Gustavo on Information Technology

Yes, I’m alive.

Since the second half of last summer I’ve been inactive in the Free Software arena. No commits, no emails from me in the last few months which may indicate that the projects are dead. So I wanted to write to let you know that I have no plans to stop maintaining any of my projects. I will start to catch up with all the things I’ve missed in the projects I normally contribute to and the projects I develop alone.

The reason why you’d heard nothing from me is that I left Spain to move to Oxford, in order to work at the cool company behind 2degreesnetwork.com. The removal was the most time-consuming and stressful thing I’d ever done, but after one month working here, I’m happy to say that it was worth it. The atmosphere is just like I thought Web 2.0 companies were, and I am surrounded by nice and talented people. I can’t be happier.

Well, back to the projects, I had to wait a lot to get access to the Internet at home, but I got it a couple of weeks ago and have been catching up (slowly) with the pending stuff. I still have a huge stack of unanswered emails, for example.

For the last couple of weeks I was working fulltime on repoze.what 1.1 and repoze.what-django. I hope to finish the documentation and get the first alpha releases out very soon; the code itself is pretty much ready and, as usual, fully tested. I didn’t have plans to do a repoze.what 1.1 release anytime soon, but while developing repoze.what-django I found myself implementing something which would be useful outside Django (i.e., ACLs) and thus I decided to move it to repoze.what.

After that, I want to improve the auth documentation in TurboGears 2. repoze.what-pylons is the crucial part of the repoze.what integration in TG2 and it’s fully documented, but duplicating part of those docs won’t do any harm and adding some tips and tricks would be nice. I started doing that some months ago but never committed it; I have to finish it this time.

Then I’d like to make repoze.what-pylons take advantage of the new features in repoze.what 1.1, like repoze.what-django already does.

That’s it for the foreseeable future. Next year I really want to get serious with Booleano and PyACL.

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I got a temporary job last summer, my first paid job; I was an operator at a call center. Many people got surprised about it, at least those who know that I’ve been dealing with computers since I was 15 and contributing to Freedomware projects since I was 17 or so.

They expected me to get a computing job, but I didn’t. I actually never sought for such a job. Just take a look around: Nearly all computing jobs require people to deal with Freedom-trampling software. Sure, I had to use Windows at the call center anyways, but my duties were beyond working on the computer, unlike a computing job — where I would’ve been required to administrate the kind of software I fight against everyday. I’ve always been proud of that desicion, and I’d do it again if required.

Some weeks ago I received an offer for a computing job, but not “yet another computing job”, this is an honest one: A computing company fully committed to Freedom in computing, with a boss who is a well-known Free Software supporter, Alberto Barrionuevo (president of the FFII, among other things).

I’ve been working for Alberto’s Freedomware consulting firm, Opentia, in a very interesting project. The job is rather cool: I work from home, it’s well-paid and I’m promoting free computing environments at the same time!

The only drawback(?) is that it’s a project-basis job, I mean, it’s not a permanent one. It all depends on the requested projects.

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