On Sat, 11 Feb 2012, Francesca Ciceri wrote:
Hi all, members of the Debconf Team and Publicity Team need your help!!1!! (nooo! don't hide!!) We'd like to have a quote from all Debian Developers and contributors naming their most important technical and/or social achievement reached during past DebConfs. The quote need to be short (one or two lines) and could be something like: "During DebConfN I wrote $cool-software which we now use to do $cool-things"
During Debconf8, I wrote some improvements to piuparts. It doesn't appear those changes are actually in the main piuparts tree (!? aw well), but it introduced me to Lucas Nussbaum, QA extraordinaire, and gave me the confidence that people in Debian trusted my contributions.
During Debconf8, I learned about one DD finding himself locked out of his room in the middle of the night. This let me to understand that DDs are not just technically sharp and concerned with software freedom but also sometimes hapless.
During Debconf11, I engaged in ongoing hacking to finish the new version of mentors.debian.net. Debian now uses this to help new contributors submit high-quality packages to Debian, and Arno Töll has taken the reins on this project. Since then, 11 people have contributed patches to this codebase, and it is the basis for tracking sponsorship requests in the Debian bug tracking system.
(I'm happy to revise these quotes as needed for publicity team use.) -- Asheesh.