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AM report for Nathan Handler



I recommend to accept Nathan Harrison Handler as a Debian Developer.

1. Identification & Account Data
--------------------------------
   First name:      Nathan
   Middle name:     Harrison
   Last name:       Handler
   Key fingerprint: 31DC C3B3 3F21 7988 3DA0  14C7 CAFB 3BAD 0A75 C877
   Account:         nhandler

2. Background
-------------
I started my GNU/Linux journey back in fall 2006. I had started teaching 
myself how to program in Perl on Windows, and people kept saying that Linux 
was a better for serious programming. This motivated me to start researching 
different Linux distributions and downloading the many ISO images needed to 
install some of the more popular distros. After trying several distributions, 
Ubuntu 6.04 Dapper Drake was the only one to support all of my hardware out of 
the box. Not longer after that, I discovered the Ubuntu forums and the Ubuntu 
Forums Beginners Team. This team helped encourage me to start contributing to 
Ubuntu.

My first few uploads to Ubuntu involved adding missing .desktop files and 
icons to applications. While trivial in nature, these patches helped expose me 
to the packaging/patching processes and the large collection of development 
tools. It also resulted in my first contributions to Debian; whenever I got a 
patch uploaded in Ubuntu, I would submit it to the BTS (when applicable) in an 
effort to reduce Ubuntu's delta.

Fast forward to December 2008, and I finally applied and got accepted as a 
MOTU (upload privileges for Ubuntu's universe/multiverse repositories). From 
there, I proceeded to serve on several of Ubuntu's leadership councils 
(Beginners Team Council, MOTU Council, America's Regional Membership Board, 
IRC Council) and contribute to many other teams in the community.

In May 2009, I really started getting active in Debian development. I joined 
the pkg-perl team and packaged a few new Perl modules from scratch. I also 
helped to update and maintain their collection of over 2,300 packages. Since 
pkg-perl as a group maintains all of their packages, I never got to experience 
maintaining a package by myself until June 2012. At this time, I packaged and 
started maintaining the package udj-desktop-client by myself. I have worked 
closely with the upstream maintainer to resolve various issues with the source 
code, and I have updated the Debian package to keep it in sync with upstream.

Finally, in October 2012, I had the opportunity to meet up with Stefano 
Zacchiroli (zack) and Asheesh Laroia (paulproteus) at the Association for 
Computing Machinery at Urbana-Champaign's Reflections | Projections 
conference. After talking with them and my sponsors and having them sign my 
OpenPGP key, I decided to finally apply to be a Debian Developer. My goal is 
to be able to help sponsor other people on the pkg-perl team and free up my 
sponsors to focus on things other than reviewing/uploading my changes. 

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