this talk is not really about any particular technology
in debian
its actually a talk about how debian changed my life
which seems something that people here maybe intereste in
so im here to tell my story, thanks for coming
so im gonna start from the begining i was born here in
scarborough on an street that looks like this
yay canada
its canada like the suburbs from totonto you could walk down
my street and you look over the ??
and looked like this
you know snow for about 8 months of the year
but otherwise incredible beautiful
but i didnt actually stayed in canada for that long
so when i was for a about 3 years old and
my family moved to upstate new york, because my dad
got a better job, and i think he was kinda always interested about
the american dream basically, he wanted to move to the us
you know, being american, so, when i was 3 and a half,
we moved to this house
in ?? new york, which is a suburb ??
and its generally and incredibly little boring suburnban town
so i grew up being a pretty nerdy kid and
i also spent a lot of time on this place i like to call the farm
which its actually in canada my granma lived here and
i runned around on the farm and doing lots of farm things and
generally being kinda a dirty, you know, farm kid
getting dirty on the mud and
i was also a huge nerd so i read a ton of books ??
that i readed when i was really young
so this is the high school i went to, it was in corn field
extremely extremely interesting
but i was also pretty active little kid
i liked to run a lot, i actually run cross country
which is like ?? in middle school
i also run track and field
this must had been not a good day
and this is highschool i went to, and in highschool i was also
like a music geek so 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, i also played trumbet on the jazz band
and in highschool i actually i gave up cross country in order to do this
so my highschool i had a pretty ?? highschool marching band
so if you are not familiar with marching band this is a particular
kind of marching band which is not like parade band, we didnt march on paredes
but we did do whats had likes 8 minutes coreographed show that we would do
on football fields, to play in like half time games and
whom football games and also this kind of competition circuit and
this is actually kinda of like state finals at the cicuit
and the show was based on this ?? called DS
so we are like make this 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 corn field
and play music and reading books, eventually i discovered computers
and i guess it was about mostly around middle school i would say
so i got into computer through games and i have like really vivid
??
and one of the things i found on games was scape
so town i grew up was super boring
i kinda looked into computers for adventure, so i really like games
that gave me hability to kinda explore worlds
and they didnt necesarely have like linear story lines
but like this is wind commander privateer which i loved and
one of the things i really liked about it is that you didnt have
to follow the story line if you didnt want to
you could just like go around and run missions and make a lot of money
and like upgrade your ship
and you could do the story if you wanted, but you didnt have to
so my gamming experience is really driven by this dessire to explore new worlds
and control my own experience
and this is my room in probably about 7th grade
i had this compact desktop machine that i think we got at somewhere like pc
it was like big bucks store that was popular in the early 2000
i think it was from circuit city
and you can actually see im running windows xp on it, so it is before
the debian days
and i was also like a huge soccer player, you can see like my soccer
team photos and i hate to admit this but i also had this obsession with horses
[laughts] which you might noticed from the decor
so, back to gaming, and my gamming experience which I said was driven by this
dessire of exploration, eventually let me to get involved in this
online text games called MUDS and in particular i was like one day
like 9 or 10 grade after marching band ended
and marching band took a lot of time so, i had practices basically
3 days a week for like 4 hours at the time, plus we had competitions
so marching band ??
my life was empty, like i have nothing to do except for school
and surf the internet, so it was like after
??
so you actually you ?? terminal
and log into the MUD server via telnet
and so this is like the login screen for shadows of isildur
which was this mud that i got into
and it was a particular kind of mud in that it was called
like role playing instensive mud, so people will form this characters
and put a lot of story into them
this is the character i played in this mud in like 3 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 love story and the description of her
and like important events on her life, people she knew that i could
reference that when i was playing in the game and make sure i was
staying in character and i think this character was very much
a representation of like my want for adventure and being the good kid at
school and not wanting to be the good kid online
but this character had this kind of sordid past and kinda was up to no good
got into some trouble, but i got so into this game that i actually
?? helping running
and this was my administrator kinda like persona on the game
she was a norse god, my family is norwegian by the way
this is also a major part of my upbringing so
i had this alter ego kinda ??
viking and like ??
so people would thought i was tough ??
skimo online administrator persona
one of the things administrators could do on the game is like you could
create your own personal room so when i logged into the game i spawn
into this room the great hall of valhalla
and like you would build this rooms and you could make objects
so there was facilities on the game that you ??
