The Debian Women Project / Debian Women profiles / Elizabeth K. Joseph

Elizabeth K. Joseph

How long have you been using Debian?

Since 2002.

Are you a Debian Developer?

No.

What areas of Debian are you involved in?

These days I host the Debian dinner for the San Francisco Bay Area Debian (bad.debian.net) group every other month where we chat about Debian, sign keys and welcome traveling Debian contributors who frequently attend our dinners. I also pitch in with the Debian News team here and there, sharing links when I come across them and since attending DebConf14 in Portland have started to also pitch in with summary writing and editorial review. As a bit of background, I got started with working on Debian with Debian packaging in 2006 when I was working for a company that was using a number of Debian packages internally for some of our applications. In that role I was also able to work with a Debian Developer on staff to get a couple tools into the Debian archive. I also spent some time working on PHP Pear packages. I've since shifted focus in my day job so it's been some time since I've been involved with packaging, though I'd love to get back into it.

What got you interested in working with Debian?

I love contributing to open source software, so it was pretty natural for me to be interested in learning about packaging after I'd been using Debian on my home computers for a couple years. As I mentioned, it was actually a paying job that finally got me to do packaging, since we were using the packages in our infrastructure at work. My relation to the news team started because I'm the editor for the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, I routinely come across Debian-related articles when looking for Ubuntu ones, so it made sense for me to start sharing those.

Do you have any tips for women interested in getting more involved with Debian?

Dive in, ask questions and don't get discouraged. Debian is complicated, and there are lots of ways to do things, so it's easy even for the smartest people to get lost. There are lots of teams inside of Debian for whatever you may be interested in, and most of them are eager to get new contributors so they're happy to help you out. You're also welcome to ask folks on the Debian Women mailing list and IRC channel, there are plenty of helpful folks there who can point you in the right direction.

Are you involved with any other women in technology group? Which one(s)?

I spent several years working with the Ubuntu Women project (ubuntu-women.org), which seeks to get more women involved with and using Ubuntu.

A bit more about you...

My day job is a Systems Administrator working on the fully open source infrastructure that OpenStack developers use, it's really exciting to blend my passion for open source with my skills as a sysadmin. The OpenStack project uses a large Continuous Integration (CI) system, so I'm very interested in keeping an eye on what the Debian project does with CI work moving forward. I also am on the board of directors for Partimus.org, a non-profit which puts Linux-based desktops into schools in need.