set up easily PPPoE connection:
pppoeconf (now in collab-maint team). Like a good debian user,
I try to report all bugs that I found and joining a patch.
Note that I maintain a summary about my Debian work on the wiki:
http://wiki.debian.org/GregoryColpart

Timo:
-----
I started using GNU/Linux by installing SuSE Linux 5.3 in 1997. It
took over 7 years from there to get rid of non-libre software
(especially operating system). My real interest in Debian came only
after switching from SuSE to Ubuntu at home in October 2004. Some time
after that, I started using Debian testing at my work, hastily visited
Debconf05, got more interested and started keeping Ubuntu+Debian
dual-boot also at home. I want to volunteer my time since it's fun,
and since I've gotten all the tools I have needed at home, at work and
at M.Sc. studies (before I graduated) from the free software
community.

I've contributed to Debian mainly by maintaining the five packages
related to high quality free software Finnish spellchecking and
hyphenation software [1]. I've also had them included in the Finnish
tasksel task, though unfortunately the change didn't make it to etch.
In addition to some Finnish language issues, I have also tested+closed
a few random bugs in various applications of my interest over the
time. All in all, maintaining the packages has been clearly the
biggest effort so far.

In addition to directly contributing to Debian, as a founder of Ubuntu
Finland [2] I've tried to bring Debian forth from the beginning. Among
else, "contributing" section's (on the "Ohjeita" page) one link out of
three is to Debian, together with a link to my blog article about
Debian and especially how to contribute to Debian. I hope that they
help to bring the Finnish-speaking people most interested in
contributing also to the Debian community.

My primary interests and goals in Debian include improving
localization, out-of-the-box desktop usability, benefiting from and
co-operating with Ubuntu and lessening the people's urge to install
non-free software by helping if possible with testing of gnash, X.org
video drivers (I've managed to fix a bug or two in ati drm/ddx),
Xiph.org stuff et cetera.

In general I also hope that Debian will become easier to access, and
more friendly as perceived by any new people trying to get to know to
either Debian people or Debian project. I guess it includes improving
the web site, then, and maybe supporting the idea of establishing
"code of conduct" to eg. mailing lists or the project in general.

[1] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=timo.jyrinki@iki.fi
[2] http://www.ubuntu-fi.org/

Adriaan:
--------
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Ghent University, Belgium. I
started working with GNU/Linux back in early 1999 while I was working
at a Belgian ISP. The first Debian release I used was potato and my
first bug report dates back from March 2001.

I became active as a Debian contributor a while later with my first
patch (a one line documentation patch) in December 2002. From that
moment on I assigned more time to the Debian project and did some more
qa work (wmtime man page, ipv6 patch for offlineimap and other small
but annoying documentation bugs).

My first Debian package (dnstop) was accepted in Debian in April 2003
and I currently maintain 6 sponsored packages ranging from console
applications to gnome applets.

I want to become a Debian Developer to be able to do the packaging I
do currently more easily and to help other Debian contributors with
sponsorship through debian-mentors. I see a lot of effort in packaging
is lost due to a lack of manpower.

Furthermore I want to help the utnubu team to bring patches from
Debian derived distributions back to Debian. I believe the Open Source
/ Free Software community can only benefit from better collaboration.

Finally I want to dedicate some time to find and resolve small but
annoying documentation bugs or missing links, like I did before
applying to become a DD.

Soeren:
-------
I have a long term computer history. It all started now already more
than 15 years ago. Around 1995/96 -- being an ex amiga user -- I met
frank ronneburg (who wrote the german debian user guide
http://debiananwenderhandbuch.de/ ) who basically talked me into trying
linux and I suddenly became a volunteer at the 3rd linux congress in
berlin (linux 2.0 was just available as a pre-release). I then studied
computer science at the humboldt university in berlin. Only around when
I finished I started to exclusively use Debian GNU/linux (potato or
woody at that time). Since then I am tracking sid reporting bugs I
stumble across (via bugreports@nn7.de - not debian limited). I then
became a phd student at the fraunhofer institute first (homepage
http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/~sonne ) and there took care of the 20-50
linux machines of our group for two years. In this process I converted
the whole group to using debian/linux and became familiar with the
standard unix tools. As the work I do at fraunhofer is focused around
machine learning ( cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning )
my mission is to make open source software for machine learners -- both
in using and producing -- more attractive. To this end I co-organized a
workshop on machine learning open source software (MLOSS) at NIPS (one
of the biggest machine learning conferences
http://mloss.org/workshop/nips06/) and am co-leading a inititiative to
make MLOSS publishable
http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/v8/sonnenburg07a.html . I also helped
setting up http://mloss.org (not yet publicly announced) as a community
portal for MLOSS. To put it short, my goal is to get all the good MLOSS
into debian (and there is already some: lush, libsvm, torch,...). My
hope is that this way we will have much improved spam filters, ocr,
image segmentation etc etc applications in the near future.

As the main author of the shogun machine learning toolbox
(http://www.shogun-toolbox.org) I am involved in relatively big OSS
project. I also wrote a small gnome applet (cpufire-applet). I have been
working with my sponsor Torsten Werner and otherwise quite busy doing
actual research in bioinformatics. Otherwise googling for Soeren
Sonnenburg has the full details and should bring up like 25 pages of
hits with all the things I am doing.

I like debian, as its strength is the clean upgrade path (early and
clean FHS implementation); the fine tuned separation into many small /
independent packages limits risks of breaking unrelated packages
often a problem with other linux distributions.

Most importantly it is volunteer + community (bottom-up) driven. This
IMHO makes it relatively independent of certain issues appearing in
top-down organized projects. For example I consider debian's "when it’s
ready" principle, as well as not using the latest but the greatest
(stability over features) approach a big big advantage. However I think
communication ``why it is not yet ready'' could be improved a lot (by
some status page listing the criticial things that block next release
with some kind of estimated target date based on the number of current
bugs...

Apart from bug-reports I contribute to debian by maintaining a number of
packages (cvxopt, dsdp, shogun - all machine learning related and I hope
there will be more of this kind here) and cpufire-applet.

Please join me in welcoming all these new and enthousiastic contributors
to the project.

Thanks,

--
Wouter Verhelst, on behalf of the NM Frontdesk

Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22

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