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this talk is not really about any particular technology<br/>in debian<br/>its actually a talk about how debian changed my life<br/>which seems something that people here maybe intereste in<br/>so im here to tell my story, thanks for coming<br/>so im gonna start from the begining i was born here in<br/>scarborough on an street that looks like this<br/>yay canada<br/>its canada like the suburbs from totonto you could walk down<br/>my street and you look over the ?? <br/>and looked like this<br/>you know snow for about 8 months of the year <br/>but otherwise incredible beautiful<br/>but i didnt actually stayed in canada for that long<br/>so when i was for a about 3 years old and<br/>my family moved to upstate new york, because my dad<br/>got a better job, and i think he was kinda always interested about<br/>the american dream basically, he wanted to move to the us<br/>you know, being american, so, when i was 3 and a half, <br/>we moved to this house<br/>in ?? new york, which is a suburb ??<br/>and its generally and incredibly little boring suburnban town<br/>so i grew up being a pretty nerdy kid and <br/>i also spent a lot of time on this place i like to call the farm<br/>which its actually in canada my granma lived here and<br/>i runned around on the farm and doing lots of farm things and<br/>generally being kinda a dirty, you know, farm kid<br/>getting dirty on the mud and<br/>i was also a huge nerd so i read a ton of books ??<br/>that i readed when i was really young<br/>so this is the high school i went to, it was in corn field<br/>extremely extremely interesting<br/>but i was also pretty active little kid<br/>i liked to run a lot, i actually run cross country<br/>which is like ?? in middle school<br/>i also run track and field<br/>this must had been not a good day<br/>and this is highschool i went to, and in highschool i was also<br/>like a music geek so i played the french horn for 10 years<br/>so growing up like this was a huge creative outlet for me<br/>i was like in the band, i also played trumbet on the jazz band<br/>and in highschool i actually i gave up cross country in order to do this<br/>so my highschool i had a pretty ?? highschool marching band<br/>so if you are not familiar with marching band this is a particular<br/>kind of marching band which is not like parade band, we didnt march on paredes<br/>but we did do whats had likes 8 minutes coreographed show that we would do <br/>on football fields, to play in like half time games and<br/>whom football games and also this kind of competition circuit and<br/>this is actually kinda of like state finals at the cicuit <br/>and the show was based on this ?? called DS<br/>so we are like make this formations and walk around and play music<br/>and it was really fun<br/>but during this whole time, while i was like growing up in a corn field<br/>and play music and reading books, eventually i discovered computers<br/>and i guess it was about mostly around middle school i would say<br/>so i got into computer through games and i have like really vivid<br/>??<br/>and one of the things i found on games was scape<br/>so town i grew up was super boring<br/>i kinda looked into computers for adventure, so i really like games<br/>that gave me hability to kinda explore worlds<br/>and they didnt necesarely have like linear story lines<br/>but like this is wind commander privateer which i loved and<br/>one of the things i really liked about it is that you didnt have<br/>to follow the story line if you didnt want to<br/>you could just like go around and run missions and make a lot of money<br/>and like upgrade your ship<br/>and you could do the story if you wanted, but you didnt have to<br/>so my gamming experience is really driven by this dessire to explore new worlds<br/>and control my own experience<br/>and this is my room in probably about 7th grade<br/>i had this compact desktop machine that i think we got at somewhere like pc<br/>it was like big bucks store that was popular in the early 2000<br/>i think it was from circuit city<br/>and you can actually see im running windows xp on it, so it is before<br/>the debian days<br/>and i was also like a huge soccer player, you can see like my soccer<br/>team photos and i hate to admit this but i also had this obsession with horses<br/>[laughts] which you might noticed from the decor<br/>so, back to gaming, and my gamming experience which I said was driven by this<br/>dessire of exploration, eventually let me to get involved in this<br/>online text games called MUDS and in particular i was like one day<br/>like 9 or 10 grade after marching band ended<br/>and marching band took a lot of time so, i had practices basically<br/>3 days a week for like 4 hours at the time, plus we had competitions<br/>so marching band ??<br/>my life was empty, like i have nothing to do except for school<br/>and surf the internet, so it was like after<br/>??