My experience at DebConf 2026 in Santa Fé

The Official DebConf26 Group Photo

Last month, I attended DebConf 2026 in Santa Fé, which was my 5th DebConf. As always, it was an amazing experience, and I met a lot of great people there.

For those unfamiliar with the event, it takes place over the course of two weeks. The first week is called DebCamp and is geared more towards hacking and organizing the event itself, while also offering a great opportunity to discuss ideas with others. The second week is the DebConf. We still have the hacklabs, but the talks and workshops are the main focus.

My Activities during DebCamp

My main activity was working on the python-click transition that I started in May. There were only a few packages left, and with the help of Guilherme Puida, we managed to work through all the remaining bugs.

I plan to talk in details about this transition in another blog post, where I will focus on the tools I used and my experience with mass rebuilds and mass bug filing.

I also helped with de Golang Sprint. I worked on a few packages and experimented with the dak API to generate a list of packages that needed manual action.

There was a lot of manual, repetitive work and false positives, so I eventually moved on to some other, more fun stuff.

I also learned a few thinks about kernel live patching while talking to David Tadokoro. I had to work on the Ubuntu Kernel package recently as part of my job, so we exchanged some ideas, and the conversation was really helpful.

He also taught me two commands that I wasn't familiar with, since I'm a newbie in kernel development. Here are the commands:

$ b4 am https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240730071904.1047-1-sergiosacj@riseup.net/
$ b4 diff *mbox

By the way, this is the first and only patch I have submitted to the Linux Kernel. I worked on it during DebConf 2024, when I attended the workshop Helen Koike runs to help newcomers submit their first patch to the Linux Kernel.

Another great interaction was with Marcos Talau. He showed me his remote access setup, which he is using to help students make contributions to Debian without the struggle of setting up the development environment.

Another cool thing is that Puida showed me the command:

$ gbp clone vcs-git:typer

After that, I decided to read the gbp manpage because these little details really improve the overall experience.

I also had many other amazing interactions. I just decided to write down the ones that I felt made the most sense for this kind of "blog report" post.

My Activities during DebConf

I gave a talk about dh-make-vim, a tool I have been working on sporadically. An interesting detail is that one of the video team volunteers for the talk, Piotr, spoke to me about his tool, pypi2deb, which is similar but aimed at the Python ecosystem. There are many tools of this kind in Debian, and they are all interesting pieces of software. I plan to write more about them in the future.

I attended several talks and participated in a few BoF sessions, and they were all great. But something that really stood out to me was the workshop on the Debian Installer, led by Alper Nebi Yasak. I didn't know anything about the Debian Installer, and I liked the way he approached the subject and showed the specific details.

I'll take some time to read the Debian Installer internals documentation. I was not familiar with udebs or with the fact that the Debian Installer uses debconf under the hood.

Wrap up

It was an amazing event. Unfortunatly, a lot of people I know were not able to attend for different reasons, and they were missed.

There were many other things that I enjoyed during this trip. Here are a few more highlights:


Written on 2026-08-19.