 So this talk is not really about any particular technology in Debian. It's actually a talk about how Debian changed my life, which seems like something that people here might be interested in. So I'm here to tell my story. Thanks for coming. So I'm going to start from the beginning. I was born here in Scarborough, Ontario. On a street that looked like this. Yay, Canada. It was kind of like the suburbs of Toronto. You could walk down my street and you'd look out over the Scarborough Bluffs. And it looked like this. You know, snow for about eight months of the year, but otherwise incredibly beautiful. But I didn't actually stay in Canada that long. So when I was about three and a half years old, my family moved to upstate New York because my dad, he got a better job. And I think he was kind of like always interested and like excited about the American dream, basically. He wanted to move to the U.S. to, you know, be an American. So, you know, when I was three and a half, we moved to this house in Camillus, New York, which is a suburb of Syracuse, New York. And it's generally an incredibly boring little suburban town. So I grew up being a pretty nerdy kid. And I also spent a lot of time at this place I'd like to call the farm, which was actually in Canada. My grandma lived here. And I would run around on the farm and do lots of farm things and generally be kind of like a dirty, you know, farm kid, getting dirty in the mud. And I was also a huge nerd, so I like read a ton of books. A voracious reader when I was really young. And this is the middle school that I went to. It was in a corn field. Extremely, extremely interesting. But I was also actually pretty active little kid. I like to run a lot. I actually ran cross country, which is like trail running in middle school. And also I ran track and field. This must not have been a good day. This is the high school I went to. And in high school I also, I was also like a music geek. And I played the French horn for 10 years. So growing up, like this was a huge creative outlet for me. I was like in the band. And I also played trumpet in the jazz band. And then in high school I actually gave up cross country in order to do this. So my high school, I had a pretty well known high school marching band. So if you're not familiar with marching bands, this is a particular kind of marching band. It's not like parade band. We didn't march in parades. But what we did do was we had this like eight minute choreographed show that we would do on football fields. So we would play it like the halftime game football games. And then there was also like this competition circuit. And this is actually kind of like the state finals at the Syracuse Dome. And the show this year was based on this prog rock band called Yes. So we would like, you know, make these like formations and walk around and play music. And it was really fun. But during this whole time, while I was like growing up in a cornfield and playing music and reading books, eventually I discovered computers. And I guess this was about mostly around middle school, I would say. So I got into computers through games. And I have like really vivid. And one of the things that I found in games was escape. So the town that I grew up in was super boring. And I kind of like looked to computers for adventure. So I really liked games that gave me the ability to kind of like explore new worlds and didn't necessarily have like linear storylines. But like this is a Wing Commander Privateer which I loved. And one of the things I really liked about it was that you didn't have to follow the storyline if you didn't want to. You could just like go around and like run missions and make a lot of money and like upgrade your ship. And you could do the story if you wanted, but you didn't have to. So my game experience was really driven by this desire to like explore new worlds and control my own experience. And this is my room in probably about seventh grade. I had this like compact desktop machine that I think we got at some like PC. What was it like big box store that was popular in the early 2000s? Circuit City? Yeah, I think it was from Circuit City. And you can actually see that I'm running Windows XP on this. So this is before the W&Ds. And I was also like a huge soccer player. You can see my like soccer team photos. And I hate to admit this, but I also had this obsession with horses. Which you might notice from the decor. So back to gaming. My gaming experience, which I said was driven by this like desire for exploration eventually led me to get involved in these online text-based games called Mud's. And in particular, I was like, it was one day in like ninth or tenth grade after Marching Man had ended. And Marching Man takes up a lot of time. So I had practices basically like three days a week for like three hours at a time, plus weekend competitions. So when Marching Man let out, like my life was empty. And like I had nothing to do except for school and surf the internet. So he was like, he was like, so you actually just like fare a bit terminal and log into the mud server via telnet. And so this is like the login screen for Shadows of Isseldure, which was this mud that I got into. And it was a particular kind of mud in that it was what's called like a role-playing intensive mud. So like