<br/>so you actually you ?? terminal<br/>and log into the MUD server via telnet<br/>and so this is like the login screen for shadows of isildur<br/>which was this mud that i got into<br/>and it was a particular kind of mud in that it was called<br/>like role playing instensive mud, so people will form this characters<br/>and put a lot of story into them<br/>this is the character i played in this mud in like 3 years<br/>and people would put a lot of effort into like painting the stories<br/>behind their characters, so i had like text files and text files<br/>that are like, my character love story and the description of her<br/>and like important events on her life, people she knew that i could<br/>reference that when i was playing in the game and make sure i was<br/>staying in character and i think this character was very much<br/>a representation of like my want for adventure and being the good kid at<br/>school and not wanting to be the good kid online<br/>but this character had this kind of sordid past and kinda was up to no good<br/>got into some trouble, but i got so into this game that i actually<br/>?? helping running<br/>and this was my administrator kinda like persona on the game<br/>she was a norse god, my family is norwegian by the way<br/>this is also a major part of my upbringing so<br/>i had this alter ego kinda ??<br/>viking and like ??<br/>so people would thought i was tough ??<br/>skimo online administrator persona<br/>one of the things administrators could do on the game is like you could<br/>create your own personal room so when i logged into the game i spawn <br/>into this room the great hall of valhalla<br/>and like you would build this rooms and you could make objects<br/>so there was facilities on the game that you ??<br/>write the description of all these objects and<br/>the porpurse of the administratos on the game was actually to run plots<br/>and kind of keep the story going<br/>because this particular game was incredibly story driven<br/>and is a text based game, that is all that you had<br/>and on this game if you died, if your character died<br/>your character was dead<br/>so this gives an incredible amount of wits to take actions and ??<br/>going on the story. but this was the first time i found people that<br/>i really connected with and i made really good friends with the other<br/>people who runned this game and the lived across the country<br/>there was this guy who lived in missury<br/>??<br/>he was about the same age as me and most of the other administrators<br/>were older, so we talked about life and got into punkrock and talked<br/>to this guy, and i think having this outlet for weirdos and nerds was<br/>a really big part of me and feeling confortable on my skin on real life<br/>such as this<br/>so i went into this program when i was 15 where i were into the bay area ??<br/>for a week, and doin science nerd things i was actually so into this game<br/>that i met up with the person who wrote it ?? streets<br/>i didnt tell my parents by the way<br/>meeting people from the internet, im 15 years old<br/>but hes actually a totally cool guy and he thought i was a totally<br/>crazy little thing kid but hes going to the university of santa clara<br/>at the time he was considering become a laywer and i think meeting<br/>this guy in real life ?? mythos of the creator of this game<br/>a little bit<br/>he lives in seattle now and i have an open invitation to grab ?? <br/>sometimes with him so... thats all<br/>i also made friends in real life and i found all the weirdos at my school<br/>after figuering out how to be able to express myself by meeting people<br/>online and the ?? animators at school, we did crazy things like<br/>dressing up like the spanish inquisition for halloween and<br/>going out to different classrooms in highschool im like<br/>??<br/>at the time, i was really into running this game, but it turns out if you<br/>??<br/>helped me to install debian on that compact machine that you saw<br/>on the previous slide<br/>at the time installed debian sarge, it was testing i thing, this was<br/>2004 probably and was a pivotal moment for me i started like running debian<br/>all the time, i haven ever run any linux distro other than debian<br/>and it turns out im incredibly entuthiastics about things and<br/>curious and i really couldnt keep my hands off debian<br/>i was curious about how it worked. its a pretty strange thing<br/>like a thousand people all around the world that managed to<br/>create somehow this software that is able to run my computer<br/>thats pretty amazing and so i was curious as a 15 years old i wanted to<br/>learn more, so i guess i started lurking around, subscribed to probably<br/>debian-devel started reading planet debian and one day i was reading<br/>planet debian and this blogpost was on planet debian<br/>this post was about hanna wallach who a bunch of you know<br/>?? a time when debian was really interested in increasing its diversity<br/>and this organization had pop up called debian women<br/>just founded by anna and ?? clarck and a few other people<br/>so anna wrote this blogpost talking about debian women on planet debian<br/>when i read this blogpost i