Ramble on

Use OSS to Prove Experience

After some years of working in different positions and lots of projects, you will realize that you tend to specialisation and that is difficult to get new projects.

For example, when I joint my current company, my profile was very sysadm oriented, and it was kind of hard to prove I’m not a bad programmer (IMHO, I started programming when I was 13).

When you do that thing you’re known to do well, you’ll be more focused to do it again and again. Call it ultra-specialisation or just “you’ve been typecasted”.

Just in case you want to change your role a little bit, you’ll see that it’s very difficult, because your CV shows you as hardcore sysadm. Then it’s when open source software can help you in your career.

About two months ago I realized that I’ve never been a significant contributor for any open source project. I’ve submitted small patches every now and then, but nothing noticeable that I could highlight in my CV. Although I’ve been programming for almost 20 years of my life, to different degrees of programming, I don’t have enough stuff to prove that I can program professionally in some areas (OK, may be bogom; but it’s small and with little interest right now).

So I started to look for a interesting project to be involved in, for at least 4 hours a week, and contribute as much as I can so I can fix that gap in my CV.

Finally, my target is Cherokee, and I’ve started to work hard in reading the code, and I’ve been successful fixing two small bugs that required deep code reading (aka 1 hour of code reading though the tree to write a two line fix).

I think I’ll be comfortable with the code in a pair of weeks, so I will need less that 4 hours week to be productive (but I like it, so I wouldn’t mind spending more time hacking on it heh).

What do you think? Is this a good idea to improve your CV?

Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.05 Released

Seems that things are going back to normal, after I was finally settled in Exeter.

Last week I was hacking a little bit in Cherokee web server, what resulted in a relatively useful validator plugin.

The other thing I’ve been meaning to do was fix my review request to include Nautilus Flickr Uploader in Fedora, but that needed some more time because I found a couple of bugs that were worth fixing before (you can check the changes).

OK, it weren’t big changes, but I’ve found them quite annoying while uploading some photos from Exeter (specially the ‘spaces in path’ problem while dragging photos into the preview list).

So, you can grab the new release of Nautilus Flickr Uploader in the usual place.

Here Documents Magic

Check this two examples of here document in BASH.

First one, classic:

$ cat >file-sh<<EOF
string="hello world"
echo $string
EOF

Second one, new magic I learnt today:

$ cat >file2-sh<<"EOF"
string="hello world"
echo $string
EOF

There’s a big difference:

$ diff file-sh file2-sh 
2c2
< echo 
---
> echo $string

First notice, and it saved my day!

Update: if you’re reading this post through your feed reader, the examples may look weird. Blame Tumblr: the way they generate the RSS it’s broken.

Getting in Touch With Local Linux Users

I’ve been doing some research to know how’s the situation of LUGs and distro-communities in Exeter and surrondings. I believe in the importance of going local (the results in Valencia were amazing, with two Barcamp Valencia in 6 months).

My results are not bad so far:

• Fedora ambassadors from UK (at least two people seem to be based in Exeter).
• South West people of the UK Team (Ubuntu LoCo, at least two Exonians).
• Devon and Cornwall GNU/Linux user group (the South West (UK) Linux User Group is closed, but this LUG it’s active!).
• Devon & Cornwall Perl Mongers (not strictly a LUG, but related).

Moreover I know there’s at least another fedorian in Exeter, and I would bet there’s a Gentoo guy too (there’s always a Gentoo guy! hehe).

That makes about 5 or 6 guys in the town that like Linux and actively use and kinda promote it. That’s great!

The DCGLUG has meetings in Paignton at regular basis. Although that’s not far away from Exeter, I wonder if it would be interesting to hang out for a beer and geek chatting with the local people.

Unpacked

Things are going more and more stable each day, and one of them arrived today: the Internet connection.

We have chosen Virgin broadband, and we have suffered the self-install kit that needs IE or Safari in order to activate the connection. Shame on you Virgin.

After some WTFs we got to activate the connection and everything seems OK, I’m pretty satisfied with the service (if you don’t take into account the non-sense of the activation process).

Tomorrow I’ll be back at work (remotely), and I hope I can resume all the halted stuff since I started moving to Exeter.