people would form these characters and put a lot of story into them. This is a character that I played in this mud for like three years. And people would put a lot of effort into like painting the stories behind their characters. So I had like text files and text files that are like my character's life story and like a description of her. Like important events in her life, people she knew that I could like reference that when I was playing in the game and make sure that I was staying in character. And I think this character was very much a representation of like my like want for adventure and like kind of like being the good kid at school and not wanting to be the good kid online. So like I played this character at this like kind of sorted past and kind of got up to no good and got into some trouble. But I got so into this game that I actually started helping run it and then this was my administrator kind of like persona on the game. She was a Norse god. My family is Norwegian by the way. This was also a major part of my upbringing. So I had this like alter ego kind of at school where people would call me Viking. And like I would use this as an excuse to like do silly things where people would think I was tough. But how this came out online was my administrator persona. And one of the things that administrators could do in the game was like you could build your own like personal room. So like when I logged into the game I would spawn in this room, the great Hall of Ahala. And like you would build these rooms and like you could make objects. So like there were facilities in the game for you just to like, you know, write the descriptions for all these objects and then like the purpose of the administrators on the game was actually to like run plots and kind of like keep the story going because this particular game was incredibly story driven and you know it was a text based game. So that's kind of all that you had. And actually like on this game if you died, if your character died, your character was dead. So this gave an incredible amount of weight to kind of actions and lines that were going on in the story. But this was kind of like the first, the first time I actually like found people that I really connected with and I made like really good friends with some of the other people that ran this game. Though they like lived, you know, across the country. There was this one guy who lived in Missouri that I really took to you and like he was about the same age as me and like most of the other administrators were older. So like, you know, we talked about life and like I got into like punk rock and got to like talk to this guy and I think that having this outlet for like weirdos and nerds was a really huge part in me like feeling uncomfortable enough in my own skin to like make friends in real life, such as these. So I went on this program when I was 15 where I went to the Bay Area for like a week and was doing like science nerd things and I actually was like so into this game that I met up with the person who wrote it while I was on this trip. I didn't tell my parents by the way. Meeting people from the internet. I'm 15 years old. But he's actually like totally cool, nice guy and like probably thought I was totally crazy little fan kid. But he was going to like the University of Santa Clara at the time, was sitting to be a lawyer and I actually think that meeting this guy in real life kind of like shattered my like mythos of the creator of this game a little bit. But he lives in Seattle now and I have like an open invitation to like grab beers with him so it's cool. And I also made friends in real life and I kind of found all the weirdos at my school. After having been able to like figure out how to express myself via meeting people online and the friends that I made at school we did crazy things like dressed up as the Spanish Inquisition for Halloween and we would like go to all the different classrooms at my high school and like burst into the classroom. I was really into running this game but it turns out if you... The game was... I wanted to like be my involvement in my brother to help me install Debian on that compact machine that I saw you saw in the previous slide. And at the time, installed Debian Sarge was testing at the time I think. There's just 2000... 2004 probably. And that was kind of a pivotal moment for me. I started just like running Debian all the time. I've never run any Linux distro other than Debian. And it turns out that I'm like incredibly enthusiastic about things and curious and I couldn't really keep my hands off of Debian in that like I was curious about how it worked. Like it's a pretty strange thing. Like there's a thousand people all around the world that like somehow managed to create this like software that will run my computer. That's pretty amazing. And so I was curious as like 15 years old and you know I wanted to learn more. And so like I started kind of like lurking around like subscribed to probably DebianDeVal and started reading Planet Debian and one day I was reading Planet Debian and this blog post was on Planet Debian. It's a blog post written by Hannah Wallach who I bet a bunch of you know. And right around this time was a time when Debian was really interested in increasing its diversity and this organization