Last week i attended my very first Debian Conference, the Mini Debconf in Hamburg. It gave me the opportunity to personally meet one of my gsoc mentors, formorer, and i’ve also met some other folks, both Debian contributors and people who are not. It was my first time experiencing Hamburg with warm and sunny weather- i went to Hamburg multiple times in the years when the Chaos Communication Congress was held there. The first day of my stay i took the time and looked around the city and was also curious about the state of the congress center- it looks like they are very thorough with the reconstruction.

From the Debconf i only attended the conference itself, not the Debcamp part. There were a couple of interesting talks, one of them was about CADUS, an organisation that works in combining technology and humanitarian aid. They built a mobile hospital from and old truck and they are researching and creating other really useful stuff. They also did a talk at the 34c3 in Leipzig last year.

After the CADUS talk there was formorers talk about the migration to salsa and the end of alioth.d.o. He also talked about some interesting features of the gitlab instance. Then there was a talk about “package security beyond signatures and reproducible builds” which proposed solutions to distribute software with apt that would help to detect targeted backdoors. Definitly an interesting topic, but i think i’ll have to watch the recording of the talk again to understand the approach (or do some reading about merkle trees ;)). Another interesing talk was about the Civil Infrastructure Platform, which aims to provide support for Linux systems for infrastructure that runs up to 30 years.

The recordings of the talks are in the meeting archive