In this low‑pressure Monday meetup, Otto Kekäläinen helps aspiring Debian devs untangle packaging puzzles, absorb the culture, and turn curiosity into accepted contributions.
Wanna learn how to be a bona fide Debian developer by getting free advice from folks who are actually doing that? Or maybe all you want to know is how to build your own deb packages like a pro — again, from people who are actually doing that.
If that’s you, you’re maybe in luck. Otto Kekäläinen is hosting a free weekly Matrix meetup called Mentoring Mondays for the sole purpose of mentoring aspiring Debian contributors — or anyone else who wants to learn about things related to contributing to a Linux distribution.
You could do worse for a mentor. He brings to the table a considerable amount of open source cred, including four years at Amazon Web Services as a software development manager, 10 years at the Finnish WordPress hosting company Seravo as CEO, seven years at the Finnish Unix Users Foundation as board chair, and nearly four years at MariaDB Foundation as CEO.
There’s more, but I’ll stop there.
“Mentoring Mondays have already been happening for the past few Mondays, and this week we had a record 20 people on the call,” he wrote in an announcement he posted Thursday on his website, Optimized by Otto. “During the calls so far we have had a demo of updating a package for a new upstream release using gbp, and of how to create a Merge Request on Salsa for a new upstream version.”
Inside Mentoring Mondays
Kekäläinen describes Mentoring Mondays as a weekly video call that lasts roughly 45 minutes. To encourage participants to speak freely, calls aren’t recorded, and attendees are encouraged to be on-camera to help create a sense of community.
The agenda, in case you’re thinking about attending, is presented by Kekäläinen as a bullet list:
- Weekly walk-through: demo of something in Debian packaging, explaining the what and why
- Discussion on pros and cons to help participants develop their judgment
- Questions & answers on Debian packaging, or open source contributing in general
If you’re wondering who the event targets, the announcement includes a “who should attend” list. If any of these are you, then you might wanna dial up:
- Have built a .deb package at least once and want to do it better
- Are stuck on a specific Debian packaging bug and need guidance
- Want to understand how Debian Developers actually work day-to-day
The trouble is, two of the items on this list could be you, and you still couldn’t go. This appears to be something of a closed meeting for people who are already in the club:
“The call is mainly intended for those who want to contribute to Debian (or Debian derivatives, with Ubuntu being the most popular), but anyone can join to learn about things related to contributing to a Linux distribution,” he said. “Please note that video chat uses Debian Social Jitsi. Joining the call requires authentication using a Salsa account, which anyone contributing to Debian should have anyway.”
The way I understand it, that last note about the Salsa account means that unless you’re already an active Debian contributor, you’re SOL since you already have to be contributing to Debian to get an account. If you want to learn the best way to build .deb packages, or maybe how to get started as a Debian contributor, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Opening this up to folks who aren’t already in the Debian club isn’t a hill on which I’m prepared to die, but I’m hoping that these meetups will become more inclusive before they get too far down the road.
Where and When?
The next meeting will be held on Monday May 4th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC at https://jitsi.debian.social/MentoringMondays. Again, you’ll need to be logged in to Salsa before opening the call on Debian’s Jitsi instance. While the 12:30 UTC time is pretty inconvenient for those of us in the US (except maybe for those of us on the East Coast), it’s a “greater good” thing, since it’s pretty convenient to folks in Europe, Asia, and Australian time zones. That means the time will become the norm until just before the Equinox.
- May 11th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
- May 18th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
- May 25th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
- June 1st, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
- June 8th, 2026 at 12:30 UTC
After that the meeting time will change to accommodate participation in different time zones.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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