had popped up called Debian Women which was founded by Hannah and Erin Clark and a few other people. And so Hannah wrote this blog post talking about Debian Women on Planet Debian. And when I read this blog post I was like holy shit these people want me to like contribute. So that pretty much changed my life. Like I started getting on IRC and I met a bunch of these people on IRC and kind of started like funneling my energy away from the game and into Debian. So this is like two days after I read that blog post I wrote my own. Like I had this blog that I was running on a subdomain of MiddleEarth.us which was the game site because you know I was 15 years old and didn't have a server. So that was like the way I had a publishing platform on the web and I had this WordPress blog. And I was like really excited. So I wrote this response blog post which describes in my own words at the time like how I felt. So I like started learning to package and I started learning Python and Christian Perrier who's another Debian developer kind of like took me under his wing and like I helped out with the shadow team which you know packages some kind of important utilities and that made me feel really important. And everyone was just like super friendly and encouraging and I wanted to stay. So I did. So this is me wearing a Debian women t-shirt that I had to like awkwardly ask my mother for money to buy because like I think it was like Steve McIntyre that had been the person who instigated Debian women t-shirts and he lived in the UK and like I was in upstate New York and like had to like pay him dollars so he could send me a t-shirt and my mother was just like I don't know whatever sure you can have some money. What are you doing? But I was hooked and I was 16 years old. So this is actually a quote from my college applications which describes what happened after that. In my college applications I pretty much I talked about two things. One was marching band and two was Debian. So I didn't really before that I hadn't really decided on like what I wanted to do going forward. I kind of always had this sense growing up that I was going to be an engineer. I came from a family of engineers but like that's a very broad thing like engineering like I could have decided to be a mechanical engineer or a chemical engineer but I'm like damn no this software stuff stuff is changing the world. This is cool. It's fun. So that really changed the way I was thinking about where I was going. And this is Hannah Wallach and at the time I was applying for colleges I had like via like my involvement in free software and Debian I kind of developed this like college crush on MIT but I was like too shy to like I was like too unconfident I guess to like apply there until like this one day I was talking to Hannah Wallach on IRC and we were like you know private messaging each other and I was talking about college applications and I was like I really kind of want to apply to MIT but I don't know and she was just like super enthusiastic and I was like you should totally apply to MIT and so I did but I didn't tell anyone. I really didn't tell anyone. I told my parents but I didn't tell anyone at school because this other like smart kid at my school had applied to Harvard and like every day all the other kids would see him and be like did you get into Harvard yet? Did you get into Harvard yet? And like I just didn't want to get harassed about it so I didn't tell anybody. But I got in. It was like I never expected that to happen and it was incredibly exciting like from the minute I got my acceptance letter which actually had like a handwritten note on it from the admissions officer talking about I had basically waxed about like free software and having hacking in my essays and like the admissions person like wrote on my acceptance letter that he thought that I would really fit in at MIT because of like my interest in like free software and open source and I kind of like agriculture. So I was sold. And so I visited MIT in April of 2006. They have this like preview weekend where you know prospective students come and check out the campus and they like put you up with a current student and so I did that and I was staying on in this dorm called East Campus and it looks like this. There's actually a photo from my visit and visiting MIT kind of blew my mind. Like here's like a bunch of nerds like sitting around in this like super like kind of grungy dorm with like computers and like soldering equipment and like they did some crazy things over there like we're doing this thing where we like put ping pong balls in a microwave that was a science microwave not for food use and they caught on fire and like they were like throwing old LCD monitors off the roof and like it was just crazy. I don't know. It kind of blew my mind and I was totally sold. I was like these are my people I'm coming here. And during this trip I also like I had come a day early because I was taking the train from upstate New York to Boston and that meant that like I got there like the day before I actually had a host on campus. So of course I emailed Debbie and Boston Social and I was like I need a place to stay on like Wednesday night and Benjamin Macohill responded to that email and offered me to crash on his couch and his house is called the