I am an official Debian developer, although I don't spend enough time for debian these days. You never do.

In the past, I used for example to be one of the coordinators of debian french translators group for several years (but I resigned over a decade ago). I contributed the po4a framework, allowing to translate easily any kind of documentation. I had to pass over the maintainance to Nekral for about 10 years due to lack of time, and kinda took it back when Nekral had to go.
I am also the official Debian maintainer of quilt, a tool to allowing to survive with a pile of patches against a changing source tree. This tool, written by Andrew Morton and Andreas Gruenbacher, is now one of the core component of the debian packaging system.
I package several games, such as widelands, minetest, flare or frogatto.

Check my other contributions on GitHub, OpenHub or CoderWall.

Random Links

• The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. A must read.
• L'histoire des Pingouins - a SF story about Linux, in French.
• Tao of programming - the philosophy of (good) programmers.

• BOFH - Bastard Operator From Hell. See also my BRFH.

• Cathedrals, Bazaars and the Town Council. A text from Alan which should be read and read again by wannabe open-source contributors.

• http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html How the cloud introduces new way of having closed-source softwares, and why we cannot rely on them to develop open-source softwares. Yes, I know I should resign from GitHub. But they have such a shiny streak thingy...
• http://www.levenez.com/unix/ Unix history - historical tree of the Unix versions.
  

External Sources of Procrastination

• Light Bot and Light Bot 2 are two flash games for programmers. I like it a lot, even if the first one is a bit short and the second one is a bit hard.
• Robozzle is similar to Light Bot yet different. If you liked one, you'll like the other one. It's kinda playable in javascript although I've been told that the SilverLight version is much more usable.
• There is also some funny and challenging exercises in the PLM. In particular, check the maze and lightbot lessons.
• Online exercisers: these sites list a whole load of algorithmic problems. Pick a problem, solve it, submit your solution, and the robot will evaluate the correction of your program instantly. Unfortunately, the problem lists are long and uneven. I must be prefectionits, but I'd prefer some more editorial work from their maintainers.
  • CodinGame The best players will get interesting job offers.
  • Sphere Online Judge
  • Programming Challenge The editorial work is a bit better here, with less exercises.
• Programming Contests: There is several sites that organize some sort of programming contests. In general, they are intended to select the best programmer from the participant, and are thus quite difficult to achieve. Another result of this premise is that no or little help is given to improve your solution if you fail. I must confess that I didn't really tryied them out, but you may like them.
  • GoogleJam is an annual coding contest.
  • TopCoder is another similar system, but more restrictive on the languages you may use (only Java, C++ or C#).
  • ICFP contest is certainly the king of all programming contests. It is also rather difficult, definitely far from the "gentle coding brainteasers" category listed below
  • A larger collection of Programming Contests maintained by Pascal Lafourcade.
• Small games that could maybe be implemented for fun:
  • Pen and paper games
  • Rich maths activities
  • Full collection by Pascal Lafourcade.
• If you liked these links and if you speak French, you probably should stop by interstices, too. That's a really nice website.

Hacking ideas

Here are some nice little projects I'd like to implement one day.

AutoMultipleChoice should allow Parsons Problems.

It would be cool to have a command-line tool for searching Linux commands such as this one, but relying on local and FOSS resources instead of google online services.

A Friedman number is a positive integer which can be written in some non-trivial way using its own digits, together with the symbols + – × / ^ ( ) and concatenation. For example, 25 = 5² and 126 = 21 × 6. 736 is a nice Friedman number because its digits are in the same order in the decomposition: 736 = 7 + 3⁶