was like holyshit, this people want me to<br/>contribute, that pretty much changed my life like i started getting<br/>on irc and met a bunch of this people on irc and ?? funneling my energy<br/>out of the game and into debian<br/>this is like 2 days after i read that blogpost i wrote my own<br/>like i had this blog i was running on a subdomain of middleearth.us<br/>which was the game site because i was ?? yeard old and<br/>didnt have a server so that was the way i had publishing something<br/>on the web. I had this ?? blog and i grow really excited so<br/>i grow this blog response first, which describes on my own words at the time<br/>how i felt<br/>so i started learning how to package and started learning python and<br/>christian perrier, which is another dd took me under his wing and<br/>i helped with the shadow team which packaged some important utilities<br/>and that made me feel really important and everybody was super friendly<br/>and encouraging and i wanted to stay, so i did<br/>this is me wearing a debian women tshirt that i had to<br/>ackwardly ask my mother for money to buy because i think it was<br/>steve mctire?? who had been the person who<br/>instigated debian women tshirt and he lived in the uk and i was in<br/>upstate new york so i had to pay dollars to send me a tshirt<br/>and my mother was like... i dont know, whatever, sure you can<br/>have some money. what are you doing?<br/>[laughs]<br/>but... i was hooked and i was 16 years old<br/>this is actually a quote from my college aplication<br/>which describes what happened after that<br/>in my college applications i talked about two things<br/>one was marching band and two was debian<br/>before that i didnt really decided on what i wanted to do going forward<br/>i always had the sense that i was going to be an engineer<br/>i come from a family of engenieers<br/>but i guess thats a very broad thing, engenieering<br/>i could had decided to be a mechanical engenieer or a chemical engenieer<br/>damn, no, this software stuff, this stuff is filling the world<br/>its cool, its fun<br/>so that really changed the way i was thinking about ?? going<br/>this is hanna wallet and at the time i was applying for colleges<br/>via my involvement in free software, in debian kinda developed this like<br/>college crush on MIT. But i was too shy to... i was too unconfident i guess<br/>to apply there until some day i was talking to hanna wallet in irc<br/>you know, private messageing each other, and i was talking about college<br/>applications, i kinda wanna go to MIT but i dont know<br/>and she was super enthusiastic and was like, you should totally apply to MIT<br/>and so i did, but i didnt tell anyone... i told my parents, but i didnt<br/>tell anyone at school because these other smart kid at my school had applied<br/>to hardward and everyday the other kids would see him and be like, you got<br/>into hardward yet?, you got into hardward yet?<br/>and i didnt want to get harass about it<br/>so i didnt tell anybody<br/>but i got in<br/>i never expected that to happen, it was incredibly exciting<br/>from the minute i got my aceptance letter, which actually had a<br/>hand write note on it from the admisions officer, talking about<br/>i had ?? wax about free software ?? debian and hacking on my assets<br/>and the admissions person wrote on my admision letter than<br/>he thought i would really fit into MIT because of my interest in<br/>freesoftware and opensource and kinda hacker culture<br/>so i was sold<br/>so i visited MIT on april 2006, they had this preview weekend<br/>where ?? students come and checkout the campus<br/>and put you up with the current students<br/>so i did that, and i was staying on this dorm called east campus<br/>that looked just like this<br/>it was actually a photo from my visit<br/>visiting MIT kinda blew my mind<br/>here there are a bunch of neds just sitting around super kinda grindy<br/>dorm with computers and ?? equipement<br/>they did some crazy things when i was there<br/>they did this thing where they put pingpong balls<br/>in a microwave that was that designed to ??<br/>and they caught of fire, they were throwing all this LCD monitors<br/>off the roof and it was crazy, i dont know<br/>it kinda blew my mind, and i was totally sold<br/>I thought, this are my people, im coming here<br/>and during this trip, i also had come a day early<br/>because i was taking the train from upstate newyork<br/>to boston and that meant i got there the day before<br/>where i actually had a host on campus so of course i emailed debian<br/>??