Living life as Free software hacker with Rodrigo Moya experience

Well in this talk Rodrigo Moyá told us about the most relevant things that happened to him during his career as a developer in many different companies he worked. The first of this anecdotes was that (as may had happened to all of us) during his first job he though that he really didn’t know much about developing or programming in general as the people that was already in the company, since he was just a beginner that during the afternoons used to play a bit with linux downloading some source code and that was it.

Later on, as the time went by, he discovered that this wasn’t true at all. He found out that there were people, that worked with him, that maybe didn’t even know how to use a simple version control system or that weren’t able to used a library for code that was used regularly and made more sense to put it on a library.

Well then he told us about many other companies he went through some of them were acquired by others so he went through several opensource software companies. Among this companies a very important experience we could mention is the one he got during his work in cannonical.

He is a strong believer on working on opensource code and making the changes get pushed to the upstream project, so he told us that at the beginning he was very comfortable since he worked in projects that always were pushed to upstream and stuff, but later on they changed him into working for the desktop project so this is where he told us that it was very hard for him since he had to kind of mediate between canonical and gnome interests, and sometimes this mediations takes you most of your time and since he is a programmer this wasn’t really the kind of things he liked to lose most of his time during the work, instead he wanted to be really writing some code. So this is a very important stuff you have to take care when working in this king of projects too, that usually you are not aware of them until you get related into this type of projects

Then of course we had some questions about all this experiences he tried to told us, so someone asked about the other roles in free software projects different than the developers. More specifically we asked Rodrigo about if there was enough work places also for other software roles different that developers?

To what he replied that even thought this free software projects usually start with a single or couple of developers, of course there is always going to be needed some systems administrators to manage the platform where the software is going to be deployed so there is plenty of work for sys admins in free software too.