I've been in A Coruña for this year's GUADEC since Tuesday night, and it rocked. I did a late registration after my first week at Collabora, which is sponsoring my stay here.

I came one day early to participate, as Debian's representative, at the yearly GNOME Advisory Board meeting, for the first time. It was a positive experience, which helped me get a grasp of the “big picture” of what the GNOME Foundation does. I also had the pleasure of visiting Igalia's awesome offices in the city, and puting faces to many names during the meeting.

I presented an overview of Debian's relation to GNOME, how our packaging team works and what are our goals and biggest problems as a GNOME downstream. We stirred some good debate as some other Advisory Board members share part of our problems. I should be posting a summary of what happened there for debian-project@ldo as soon as I have the time to scribble it.

I've met with GNOME Hispano people I hadn't seen since 2004 or 2006 in the best case, and catched up with many of them. I've also met many GPUL members I had know for over a decade via IRC, but never had met in person, and it was about time. And of course, I've got to known a good number of my new workmates at Collabora, and had fun with them around the conference, the beach and the numerous post-conference events.

Last, but not least, I ended up participating in the GNOME Olympics, substituting Rodrigo in Team B “Core Dumped”, along with Stefano, John, Bastien, Chema and Adam. WE WON, not thanks to me, but the statistics shine: I've won all FreeFA World Cups I've played :P so here's a PROtip: if you want to win next year, be sure to be my team mate, and more importantly, be sure Adam is not your rival. :)

Unfortunately, I'm only attending the core days so tonight I'll be flying back to Madrid on my way home in València. See you next year! A Coruña is a city that has impressed me quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to coming back for some more standard vacation at some point. :)

It feels like I'm sitting in a roller-coaster wagon. There's probably too much change going on for me to assimilate naturally. In particular:

I just wrapped up (well, mostly) one of the toughest Uni semestres. I had to deal with lots of very time consuming assignments, and then the usual round of final exams. Even if this semester I got the best marks in my journey (or shall we say Via Crucis) through University, I still managed to fail one exam, for the Advanced Networks subject, which is quite annoying, given I got high marks (even the highest in one case) in other subjects I really don't master at all. In any case, this is the end of the pain. The only thing that's left is just one exam and a project based on GNU/Linux technologies which will basically mean formatting for prettyness the sysadmin docs we've been collecting at the office during the last few years. This effort will be nothing to what I've been doing during the past 18 months, so I'm really relieved to have it past me already.

Getting rid of studies comes just two weeks before a big change in my professional career. Friday was my last day at the Institut Tecnològic d'Informàtica, after five and a half fantastic years working with awesome people in a very friendly atmosphere. I've learned a great deal, and taking this decision wasn't easy at all. I leave lots of good friends behind, people I really love, and tomorrow will be difficult to not have them around me. I wish my ITI ex-workmates the best of luck in these difficult times for everyone in Spain and specially in the Valencian Country with the massive cuts going on. I feel the timing for this jump couldn't be better.

Tomorrow, when I get ready to go for work, I won't be leaving home at all, instead I will just sit where I am right now, at home, and log into some corporate IRC server. Tomorrow I'll be joining Collabora, and I'm a mix of excited, curious and happy about this incredible opportunity. Thanks to Sjoerd for nags, I might not be writing this if it wasn't for you!

When I was first approached about this, I thought Collabora was a small company. But as I looked more into it, I discovered that's not longer the case, there's many more people than I imagined working there (here!), and was delighted to see I knew many of them, and many other are well known members of the major Free Sofware communities. I'll be joining the sysadmin team to work closely with Jo Shields. See you tomorrow, folks. :)

This opportunity to work from home is godsend, given the third bit of change that'll be happening soon: sometime in late September, Maria and I should join the ranks of first-time parents, following the baby boom wave surrounding us. While you can imagine we're really happy about this, we're also freaking out because this is going to happen in just two months and a half, and weeks go by really fast lately. So yeah, being able to be at home with this really small baby will be a big bonus for the incredible experience we're about to enjoy. We've been both busy with other stuff, but during the summer we should be focusing on preparing the baby's arrival. There's a whole lot to do!

Expect my Debian and other Free Software activities to get a hit, of course. :) If I am normally sleep-deprived, this is going to be the next level.