One of the student groups I'm involved in at MIT is the SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board. It's a volunteer computer group so old that they called it "information processing" back then. They run a bunch of different servers and provide lots of cool services for the MIT community. One of the things that they do is teach classes about various things related to computing during IAP, MIT's Independent Activities Period.

So back when I had just gotten started with the group, one of the members was like, "Hey! You want to teach an IAP class!" and, being a frosh, I was like, "Er, I didn't know that... but, um, okay." So I taught one about Debian, of course. This year's topic was Giving Back: Contributing to Debian and the New Maintainer Process. It was a three-day series, as described here. The lengths of the talks varied, with the first day being ~45 minutes, the second being ~1.5 hours, and the last being ~30 minutes.

All of the lecture materials can be found here.

The audience was on the high side of technical, and a lot of the slides were more to nudge me into what I was talking about rather than to be really awesome slides. Which probably should have involved less text.

The packaging crash course definitely drew a much larger audience than the first or third parts, which mostly consisted of people I know who work on Debian-Athena, the unexpected appearance of my friend Aaron Swartz who's in town for a couple weeks, and a few faces that I didn't know.

Maybe next year I'll try to plan something that just involves a more intensive packaging course. Because, although I procrastinated, pushed the original lecture dates back a week from original plan, and made my lecture slides on the day they were presented, I actually did have fun. And it's good practice.