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Short summary of the first three months of 2011

Wow, three months without writing even replies to your comments on some old posts. This should not happen, not again.

Let me write a short summary of what happened during this time that kept me so busy that I couldn't find some spare time to keep you up-to-date.

First things first (or business is business if you prefer). So, starting with my job, I took some decissions by the end of 2010 (as the result of some thoughts and oppinions I gathered through the last 4-5 months of last year) which lead me to a frenzy day-by-day of decissions, meetings, paperwork and planning. That has been probably 70% of my time (and headaches) since last december.

I decided to split my efforts and dedicate some more time to some ideas and projects that had been in my suitcase for some time. The kind of projects you try to release to the public from time to time, but you never find the time to do it. I built a plan for each project, with roadmaps, deadlines, etc, and I've been working really really hard to achieve the goals I've set to myself.

As the result of all this work, the first project is already online, Zavo (http://zavo.es), which is an online service (SaaS style) for lawyers, attorneys, judges, etc that consist in a webapp that let them manage customers data (CRM), courts, cases, documents, notifications, events and a lot more stuff. With this service they can manage everything using an easy-to-use web interface powered by some python software (built on top of Zope and django). It has been a great experience to work on that project, setting everything up, and doing it (imho) the right way.

There are another two projects that will be released during 2011, so I expect to be busy for quite some time.

On the other side, I'm back in the freelancer business. Codigo23 website will be up & running in the next few weeks, offering some information about the company services, and I already have contracts with some customers to work on some projects, both related with sysadmin tasks (\o/) and software development (yes, lucky me, related to python).

Being a freelancer is good, really good. Of course there are a lot of things to deal with, and you've to be quite responsible, but you can manage your own time and efforts in a better way, and you can choose which kinds of jobs you want to do.

If you don't trust me, go ask my friend betabug, which is back as a freelancer too after being working exclusively for the same company for the past few years. Who knows, perhaps we will be able to team up for some projects soon ;D.

Back to me, I've learn a lot of things during these past three months.

I've worked for the first time with things like wsgi (writing some stuff directly as wsgi applications, not setting it up existing apps like django or trac, which I already did in the past), Mako (which is a dammed good templating system for python apps) or django-piston (a django app to create RESTful APIs in your apps).

I've read about TDD (Test Driven Development) and I started to write tests in my code. I've played for some time with sphinx (a documentation generator used in projects like python, django, sqlalchemy or blender) and now I'm using it to manage documentation within my projects (developers, users and admins documentation).

I've been working a lot with FreeBSD, with Jails and with the GELI crypto framework for encrypting disks and partitions under FreeBSD.

I've spent some time working with (and trying to understand) Zenoss, which is a really damned powerful beast.

So, as you can see, I hadn't the time nor to write some lines here in the blog neither to get bored at all.

I'll try to write more frequently again, as I've a lot of small articles and tutorials in my suitcase again, probably all of them quite boring, but I've to share them with you, you know...

Having fun at the mountains (Os Ancares) (I)

For the past two days I've been in Os Ancares, a mountain range in north-west Spain located between Lugo and León. I went there with dolo and some friends (included emereci) and it was the perfect excuse for a meeting and have some fun.

The plan was to go for some hiking during the day and stay in cabins at night, just talking, drinking and having a good time.

We woke up early on Thursday and we arrived at the cabins place before noon (it is a bit less than a 1-hour drive from Lugo). We put everything inside two of the cabins (food, drinks, clothes, sleeping bags, table games, etc) and we started to get ready for hiking.

The cabins were really good. There were made of wood, really comfortable and with plenty of space. I think one is ok for about 10-12 people. We were 11, but we had a reservation for 2 cabins (just in case). They were really cheap (75 euro per cabin/night) so we could afford it and we thought it would be even more comfortable.

Once everything was ready, we picked up two of the cars and we drive another hour and a half until we reach Puerto de Ancares, where our scheduled route started.

Puerto de Ancares is 1648m high, and we were going to one of the peaks that is 1975m high. Probably not too much meters to go up, but the path we choose was quite larger than that (about 4-5 Km).

As soon as we went out of the cars, we realized ourselves that the weather was quite different up there. Back in the cabins place it was warm, the sun was shining, and we were fine wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Up there, at Puerto de Ancares it was dammed freezing cold.

Now, guess what? Everybody was carrying over some long pants and hiking clothes and stuff. I had only my shorts, a t-shirt, a sweater and (lucky me) something to put on my head and face. I looked exactly like this:

I swear it was freezing cold at first, when we got out of the cars. Obviously everyone was laughing at me because of my lack of thinking when adding stuff to my bag. Luckily, it turned out later that wearing shorts wasn't a bad choice after all ;D.