Ascitarium. So I stayed at the Ascitarium and this is my stuff on the floor the Ascitarium version 1.0 and they like threw a party for me. It was amazing. At least I assumed the party was for me. It might have just been a party. And yeah so like I had started just like meeting people from the internet in real life which I didn't tell my parents about but on this trip another amazing thing happened which was because I was staying with Macohill he gave me the tour of the MIT Media Lab which was where he worked at the time and on that tour I met this guy who was like working in a lab and that guy just happened to be looking for like a source to like employ for the summer and so like I go home and get an email from this guy who's like do you want a job? Because like Macohill had introduced me as like this like Debian hacker and so he's like wow awesome like high schooler who is probably unemployed and I need some help. So despite the fact that they weren't going to pay me very much and I was going to be like living alone in an inexpensive city and I said yes because I really wanted to get out of my town. So I pretty much went from this which was a Saturday in June of 2006 and on Monday it was this. On Sunday the day after I graduated my dad drove me to Cambridge, Massachusetts in the family minivan and all of my stuff in my new Cambridge apartment and drove off. He left me there that same day. So luckily I knew some people in Cambridge already and Macohill and his partner Mika basically adopted me for that summer. So because I didn't really know anyone I didn't know any students like all the other students my year weren't there yet and I pretty much spent my entire time hanging out with Debian people that summer and Maco and Mika fed me lots of delicious vegetarian food because I had never cooked before in my life and that was my social group. We did things like road bicycles and they were kind enough to introduce me to some actual MIT students. They're some in the middle of this picture. And the summer went on. At the end of the summer I actually moved into MIT. This is East Campus which is the place where I lived my first year. East Campus would do this thing where they would build these giant crazy contraptions and this was the thing that they were calling Jesus the ride which ended up being a giant cross that had this counterweight on it and like strap people to it and like put them on the ground and then like launch them and like you would like go like up up up up up up up up up up until like your nose was like two feet from the ground and then the counterweight was like carefully calibrated to make sure that you would just like go back. So I was pretty sold on this as a place to live. Safety first, right? And eventually I ended up moving into this kind of crazy co-op campus and broadening my skill set in hacking such as in building bicycles, building crazy contraptions in the basement. Yeah, this is a giant Tesla coil. Actually, my involvement in this project was this. I was honestly quite terrified that we were going to like blow up the entire house. Also got some crazy shenanigans with fire. Might have been involved in putting some things on rooftops, different kind of MIT hacking and you know like hacking on computers and generally my experience at MIT can be summed up in this picture. It's a very kind of like love hate place. It's super intense and I would definitely do it again but like I'm glad there's been four years. It might have taken me two years to say that I would do it again and this is another picture of how I experienced MIT. No, this is a room but it's just like a sad selfie. Might have been during some period of crushing depression, impending exams or something. But while this stuff was happening at MIT I was also still involved in Debian. I actually spent two summers like traveling around Europe and I went to DevConf 7 with my own money that I had earned with jobs that I had gotten via Debian actually. Like I worked at the on-campus like help desk so like answering like Unix help questions like helping people with computers and I also got this job at this company called Best Practical which makes this thing called RT. And the way I got this job was like the owner of this company had like heard of me and like my like Debian cred and like tracked me down and was like, do you want a job? And of course I said yes and he was so awesome to let me like run around and go to Europe during the summers while I was working for him. And this is more Debian 7. Scotland is full of castles and David Nuceno is apparently eyeing the camera. I kept going to Debian 9. And this is the t-shirt that Best Practical gave me. A very apt t-shirt. And this is me at Guarek in 2008 in Gran Canaria. And MIT, I also got involved in the student group that was called the Student Information Processing Board which is basically the computer club at MIT except for it's so old that they didn't call computing computing when it was started. It was actually like started to like manage the time sharing on like this Multic server. And this organization is full of tons of hackers so obviously like I was drawn to it because of my experience in Debian and this student group did a lot of really cool things like they revamped the entire kind of like campus Linux distro while I