write the description of all these objects and
the porpurse of the administratos on the game was actually to run plots
and kind of keep the story going
because this particular game was incredibly story driven
and is a text based game, that is all that you had
and on this game if you died, if your character died
your character was dead
so this gives an incredible amount of wits to take actions and ??
going on the story. but this was the first time i found people that
i really connected with and i made really good friends with the other
people who runned this game and the lived across the country
there was this guy who lived in missury
??
he was about the same age as me and most of the other administrators
were older, so we talked about life and got into punkrock and talked
to this guy, and i think having this outlet for weirdos and nerds was
a really big part of me and feeling confortable on my skin on real life
such as this
so i went into this program when i was 15 where i were into the bay area ??
for a week, and doin science nerd things i was actually so into this game
that i met up with the person who wrote it ?? streets
i didnt tell my parents by the way
meeting people from the internet, im 15 years old
but hes actually a totally cool guy and he thought i was a totally
crazy little thing kid but hes going to the university of santa clara
at the time he was considering become a laywer and i think meeting
this guy in real life ?? mythos of the creator of this game
a little bit
he lives in seattle now and i have an open invitation to grab ??
sometimes with him so... thats all
i also made friends in real life and i found all the weirdos at my school
after figuering out how to be able to express myself by meeting people
online and the ?? animators at school, we did crazy things like
dressing up like the spanish inquisition for halloween and
going out to different classrooms in highschool im like
??
at the time, i was really into running this game, but it turns out if you
??
helped me to install debian on that compact machine that you saw
on the previous slide
at the time installed debian sarge, it was testing i thing, this was
2004 probably and was a pivotal moment for me i started like running debian
all the time, i haven ever run any linux distro other than debian
and it turns out im incredibly entuthiastics about things and
curious and i really couldnt keep my hands off debian
i was curious about how it worked. its a pretty strange thing
like a thousand people all around the world that managed to
create somehow this software that is able to run my computer
thats pretty amazing and so i was curious as a 15 years old i wanted to
learn more, so i guess i started lurking around, subscribed to probably
debian-devel started reading planet debian and one day i was reading
planet debian and this blogpost was on planet debian
this post was about hanna wallach who a bunch of you know
?? a time when debian was really interested in increasing its diversity
and this organization had pop up called debian women
just founded by anna and ?? clarck and a few other people
so anna wrote this blogpost talking about debian women on planet debian
when i read this blogpost i was like holyshit, this people want me to
contribute, that pretty much changed my life like i started getting
on irc and met a bunch of this people on irc and ?? funneling my energy
out of the game and into debian
this is like 2 days after i read that blogpost i wrote my own
like i had this blog i was running on a subdomain of middleearth.us
which was the game site because i was ?? yeard old and
didnt have a server so that was the way i had publishing something
on the web. I had this ?? blog and i grow really excited so
i grow this blog response first, which describes on my own words at the time
how i felt
so i started learning how to package and started learning python and
christian perrier, which is another dd took me under his wing and
i helped with the shadow team which packaged some important utilities
and that made me feel really important and everybody was super friendly
and encouraging and i wanted to stay, so i did
this is me wearing a debian women tshirt that i had to
ackwardly ask my mother for money to buy because i think it was
steve mctire?? who had been the person who
instigated debian women tshirt and he lived in the uk and i was in
upstate new york so i had to pay dollars to send me a tshirt
and my mother was like... i dont know, whatever, sure you can
have some money. what are you doing?
[laughs]
but... i was hooked and i was 16 years old
this is actually a quote from my college aplication
which describes what happened after that
in my college applications i talked about two things
one was marching band and two was debian
before that i didnt really decided on what i wanted to do going forward
i always had the sense that i was going to be an engineer
i come from a family of engenieers
but i guess thats a very broad thing, engenieering
i could had decided to be a mechanical engenieer or a chemical engenieer
damn, no, this software stuff, this stuff is filling the world
its cool, its fun
so that really changed the way i was thinking about ?? going
this is hanna wallet and at the time i was applying for colleges
via my involvement in free software, in debian kinda developed this like
college crush on MIT. But i was too shy to... i was too unconfident i guess
to apply there until some day i was talking to hanna wallet in irc
you know, private messageing each other, and i was talking about college
applications, i kinda wanna go to MIT but i dont know
and she was super enthusiastic and was like, you should totally apply to MIT
and so i did, but i didnt tell anyone... i told my parents, but i didnt
tell anyone at school because these other smart kid at my school had applied
to hardward and everyday the other kids would see him and be like, you got
into hardward yet?, you got into hardward yet?
