I haven’t been posting anything on my personal blog in a long while, let’s fix that!

Partial reason for this is that I’ve been busy documenting progress on the Debian Installer on my company’s blog. So far, the following posts were published there:

• Debian Installer: Stretch Alpha 8 released with details on the release process, and on the debootstrap attempt regarding merged-/usr (granted, that one was from late 2016).
• Debian Installer: Stretch RC 2 released: wrapping up both RC 1 and RC 2 for Stretch, mentioning major changes instead of all the tiny details one would usually find in the release announcements published on the debian-devel-announce@ mailing list.
• Debian Installer: Stretch released: aggregating RC 3 to RC 5 this time, since the last few weeks before the Stretch release date were quite busy!

After the Stretch release, it was time to attend DebConf’17 in Montreal, Canada. I’ve presented the latest news on the Debian Installer front there as well. This included a quick demo of my little framework which lets me run automatic installation tests. Many attendees mentioned openQA as the current state of the art technology for OS installation testing, and Philip Hands started looking into it. Right now, my little thing is still useful as it is, helping me reproduce regressions quickly, and testing bug fixes… so I haven’t been trying to port that to another tool yet.

I also gave another presentation in two different contexts: once at a local FLOSS meeting in Nantes, France and once during the mini-DebConf in Toulouse, France. Nothing related to Debian Installer this time, as the topic was how I helped a company upgrade thousands of machines from Debian 6 to Debian 8 (and to Debian 9 since then). It was nice to have Evolix people around, since we shared our respective experience around automation tools like Ansible and Puppet.

After the mini-DebConf in Toulouse, another event: the mini-DebConf in Cambridge, UK. I tried to give a lightning talk about “how snapshot.debian.org helped saved the release(s)” but clearly speed was lacking, and/or I had too many things to present, so that didn’t work out as well as I hoped. Fortunately, no time constraints when I presented that during a Debian meet-up in Nantes, France. :)

Since Reproducible Tails builds were announced, it seemed like a nice opportunity to document how my company got involved into early work on reproducibility for the Tails project.

On an administrative level, I’m already done with all the paperwork related to the second financial year. \o/

Next things I’ll likely write about: the first two D-I Buster Alpha releases (many blockers kept popping up, it was really hard to release), and a few more recent release critical bug reports.

Executive summary

Since October 2015, I've been running a FLOSS consulting company, specialized on Debian, called DEBAMAX.

Longer version

Everything started two years ago. Back then I blogged about one of the biggest changes in my life: trying to find the right balance between volunteer work as a Debian Developer, and entrepreneurship as a Freelance Debian consultant. Big change because it meant giving up the comfort of the salaried world, and figuring out whether working this way would be sufficient to earn a living…

I experimented for a while under a simplified status. It comes with a number of limitations but that’s a huge win compared to France’s heavy company-related administrativia. Here’s what it looked like, everything being done online:

• 1 registration form to begin with: wait a few days, get an identifier from INSEE, mention it in your invoices, there you go!

• 4 tax forms a year: taxes can be declared monthly or quarterly, I went for the latter.

A number of things became quite clear after a few months:

• I love this new job! Sharing my Debian knowledge with customers, and using it to help them build/improve/stabilise their products and their internal services feels great!

• Even if I wasn't aware of that initially, it seems like I've got a decent network already: Debian Developers, former coworkers, and friends thought about me for their Debian-related tasks. It was nice to hear about their needs, say yes, sign paperwork, and start working right away!

• While I'm trying really hard not to get too optimistic (achieving a given turnover on the first year doesn't mean you're guaranteed to do so again the following year), it seemed to go well enough for me to consider switching from this simplified status to a full-blown company.

Thankfully I was eligible to being accompanied by the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI Rennes), which provides teaching sessions for new entrepreneurs, coaching, and meeting opportunities (accountants, lawyers, insurance companies, …). Summer in France is traditionally rather quiet (read: almost everybody is on vacation), so DEBAMAX officially started operating in October 2015. Besides different administrative and accounting duties, running this company doesn't change the way I've been working since July 2014, so everything is fine!

As before, I won't be writing much about it through my personal blog, except for an occasional update every other year; if you want to follow what's happening with DEBAMAX:

• Website: debamax.com — in addition to the usual company, services, and references sections, it features a blog (with RSS) where some missions are going to be detailed (when it makes sense to share and when customers are fine with it). Spoiler alert: Tails is likely to be the first success story there. ;)
• Twitter: @debamax — which is going to be retweeted for a while from my personal account, @CyrilBrulebois.

I’m not used to talking about my day job but here’s an exception.

Over the past few years I worked in two startups (3 years each). It was nice to spend time in different areas: one job was mostly about research and development in a Linux cluster environment; the other one was about maintaining a highly-customized, Linux-based operating system, managing a small support team, and performing technological surveillance in IT security.

In the meanwhile I’ve reached a milestone: 10 years with Debian. I had been wondering for a few months whether I could try my luck going freelance, becoming a Debian consultant. I finally decided to go ahead and started in August!

The idea is to lend a hand for various Debian-related things like systems administration, development/debugging, packaging/repository maintenance, or Debian Installer support, be it one-shot or on a regular basis. I didn’t think about trainings/workshops at first but sharing knowledge is something I’ve always liked, even if I didn’t become a teacher.

For those interested, details can be found on my website: https://mraw.org/.

Update: It moved to https://debamax.com/ since then.

Of course this doesn’t mean I’m going to put an end to my volunteer activities within Debian, especially as a Debian Installer release manager. Quite the contrary in fact! See the August and September debian-boot@ archives, which have been busy months. :)