<br/>i need a place to stay on wednesday night<br/>and benjamin ?? responded to that email and ?? crash on his couch<br/>his house is called the asitarium, so i stayed at the asitarium<br/>and this is my stuff at the floor at the asitarium version 1.0<br/>and they threw a party for me, it was amazing<br/>at least they said the party was for me<br/>it might had been just a party<br/>[laughs]<br/>so yeah, i stayed there, just meeting people from the internet in the<br/>real life i didnt tell my parents about, but on this trip<br/>another amazing thing happened, that was, because<br/>I was staying with miko?? he gave a tour of the MIT media lab<br/>that was where he worked at the time and on that tour<br/>i met this game that was working on the lab and this was looking for<br/>hackers to employee for the summer, so i went home and got an email<br/>from this guy that was like, you want a job? because miko<br/>introduced me as this debian hacker and so hes like<br/>wow, awesome like a highschooler whose probably unnemployed<br/>and i need some help, so, despite the fact they werent going to pay me<br/>very much and i was going to be living alone in an expensive city<br/>i said YES!<br/>because i really wanted to get out of my town<br/>so i pretty much went from this, it was a saturday in june 2006<br/>and on monday, it was this<br/>on sunday, the day after i graduated, my dad drove me to<br/>cambridge, matchachusen, in the family minivan, unloaded<br/>all of my stuff on my new cambridge aparment and drove off<br/>and left me there the same day<br/>so, luckyly, i knew some people in cambridge already<br/>miko and this friend of miko basically adopted me for that summer<br/>so, because i didnt really know anyone, not any students<br/>all of the other students of my year werent there yet<br/>i pretty much spent my entire time hanging with debian people<br/>that summer and miko fed me with delicious vegetarion food<br/>because i had never cooked before in my life<br/>and that was my social group<br/>we did things like rode bicicles... and they were kind enough<br/>to introduce me to another mit students<br/>there are some of them on this picture<br/>the summer went on... and at the end of the summer<br/>i actually moved into mit<br/>this is east campus which is the place where i lived my first year<br/>many campus do with this thing where they build this giantic<br/>crazy contramptions<br/>this is this thing they were calling jesus deride??<br/>which ended up bieng like a giant cross that had this cannon ?? on it<br/>and they were strap people to it then put them on the ground<br/>and they were like... papapapa<br/>until your nose was to feet from the ground<br/>and then the cannon waited. It was careful calibrated to make sure<br/>that you are just go back<br/>so, i was pretty sold this was the place to live<br/>[laughs]<br/>safety first, right?<br/>eventually i ended up moving into this crazy coop on campus<br/>bradening my skillset in hacking, such as building bicicles<br/>building crazy contraptions in the basement<br/>yeah, this is a giant tesla coil<br/>actually, my involment in this part it was this<br/>[laughs]<br/>i was honestly quite terrified that we were goint to blow up the entire house<br/>also had this crazy shannenigans with fire<br/>might had been involved into putting somethings on roof tops<br/>a different kind of mit hacking<br/>and you know, like hacking on computers and<br/>generally my experience on mit can be summed up in this picture<br/>its a very kinda love/hate place, its super intense<br/>and would definetly do it again but, im glad is been 4 years<br/>it might had taken me 2 years to say that i would do it again<br/>and this is another picture of how i experienced mit<br/>audience: is that in a bathroom?<br/>Christine: no this is a room, but is like a... sad selfie<br/>it might had been during some period of crushing depression<br/>inpending exams or something<br/>but, this stuff was happening at mit, i was also<br/>still involved in debian<br/>i actually spent two summers like ?? around europe<br/>and went to debconf7 with my own money that i had earn<br/>with jobs that i had gotten via debian actually<br/>like i worked at on campus helpdesk, so answering like<br/>linux help questions, and helping people with computers<br/>i also got this job at this company called best practical<br/>which makes this thing called RT and the way i got this job<br/>was like the owner of the company had heard of me<br/>and my debian cred and tracked me down was like, do you want<br/>a job? and of course i sais yes<br/>he was so awesome he let me run around?? and go to europe<br/>on the summer while i was working for him<br/>this is more debconf7, skyland is full of castles<br/>and david ?? is apparently on the camera<br/>and i kept going to debconf, went to debconf9 and this is<br/>the tshirt best practical gave me, a very ?? tshirt<br/>and this is me at guadec at 2008 in gran canaria<br/>and mit, i also got involved in the student group that was<br/>called the student information processing board<br/>which is basically the computer club at mit, except it is<br/>so old they didnt call computing, computing when it started<br/>it was actually started to manage the time sharings on this<br/>multex?? server<br/>this organization is full of tens of hackers so obviosly I was<br/>drawn to it, because of my experience in debian and the<br/>student group did a lot of really cool things like they revent<br/>the entire campus linux distro and was there wanted to be based<br/>on debian actually, and still is to this day<br/>and my favourity class i took at mit was the operating<br/>system clas which kinda changed my life in that<br/>i decided i wanted to do operating systems research<br/>i was very close to go to grad school at mit<br/>and doing a masters with perl and distributed operating<br/>systems group, except for my spring on the seniour year<br/>ive been sponsoring packages for this guy, tim abaut??