Damián Viano

I'll just paste my bio from NM process: From birth till 2002/3 Ok, let's see... I got came to the GNU/Linux world out of curiosity and seeking for knowledge. I started with a Slackware Linux and failed miserably, so I left for a while. Every now and then I started again and abandoned again by lack of time or understanding. There my Lug (LugFi, which means LugFi Use Gnu/linux in the Engineering Faculty) became a real deal of my history, since having a group to share, chat and learn stuff really pushed my fears away and allowed me to fully enter the free software world.

From 2002/3 till now At that point I started using Debian, and understanding the philosophy behind it never quitted, and don't plan to. Eventually learned more and more (did I mention that I approached to Linux in seek for knowledge?) and started to answer questions in the LugFi mailing lists instead of asking them. Finally volunteered to give courses about GNU/Linux with Margarita Manterola and Maximiliano Curia (courses they gave to me before) at the university and learned and taught a lot doing that for about a year, everything in a Debian GNU/Linux environment. After that we organized several free software events at the university.

More and more I got involved in the development and wasn't too long before I wanted to do my first Debian package, nothing fancy just for personal use. And so I became aware of the complexity and importance of all that work. So this guys have a great philosophy and make a rocking work that I enjoy and that helped my to grow up to my actual potential. I *had* to give something back and improve Debian as much as I could. So I've started with DDTP, which marga coordinated for es_AR IIRC, and started to lurk debian mailing lists, even lkml.

Eventually found a software not packaged (bwm-ng) and packaged it, with that I made my own repository just to learn and mailed a couple of patches to the .php file that I used to list my packages, that lead to the creation of php-apt-parser on alioth. Marga then sponsored my package and I found some other packages to work on and so on...

Until I eventually considered myself ready and after reading a lot about changes and proposals for nm process, and decided to wait to see if something changed or not got convinced to finally apply, so here we are :-)

Ok, that much for a biography, sorry for the extension I hope not to have bored you too much. Regarding my areas of interest... it's really hard to say, I'm interested in too many probably, from kernel, libc and embedded to bug triaging, infrastructure and procedures. I like ruby, although I'm not familiarized with any ruby-packaging yet.

Regarding my contributions to Debian, besides my packages I do bug squashing whenever I can and bug reporting for now, although I'm enthusiast about increasing my contributions.