I’m going to the #ChefConf

There has been some time since my last post. I said I was taking a break from my previous job and learning new stuff. Well, one thing I’ve been learning is Chef.

For those who don’t know what that is, it is a great piece of software that help to the Sys/Ops to manage their infrastructures. It helps to manage the systems and the infrastructure as a code and apply to them all the things we already do to with the code: reuse it, version it, share it, test it…

I will write soon about these ideas and how this is somehow related to desktop development or GNOME, but today I write here about the conference that is going to be happen in a month at San Francisco: the #ChefConf

Attending #ChefConf!

I’m very excited because Opscode, the company behind Chef (which is Open Source), has given me a generous discount so I can attend to the conference.

I’m going to meet a lot of great hackers from that friendly community. I feel like I know a lot of them 🙂

I’d like to thank Opscode for the discount, but also for thinking that my humble contributions to the project worth enough.

I think the community they have create around Chef is really great. You just have to ask something at the maillist or the IRC channel to see how nice is the people there. There is always someone ready to help you out.

Well, from 15 to 17 of May I will be attending the #ChefConf. If you like to attend, tell me and I’ll give you a community discount for the registration. They gave me a few.

GNOME events

This is being a very GNOME year for me. After some time of the events I’ve attended to an GNOME Hispano meeting, an GNOME Marketing Hackfest, the GUADEC Hispana, the GUADEC and the next week I’m going to attend the GNOME Accesibility Hackfest.

I’ve been a bit lazy with the blog but I’ve been spending my time helping the awesome GNOME a11y team with is making big progress and a huge effort to keep the project alive and healthy.

I’m looking forward to meet all the enthusiastic a11y developer than are going to come to Seville the next week 🙂

Well, and of course, to Joanmarie that comes before and is being so patient (sometimes :-P) with me  😉

Great GNOME Hackers meeting

As I told the last time, this weekend was the GNOME Hispano meeting at Seville and was one of the best I remember.

I didn’t expect to have so many people here. The meeting was mostly improvised and with just few weeks of preparation, but we had hackers from many different places of Spain. I think the session with more people had over 30 attenders.

The people didn’t fit on the room so they were looking through the windows. It was cool 🙂

People didn't fit inside the room
People didn't fit inside the room

We even had Rodrigo Moya teaching us about CouchDB and DesktopCouch from another region of Spain using an open tool for video/audio meetings. Rodrigo was great 🙂

There was more good sessions, but for me was especially interesting the explanation about how the new XInput2 and GTK+ works with multi-touch interfaces made by Carlos Garnacho. Another session especially instructive for me was the one about GObject Instrospection and Gjs by Lorenzo Gil (lgs).

I knew about GObject Instrospection, but I didn’t know it was so easy to add to the current libraries and all the adventages we all have with that. Really good stuff….

But we also have a meeting about how some companies from here (Emergya, Yaco, Onirica and Warp by now) are going to approach some projects about to improve the a11y on GNOME. The projects were asked by the Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society and we all want to be coordinated with upstream maintainers and GNOME goals, so it could be really useful.

This sesion was interesting and we are now in the same page to talk this week with the GNOME Foundation people at the Zaragoza Marketing Hackfest. I think these projects and the collaboration is being proposed is going to be really good for everybody: GNOME, our client and first of all, the users.

Let’s see 😉

GNOME Hispano’s meeting at Seville

This weekend (May 1th and 2th) at the Yaco’s offices at Seville (Spain) will hold the  next GNOME Hispano meeting.

Here will be a bunch of Spanish hackers talking about GNOME technologies and having fun.

The program is ready so we will talking about:

But we will be also talking about a11y on GNOME and how to coordinate the efforts we (Yaco and Emergya) are doing with some projects that are being paid by the Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society with the GNOME a11y developers.

Here’ll be also Dani García (danigm) a friend who was working with us at Emergya and now is working with our friends of Yaco, to show us his project TBO, a GTK+ app for designing and creating comic strips from GNOME. The idea is that he could present the project and the rest of hackers make sugestions so the project will be fully GNOME friendly.

