Are you a student aspiring to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2025? Would you like to improve the continuous integration pipeline used at salsa.debian.org, the Debian GitLab instance, to help improve the quality of tens of thousands of software packages in Debian?
Becoming a Debian maintainer is a journey that combines technical expertise, community collaboration, and continuous learning. In this post, I’ll share 10 key habits that will both help you navigate the complexities of Debian packaging without getting lost, and also enable you to contribute more effectively to one of the world’s largest open source projects.
In software engineering, most ideas can be implemented without writing any design document at all. This is particularly prominent in open source communities. For example, the Linux kernel has 35 million lines of code that have been written and rewritten many times over alongside 30 years of mailing list discussions. Linux wasn’t created as a result of a grandiose design document by Linus Torvalds, but it evolved organically in small increments of actual running code.
