Re: Knowing whom to talk to on Debconf
Hi Marc,
I look forward to meting you at DebConf and talking about Smarthome
stuff, building multi-OS applications in Dart+Flutter, embedded
systems, Apache Pulsar, Philosophy, Startups, Golf, IPv6, OpenWRT or
even Debian and DebConf.
This will be my first DebConf since Banja Luka when I had to take some
time away from Debian because my wife had cancer (TL;DR: she's fine)
and then I was overworked through a series of startups and multi-
nationals until retiring recently.
As other's have said: talking while in queues is a great way. Also,
when people are chatting it's great if they leave a gap in the circle
to silently invite others to join so three people talking, leave a gap
for a fourth, and so on - body language can be powerful. Similarly,
some kind of indication on badge or something for people who are
stressed by indiscriminate bonhomie would be helpful, because I don't
want to pressure anyone.
If you see a clique who look like they're having fun, and you'd like to
join but you don't know them *do* introduce yourself. One of the
greatest joys of DebConf is meeting all of the new people who come each
year, and just as I remember at my first DebConf in 2004.
In a way, I'll be a newbie again too, since I'm sure plenty has changed
in the last 13 years while my family were growing up and my employers
weren't going to pay for me to go. So I look forward to catching up
with everyone and figuring out where I can best help the project out
going forward.
Regards,
Andrew McMillan.
On Fri, 2025-05-30 at 19:58 +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> Hi,
>
> this will be my first debconf where I am not busy with organizing. So
> I will have time to talk to people and to cooperate with people.
> Earlier this year, I was visiting MiniDebconf Hamburg and found it
> enlightening to be able to directly talk to people. The MiniDebconf
> only had 30 people, and it was easy to find people to talk to about
> certain topic.
>
> Debconf, with several hundred people, is different. Is there a
> list/medium/webpage/database where people can record their skills
> that go beyond their packages? I mean, when I want to talk about
> security,
> I seek a member of the security team. When I want to talk about a
> certain package, I seek its maintainer.
>
> But what do I do when I have a question about git? Or about "which
> idiom is the most pythonic"? Or about "is the new Arista datacenter
> switch really THIS cool"?
>
> For example, I would probably be one of the persons to talk to about
> IPv6, in-car networking, big scale DNS, adduser, sudo, exim, aide,
> network management and 1980/1990ies chart/dance music. And I would
> like to talk to people knowing advanced git, advanced ansible,
> advanced systemd, using KDE, booting the Raspberry Pi and living in a
> smarthome.
>
> Do we have support infrastructure for that? Where would I enter my
> non-obvious skills that can be useful in Debian?
>
> I am looking for a casual way to find people to talk to, for example
> during meals. I could submit bofs about "my" topics, but I need to be
> in the mood to talk about certain things and would not enjoy having
> to do that on a schedule.
>
> I am looking forward to my first Debconf where I can do technical
> work and improve my technical skills!
>
> Greetings
> Marc
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