and i didnt want to get harass about it
so i didnt tell anybody
but i got in
i never expected that to happen, it was incredibly exciting
from the minute i got my aceptance letter, which actually had a
hand write note on it from the admisions officer, talking about
i had ?? wax about free software ?? debian and hacking on my assets
and the admissions person wrote on my admision letter than
he thought i would really fit into MIT because of my interest in
freesoftware and opensource and kinda hacker culture
so i was sold
so i visited MIT on april 2006, they had this preview weekend
where ?? students come and checkout the campus
and put you up with the current students
so i did that, and i was staying on this dorm called east campus
that looked just like this
it was actually a photo from my visit
visiting MIT kinda blew my mind
here there are a bunch of neds just sitting around super kinda grindy
dorm with computers and ?? equipement
they did some crazy things when i was there
they did this thing where they put pingpong balls
in a microwave that was that designed to ??
and they caught of fire, they were throwing all this LCD monitors
off the roof and it was crazy, i dont know
it kinda blew my mind, and i was totally sold
I thought, this are my people, im coming here
and during this trip, i also had come a day early
because i was taking the train from upstate newyork
to boston and that meant i got there the day before
where i actually had a host on campus so of course i emailed debian
??
i need a place to stay on wednesday night
and benjamin ?? responded to that email and ?? crash on his couch
his house is called the asitarium, so i stayed at the asitarium
and this is my stuff at the floor at the asitarium version 1.0
and they threw a party for me, it was amazing
at least they said the party was for me
it might had been just a party
[laughs]
so yeah, i stayed there, just meeting people from the internet in the
real life i didnt tell my parents about, but on this trip
another amazing thing happened, that was, because
I was staying with miko?? he gave a tour of the MIT media lab
that was where he worked at the time and on that tour
i met this game that was working on the lab and this was looking for
hackers to employee for the summer, so i went home and got an email
from this guy that was like, you want a job? because miko
introduced me as this debian hacker and so hes like
wow, awesome like a highschooler whose probably unnemployed
and i need some help, so, despite the fact they werent going to pay me
very much and i was going to be living alone in an expensive city
i said YES!
because i really wanted to get out of my town
so i pretty much went from this, it was a saturday in june 2006
and on monday, it was this
on sunday, the day after i graduated, my dad drove me to
cambridge, matchachusen, in the family minivan, unloaded
all of my stuff on my new cambridge aparment and drove off
and left me there the same day
so, luckyly, i knew some people in cambridge already
miko and this friend of miko basically adopted me for that summer
so, because i didnt really know anyone, not any students
all of the other students of my year werent there yet
i pretty much spent my entire time hanging with debian people
that summer and miko fed me with delicious vegetarion food
because i had never cooked before in my life
and that was my social group
we did things like rode bicicles... and they were kind enough
to introduce me to another mit students
there are some of them on this picture
the summer went on... and 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
many campus do with this thing where they build this giantic
crazy contramptions
this is this thing they were calling jesus deride??
which ended up bieng like a giant cross that had this cannon ?? on it
and they were strap people to it then put them on the ground
and they were like... papapapa
until your nose was to feet from the ground
and then the cannon waited. It was careful calibrated to make sure
that you are just go back
so, i was pretty sold this was the place to live
[laughs]
safety first, right?
eventually i ended up moving into this crazy coop on campus
bradening my skillset in hacking, such as building bicicles
building crazy contraptions in the basement
yeah, this is a giant tesla coil
actually, my involment in this part it was this
[laughs]
i was honestly quite terrified that we were goint to blow up the entire house
also had this crazy shannenigans with fire
might had been involved into putting somethings on roof tops
a different kind of mit hacking
and you know, like hacking on computers and
generally my experience on mit can be summed up in this picture
its a very kinda love/hate place, its super intense
and would definetly do it again but, im glad is been 4 years
it might had taken me 2 years to say that i would do it again
and this is another picture of how i experienced mit
audience: is that in a bathroom?