was there to be based on Debian actually and it still is to this day. And my favorite class that I took at MIT was the Operating Systems class which kind of changed my life in that I decided that I wanted to like do operating systems research and I was like very close to going to grad school at MIT and doing a masters with a parallel and distributed operating systems group except for my spring of senior year I had been sponsoring packages for this guy, Tim Abbott who's a friend of mine from SIPI he was like doing a whole bunch of work on some like math software for that he was trying to upload to Debian I was sponsoring his stuff and he just started this company called Case Place and so like this one time he emailed me asking for a sponsorship to upload a package and was also like hey we're looking for interns for IAP which is like this January term at MIT like do you want a job? So I started working for Case Place before I finished at MIT still intending to go to grad school but it turned out that at the end of my senior year they just gave me a full-time offer and I was like I don't really want to go to grad school I'd rather get a job where they pay me so I started working for this company called Case Place which developed this technology that was basically a kernel module for Linux that would allow you to like take a patch to the Linux kernel and you do this like binary differencing so that you could then like load the change card into memory and change your running kernel without having to restart it which was pretty novel at the time and I never interviewed for this job it was just like I sponsored my friends Debian packages and like they knew me from SIPI and I demonstrated via my internship there that I was like a good person to work with I ended up working there for like three years the company was eventually sold to Oracle and that was a learning experience so at the end of like a year and a half at Oracle I had kind of decided that I was going to leave eventually and it was trying to figure out what I wanted to do afterwards and decided that I was also going to leave Boston and this was like a big thing for me at the time because I had been living in Boston for seven years and it had been like the only place that I'd ever really lived as like an adult I was like I moved from up to New York to Boston and I stayed there so like as a part of my process for like leaving Boston I had this whiteboard wall in my room and I like went through and just like listed all the things that I was going to miss including like incredibly things that only you miss kind of like in a nostalgic way like the potholes and like the snow and terrible weather and you know how sweaty it gets in the summer there but you know I look back on all those things right now and I'm like damn I kind of miss it so I think writing everything down was you know it was a good way to kind of let go and move on but I ended up moving to the Bay Area to Oakland and the reason I moved to the Bay Area was to start this company with a friend of mine I've been talking to this friend for a long time I actually met him a sophomore here at MIT he was like a year behind me and he had been like trying to build stuff on top of email for his like undergraduate thesis so like you know we often like take email and try to do things on top of it like you know run a bug tracking system not that I know anyone here that has done that and kind of found that he spent like all of his time just like trying to work with email and so he decided that like someone had to like make the kind of like bottom level tools better before we could like write anything interesting that actually uses email so I was pretty sold on the idea and I excited about working with him so I moved to the Bay Area and this is us back at MIT in last fall I guess pulling an extremely ill advised all nighter before he was giving a talk this was actually in one of the Athena clusters at MIT and like we had gone to like the campus convenience store and bought a bunch of snacks and like I'm never doing this ever again but it was a thing at the time and the talk was fine except probably would have been better if we had slept and this is like a little bit of an excerpt from our website and this is an example of things that you can do with Inbox which is this company that I started we actually the way that we've been going about the company has also been really influenced by my experience in Debian like for example we released our code as AGPL which I wouldn't I would never even known that existed without my experience in Debian and free software so yeah this is an example of like using our API we kind of like provide this like higher level API for interacting with email that like gives you threads across all providers not just Gmail like allows you to easily mark things as red and archive and this is like tag spaced API and we do that across all providers like you know even your Dovcott installation so we're kind of trying to evolve email from the inside out by like making something that's compatible with what we already have and I'm pretty excited about where that's going but the main reason I wanted to give this talk was to say thank you because I wouldn't be who I am without the amazing community that is Debian so thanks for doing what you do