<br/>he was a friend of mine from sippy?? he was doing a whole<br/>bunch of work on ?? software ?? that he was trying to get<br/>to debian and i was sponsoring his stuff<br/>and he just started this company called ksplice<br/>and so this one time he emailed me asking for sponsorship<br/>to upload a package and he was also like, hey, we are<br/>looking for interns for ip?? which is this gen?? term at mit<br/>like, do you want a job?<br/>so i started to work for ksplice before i finished mit<br/>i still intended to go to grad school, but it turned out<br/>that at the end of my senior year, they just gave me<br/>a full time offer and i was like i dont really want to go<br/>to grad school, i rather get a job where they pay me<br/>so i started working for this company called ksplice which<br/>develped this tecnhology where... its basically a<br/>kernel module for linux that would allow you to take a patch<br/>to the linux kernel and you do this binary differencing<br/>so you can then load the changing running kernel without<br/>having to restart it<br/>which was pretty novel at the time.<br/>I never interviewed to this job, it was like, I sponsored<br/>my friends debian's packages and he knew me from sippy and<br/>I demostrated there via my intership that i was like a good<br/>person to work with so, i ended up working there for 3 years<br/>?? eventually was sold to oracle and that was a <br/>learning experience<br/>[laughs]<br/>so at the end of a year and a half at oracle i just decided<br/>i was going to leave eventually and i was trying to figure<br/>out what i wanted to do afterwards and decided i was also<br/>going to leave boston and this is like a big thing for me at<br/>the time, because ive been living at boston for 7 years and<br/>it was the only place i have really lived as an adult<br/>its like moved form upstate newyork to boston and stayed there<br/>so as a part of the process to leaving boston I had this<br/>whiteboard in my room and i went through and listed all<br/>the things i was going to miss and clinging on<br/>things that you miss in a nostalgic way like ??<br/>the snow and terrible weather<br/>and how sweaty it gets in the summer there<br/>but i looked back on all those things now and<br/>damn, i kinda miss them<br/>so i think writting everything down was it was a good way<br/>to cut and go and move on<br/>but i ended up moving to bay area<br/>to okland and the the reason i moved to the bay area<br/>was to start this company with a friend of mine<br/>ive been talking to this friend for a long time<br/>i met him at the sophomore year at mit<br/>he was like a year behind me and he had been trying to<br/>built stuff on top of email for his undergraduated ??<br/>we sometimes taked email and tried to do stuff on top of it<br/>like run a bug tracking system<br/>not that i know anyone here that has done that<br/>and he found out that he spent all of this time<br/>trying to work with email and so he decided <br/>someone needed to make the bottom level tools<br/>better before we can create anything interesting<br/>that uses email, so i was pretty sold in the idea<br/>and i started working with him so i moved to the bay area<br/>and this is us back at mit in last fall i guess<br/>pulling an extremelly ill advice on nighter<br/>before hes giving a talk.<br/>this is actually in one of the ?? coaster at mit<br/>and we had gone in the campus convenience store<br/>for a bunch of snacks and im never doing this again<br/>but it was a thing at the time and the talk was fine<br/>except it would had probably been better if had ??<br/>and this a ?? from a website and this is an example of<br/>things you can do with innbox, which is this company<br/>that we started<br/>the way we have been going about the company has also<br/>really influced by my experience in debian<br/>like for example we release our code as agpl<br/>which i wouldnt had even knonw that existed<br/>without my experience in debian and freesoftware<br/>so this is an example of using our api<br/>we provide this high level api for interacting with email<br/>it uses threads across all providers, not just gmail<br/>it allows you to easily marks things as read in the archive<br/>this is a tags based api<br/>and we do that across all providers<br/>even your dovecot isolation<br/>we are trying to evolve email from the inside out<br/>but making something compatible with what we already have<br/>and im pretty exiceted with where thats going<br/>but the main reason i wanted to give this talk is to say<br/>thank you, because i wouldnt be who i am without<br/>the amazing comunity that is debian<br/>so thanks for doing what you do<br/>[applause]