2008 is gone..review (kind of)

It’s just too late for reviews and things like that, but I’m sure some of you would like to read (in brief) about my last year.

Best thing of the year is my first daughter, Antonia. She came into this world on the last day of march, which was a surprise. Since I was working for a MS sell out enterprise at that time, and about 200 Kms away, I traveled as soon as I could to see her. Swear to me she is wonderful, and I see her as a Linux user in the near future as she enjoys so much as I play with Compiz =)

Work was fine while it lasted. Learned a lot of SQL tricks thanks to Alex Albanez, and had fun with Karen (.NET is not that bad) and Aldo (Gnexus genius) as well.   Great people and I wish I still worked with them but when you are not having fun and disagree with so many things such as wrong technology choices, and others that I am not allowed to publish (screw it anyway), the best thing to do is to move on.

Talking about Linux, I became a proud translator for the openSUSE project, and lately joined the marketing team too. Also discovered the wonders of the KDE 4 desktop environment. It feels great giving it back, and real part of the community.

Now I’m looking for a job, so I hope it’s open source related. So far vacations are going well, fun with the family, in the right place.

is money that important?

Today I had a brief chat with my friend Pedro Villavicencio, and I spoke about how I feel now that I’m much more involved in the open source community, and how freaking great it feels to give it back. I mean, if I am using linux (and no longer windowns on my notebook, kind of dictator here because my girlfriend has no choice =P, and I feel fine) and all these really well designed tools for free, so I question what can I do for the guys that have worked so hard to make it happen?

There are some roads I can take, and so far I have chosen just two of them: translation and marketing. I am damn good at the first one, as for the second one let’s say I’m not really bright but still it’s a good thing to share points of view with the rest of the team.

Most of us contribute for the joy of it. In most cases no money behind. What’s really behind our work is a lot of feedback, our time, and the will to make our resources better day after day. Each one of us in the open source community is good (to say the least) because we are here with specific interests and do the best we can. We are not to make money, we are to make the best piece of software in the world and for today I have not heard anyone to prove me wrong on that.

I am a proud linux user and I am in this for the love of it. There is nothing compared to sharing my knowledge, which will ever be there so I ain’t affaid of someone taking it away. Like Pedro said, if one day I have the chance to work for an open source compay, that would great! but the road might be long, you never know.

“The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’. Yes, that’s it.”
- Linus Torvalds.