Christine: no this is a room, but is like a... sad selfie
it might had been during some period of crushing depression
inpending exams or something
but, this stuff was happening at mit, i was also
still involved in debian
i actually spent two summers like ?? around europe
and went to debconf7 with my own money that i had earn
with jobs that i had gotten via debian actually
like i worked at on campus helpdesk, so answering like
linux help questions, and helping people with computers
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 the company had heard of me
and my debian cred and tracked me down was like, do you want
a job? and of course i sais yes
he was so awesome he let me run around?? and go to europe
on the summer while i was working for him
this is more debconf7, skyland is full of castles
and david ?? is apparently on the camera
and i kept going to debconf, went to debconf9 and this is
the tshirt best practical gave me, a very ?? tshirt
and this is me at guadec at 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 it is
so old they didnt call computing, computing when it started
it was actually started to manage the time sharings on this
multex?? server
this organization is full of tens of hackers so obviosly I was
drawn to it, because of my experience in debian and the
student group did a lot of really cool things like they revent
the entire campus linux distro and was there wanted to be based
on debian actually, and still is to this day
and my favourity class i took at mit was the operating
system clas which kinda changed my life in that
i decided i wanted to do operating systems research
i was very close to go to grad school at mit
and doing a masters with perl and distributed operating
systems group, except for my spring on the seniour year
ive been sponsoring packages for this guy, tim abaut??
he was a friend of mine from sippy?? he was doing a whole
bunch of work on ?? software ?? that he was trying to get
to debian and i was sponsoring his stuff
and he just started this company called ksplice
and so this one time he emailed me asking for sponsorship
to upload a package and he was also like, hey, we are
looking for interns for ip?? which is this gen?? term at mit
like, do you want a job?
so i started to work for ksplice before i finished mit
i still intended 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 dont really want to go
to grad school, i rather get a job where they pay me
so i started working for this company called ksplice which
develped this tecnhology where... its basically a
kernel module for linux that would allow you to take a patch
to the linux kernel and you do this binary differencing
so you can then load the changing running kernel without
having to restart it
which was pretty novel at the time.
I never interviewed to this job, it was like, I sponsored
my friends debian's packages and he knew me from sippy and
I demostrated there via my intership that i was like a good
person to work with so, i ended up working there for 3 years
?? eventually was sold to oracle and that was a
learning experience
[laughs]
so at the end of a year and a half at oracle i just decided
i was going to leave eventually and i was trying to figure
out what i wanted to do afterwards and decided i was also
going to leave boston and this is like a big thing for me at
the time, because ive been living at boston for 7 years and
it was the only place i have really lived as an adult
its like moved form upstate newyork to boston and stayed there
so as a part of the process to leaving boston I had this
whiteboard in my room and i went through and listed all
the things i was going to miss and clinging on
things that you miss in a nostalgic way like ??
the snow and terrible weather
and how sweaty it gets in the summer there
but i looked back on all those things now and
damn, i kinda miss them
so i think writting everything down was it was a good way
to cut and go and move on
but i ended up moving to bay area
to okland and the the reason i moved to the bay area
was to start this company with a friend of mine
ive been talking to this friend for a long time
i met him at the sophomore year at mit
he was like a year behind me and he had been trying to
built stuff on top of email for his undergraduated ??
we sometimes taked email and tried to do stuff on top of it
like run a bug tracking system
not that i know anyone here that has done that
and he found out that he spent all of this time
trying to work with email and so he decided
someone needed to make the bottom level tools
better before we can create anything interesting
that uses email, so i was pretty sold in the idea
and i started working with him so i moved to the bay area
and this is us back at mit in last fall i guess
pulling an extremelly ill advice on nighter
before hes giving a talk.
this is actually in one of the ?? coaster at mit
and we had gone in the campus convenience store
for a bunch of snacks and im never doing this again
but it was a thing at the time and the talk was fine
except it would had probably been better if had ??
and this a ?? from a website and this is an example of
things you can do with innbox, which is this company
that we started
the way we have been going about the company has also
really influced by my experience in debian
like for example we release our code as agpl
which i wouldnt had even knonw that existed
without my experience in debian and freesoftware
so this is an example of using our api
we provide this high level api for interacting with email
it uses threads across all providers, not just gmail
it allows you to easily marks things as read in the archive
this is a tags based api
and we do that across all providers
even your dovecot isolation
we are trying to evolve email from the inside out
but making something compatible with what we already have
and im pretty exiceted with where thats going
but the main reason i wanted to give this talk is to say
thank you, because i wouldnt be who i am without
the amazing comunity that is debian
so thanks for doing what you do
[applause]