meetings-archive.debian.net/.../Coming_of_Age_My_Life_with_Debian.webm

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]