This could be a good help for those who want to start their own project for GNOME and don’t know exactly how do it right.

Well, I hope to see a lot of good hackers and friends there.

See you on friday night for the warm up 😉

I’m going to FOSDEM 2010

Well, last year was my first time in Brussels and FOSDEM. It was great, but I guess this time, as Barney would say: it’s going to be legen…. wait for it…. dary!!! 😛

This time a lot of friends are going and I hope to meet new not-yet-friends up there.

I’m going with my good friend from Emergya and also great Guadalinex developer, Roberto. Here we are at some spanish FLOSS congress….

Juanje and Rober at the Hispalinux congress
Juanje and Rober at the Hispalinux congress

We are the two guys in the middle… If you are at the FOSDEM we look (kind of) like in the photo.

BTW, If you see the girls you can also tell us 😛

See you there 😉

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Drupalcamp: Call for sponsors

Back in time I was working in a small company (actually it was a cooperative) called Interactor. When I was there, I was working in different stuff like the Guadalinex v3, but also some web projects. Then was when I first saw the Drupal‘s code.

I knew php, but I didn’t like so much. But Drupal’s code was different to other big (or not so big) project in php, it was well organized and very clear.

One of my partners at Interactors and still friend poked me the other day to tell me about this Drupalcamp thing. He (Javier Carranza) is owner of a small but very productive company called Alquimia which is specialized on Drupal and he is also helping with the organization of the conferences.

DrupalCamp Spain 2010
DrupalCamp Spain 2010

I got really impressed when I saw how well organized they have it and I’ll definitely go there 🙂

There are more than 450 pre-registered. They are developers, designers and companies which work with Drupal or are interested on it.

Now they are looking for sponsors (sorry, the link is in Spanish, here is a automatic translation) so If you like to be one of them, or you know someone who could do it, just tell them.

Thanks 🙂

GNOME Hispano meeting and CISL09

I’ve been in Caceres (Extremadura) the last three days attending the “Conferencia Internacional de Software Libre” (International Free Software Conference), one of the biggest FLOSS events in Spain.

It was a very intense days and I met a lot of friends and new interesting people.

But also was held there the GNOME Hispano meeting with people like Carlos Garcia Campos (aka Kal), Álvaro del Castillo (aka acs), José Ángel Díaz, and others gnomers.

The beginning was actually quite moving for some of us, because José made a retrospective of GNOME’s history and how GNOME Hispano was born. For those who were that night, when GNOME Hispano started this made them draw a smile in their (our) faces 🙂

I couldn’t attend all the sessions, because I had to attend also to the other conference, but they told me they were interesting. There was stuff like “GNOME Fails“, “Introduction to the Desktop course“, “The migration of GNOME Hispano’s services to OpenSolaris” and the other two sessions where I was: “Software development using git” and “GNOME and the distributions” (which, actually was mine :-P)

My talk was about how what developers make can be affected by changes on the distribution or by third party people who need to integrate their software with the desktop and more software. We were also talking about the very end users and how is more important to them some small and silly bugs than the next big and fancy feature.

We’ve learned from the experience of thousand of users in Extremadura (GNU/LinEx) and Andalusia (Guadalinex) that the very end users (people from little villages, childrens, old people, and so) don’t care so much about the new fancy stuff but they really do care about crash when they try to perform an email search on Evolution or some dialog is untranslated.

Some of those errors come from the distributions but others are responsibility of the upstream developers. I know it is much funnier to be working in a fancy feature or dealing with a very tricky bug, than take care of a hundred of silly bugs, but it’s probably that a lot of people won’t see the super-feature, just because one those silly bugs… I can tell you…

Anyways, the talk was interesting, the people was participating and we all learnt some lessons, I think. I’d like to write some conclusions to see what do you think as well…

I’ll probably do 😉

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.