This is a summary of the AM reports for week ending January 1st 2007.
2 applicants became maintainers.
Yaroslav Halchenko <yoh>
I have got my first exposure to GNU/Linux and Debian in particular as
soon as I came to the USA as an international student to work toward
my PhD in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. Barak
Pearlmuter became my PhD adviser. He was already a fan of Debian
project. While working toward my degree I got to learn GNU/Linux as an
active Debian user. You can get little bit more of specifics on my
persona from my resume which is available online
http://www.onerussian.com/resume.phtml
[...]
Besides that, I am trying to promote Debian GNU/Linux whenever I can
(LUGs, friends, coworkers).
I enjoy participating in the discussions on some Debian mailing lists
(debian-science is the one I actively monitor besides obvious -dev's)
As a DD I am planning at first to be a good Debian Packager, ie to
keep the packages I introduce to Debian bug-free and freshly upgraded to
upstream. Besides that I hope to continue to be a useful member of -dev,
-mentors mailing lists to raise interesting/important questions and
provide help to the 'seekers'. So as you have mentioned in your original
email - I am able to make a difference and I have done it already with
providing a few useful packages, relevant bug reports and
suggestions/solutions.
Nelson Antônio de Oliveira <naoliv>
My name is Nelson Antônio de Oliveira. On 99,9% of time I use
Nelson A. de Oliveira, because I think that my name is a little
big. I am a 22 years old male, from Brazil. On 27 of january I
have obtained my Bacherlor's degree in Computer Science and I will
start my Master's degree now on march. I still don't know exactly
the area that I will study (bioinformatics or AI and datamining).
I prefer bioinfo, since I worked with it for about 3 years.
The first time I've heard about GNU/Linux was when I was 16 years
old more or less. One friend of mine always talked about Linux. I
didn't know what was Linux, but I always liked what he said. One
day, when my family and I were travelling, I saw one CD for sale,
of Mandrake. I bought it!
I stayed months with that CD and with fear of installing it :-)
But I installed it after all. It was fantastic. I could listen to
music, play my CDs, surf on Internet, write documents and even run
Windows programs via Wine. That was really incredible for a
"difficult" system.
Time passed, I changed my dual Windows/Linux to just Linux and I
have entered on the university. Tha labs where I studied were
running Linux! I was feeling in home! :-)
When I was on my second year at the university, one researcher was
offering work on his lab. I went there to see on wich area. He
started talking about a lot of areas and when he said "Would you
like to work with Linux?" I opened a big smile and said "Sure!"
Basically, he was wanting some kind of personalized Linux to be
used for bioinformatics. He said that we would use Red Hat,
because "Red Hat is the most used on the scientific community." (I
have to say that I don't like RH).
I started to play with RH, but it wasn't OK... After some research
about Linux distros, I saw Debian. "Let's try it, why not?" After
downloading the first CD of Woody, installing and dist-upgrading
to unstable, I saw that I was with the perfect system. It was easy
to use Debian! Since this day, I use Debian on my computer, my
work machines, my friends machines, some Linux Install Fests that
I participated and everywhere else that I can say "Use Debian."
When doing this project that I said (about bioinformatics),
Andreas Tille sent me an email, saying basically "I saw that you
are creating some packages that could be usefull. Why not include
them on Debian? We all will benefit with this."
Do you know what I saw when Andreas sent me this email? "It's my
chance to give something back to the community." I use superb
programs here, with excellent quality, and I didn't need to pay
for them. Someone, from some place from Earth, used his free time
to make a program that I use. He didn't ask me "Give me money and
I will program it". He did it because he likes it! We can say that
he is helping everybody that uses his program. If I use programs
that were made like this, the minimum that I can make is to give
some help back to the comunnity, right?
This is the answer of why do I want to volunteer my time. Because
I want to help the free software grow! I want to "pay" for what I
have received for all those years. I want to help. That is it. (I
don't know if I was clear at trying to explain).
For Debian I am maintaing 9 packages (1 on non-free). Basically, I
want to keep maintaing these packages and include more, as I see
that they are usefull. I plan to keep helping on debian-med, a
CDD, togheter with Andreas Tille. QA is another area that I like
and I have interests. Helping users is another good area that I
have interests. On the other areas, I will do my best and try to
help where I can help, making Debian even better, sure.
--
Mohammed Adnène Trojette
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