RichiH used flint and steel to light the bonfire. We carefully fed it up from those sparks to a blaze. Put on the biggest logs we could find to make it last. Now I'm sitting on the hill above it watching folks gathered around. A poem is being read, in Hindi, then translated for us to English. Others have shared songs and poems in a dozen languages, both classics and their own. Out below the darkness of the lake. This is Debian at 20.

At the start of this DebConf, I gave a talk on "Debian Cosmology. In that (and a later "dh_busfactor" talk) I shared my hopes and my fears. I was conflicted about giving the this talk, worked on it for weeks, felt it might not work, or be depressing. I've had nothing but good comments about it.

20 years is ages in internet time and technical projects ossify over time. The last session I was in this afternoon was a presentation of a new tool, which I hope & feel has the potential to fundamentally change an important and suboptimal part of Debian. Then I walked outside to a rainbow over crystal clear Swiss alps on the horizon. How encouraging, and what a nice story that will be around some future campfire.