A Few Questions For David Nusinow
published on Sun May 24 13:11:45 2009 in interviews
A Few Questions For David Nusinow
How did you end up using Debian and becoming a DD?
I was raised as a hardcore Mac person starting with System 7. There was a very long dark period of time when the Mac looked very much doomed and I was tired of waiting for what would eventually be called OSX. I switched over to Windows for a little while and found that it was workable but not nearly as interesting or fun as the Mac. So I tried out Linux and found that it was a lot of fun, if totally different from anything I'd ever imagined. After about a month on Mandrake I got sick of feeling contrained by it and installed Slink and quickly updated to the brand new Potato a few days later. Debian was the hot distro at the time, and it was said to be a great one to learn on so I basically followed the crowd in my ignorance.
Debian was also rather intimidating, being full of smart people and difficult documentation. But one thing that set my own course was an interview of Wichert Akkerman, who was DPL at the time, in which he described how it was a natural progression going from user to developer in Debian because one naturally would get involved and start scratching some itch. The itch that I found was that X was painful to configure, and I wanted it to “Just Work” the way that my old Macs always had. So after several years as a user I decided that I'd become a DD to help out with this task, and I'm still working on it today half a decade later.
How are you currently involved in the Debian project?
I'm currently a member of the X Strike Force (XSF), which helps to maintain the software from X.org and other closely related packages for Debian. I recently took close to a year off from Debian in order to finish my PhD and find a job, and now that both of those tasks are done I've tried to return to the XSF and pick up the work that I'd left off. My most recent project was to document the new Input Hotplug system for Debian users. It's clear that we have much more to document given all the massive changes going on in the X world these days, so this will likely consume a lot of my time. I also am attempting to improve the autoconfiguration of the X server, as well as participate in steering the XSF in general, and maintain a few small packages when I can find the time. I don't spend nearly as much time on Debian as I used to, and while the number is growing again it currently amounts to around 20 hours a month. Needless to say, I have to lean very heavily on my fellow XSF team members with a number that small, and we're always looking for people with the fortitude to work on something as important and challenging as X.
How do you currently use Debian?
I use it on all of my personal machines, doing nothing particularly fancy except working on Debian itself. I've used unstable continuously on my main desktop for nearly a decade, and I've been trying out testing for the past several months on my laptop. I also use Ubuntu at work, although I'll very likely switch that machine to testing as well because I'm more vastly more comfortable and knowledgeable about Debian than Ubuntu.
What do you do when you're not working on Debian?
I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Brigham And Women's Hospital in Boston. I'm a Biologist by training, and I'm focused on generating and analyzing proteomic datasets as part of the SysCODE project which is dedicated to engineering whole organs to replace diseased ones in patients. Mostly this amounts to writing a lot of perl and R as part of a project that's currently science fiction that we want to make reality, which I think is very cool. I also love spending time with the other DD's and associated Free Software folk around Boston, and spending time with my girlfriend Nicole.