If you're going to Saaan Franciiiisco , to the Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit

So the first day of the Google Summer of Code mentors summit is done.

After arriving in San Francisco Thursday at noon and spending Thursday and Friday there -- blog post to come, with pics -- last night we arrived at the Sunnyvale hotel for today's mentors summit. We had a nice (well, tastes are discussable) thai food dinner and met some of the open source folks: John from the Ascend project and a Scottish guy (whose name I don't remember -- Jim?) from a language processing project.

Today we went to Google plex for the first day of the Mentors Summit, saw a bit of where Google people work, ate their food, drank their drinks and snacked their snacks. We've got the mentors yellow shirts -- I start to believe more and more that the whole purpose of this years GSoC was to make people wear ridiculous colors :) -- and had a short cool opening from Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona after which we did the session proposing and scheduling.

Also in the bus this morning we socialized with some nice people from the Fedora project and over coffee we met the other Romanian guy in the mentors gang (at least that's what I know about), Stefan Bucur.

First session we went into was about project hosting, all the platforms out there with their goods and bads, including self hosting.

Then some more thai food and caffeine free coke for lunch in the sun, accompanied by nice flute (?) music from one of the mentors.

After the lunch, we went to the talk about how to make mentoring a continuous activity, with discussions about potential similar programs initiated by OS organizations, and successful stories about motivating students.

Then we went to see how to teach college students to be "hackers" (yeah, I intentionally didn't go to the women in open source talk that was in the same time), how to make them use the real-world tools and how to motivate them, with a successful story from the university of Chicago. With this occasion I discovered that there are a lot of people in this year's summit (maybe in the program in generally) which are part of a university team (teaching, researching, etc).

After a short break, I went to see "pretty pictures": discussion about alternative methods for documentation (image, video, anything non-text), how to produce it and how to stimulate others to. Bottom line is that you need to make your users "ecstatic" about the project so that they feel the need to show it to the world in a screencast :).

Then, the last session of the day was about the relation between the academia world and the open source one, and how nice would it be if all knowledge in the academia would be published and maintained as an open source project.

Now we are back at the hotel and we're gonna have a cool pizza party by the pool. I tried on my mentors shirt over my khaki long-sleeved shirt and it's actually pretty decent. Going out now to amaze everybody with this combination (and eat), and hope to be able to stay up longer than yesterday (I fell asleep at 23, dear me).

I'm going to FOSDEM!

I'm going to FOSDEM, the meeting for open source and free software developers meeting in Brussels, on the 7-8 february weekend.

I will be there with Marta and Sergiu (not with Marius too, unfortunately), (lightning) talking about XWiki's new GWT WYSIWYG editor we're working on these days (and I am heavily into), on Sunday afternoon in the Ferrer room.

Otherwise I will be wandering around the halls and rooms and talks and workshops of FOSDEM, just like last year, proudly wearing my XWiki tShirt, socializing (!) with geeks and exchanging open source and free ideas with anyone interested.

so, I'm going to FOSDEM. What are YOU doing on the 7-8 february weekend?

XWiki at Infoeducation

A couple of weeks ago took place the Infoeducatie computer science camp, and XWiki was there, to do a teaser presentation about our platform. I went there with Jerome and Thomas, who was visiting the Iasi office at that time. Although it's been happening for a while and it is the place to be for computer highschool students, I didn't go to the Infoeducation camp ever as a student, but fortunately I grew up to get there as a 'lecturer'.



Our "host" all through the days was Vlad Giurcanu, my computer science teacher from highschool who was there with his (successful) team of students.

We spent two days at the camp, its last two days (it's something around 6 days) and got the strong taste of the computer science at Galaciuc during the Infoeducation camp (in the very nice romanian mountains). We met a lot of interesting people and some of the smart kids there -- it is a very nice place to find out things, to have IT discussions and the crowd there is a very nice gang to hang around. I only wish I did this kind of things earlier...

Then, after the camp, we took a very detoured way home: we crossed the mountains towards Brasov to have lunch with my sister there (who was on holidays from Bucuresti), and to there, we went through Tg Secuiesc and to the Sf. Ana lake. After meeting my sister (I resaw her for the first time after returning from France therefore somehing around 6 months) we took the road back to Barlad through Oituz and Onesti. Vlad drove all this time, in his own very particular way of doing it, yet safe (I did live to write this post).



From Barlad, we, the Iasi guys, took the train to get to work next day, after a tiring weekend but very, very, very nice. And since the pictures (and maps) are worth another 1000 words, here you go: Thomas's and Vlad's (1 and 2) pictures from the camp, and a map I've created.

One year at XWiki

and also my first year in a job.


While waiting for my soup to boil, I tried to write this post that I've been wishing to write for a while. Somewhere after two paragraphs of writing into it, I realized that it's dangerous, I won't do it, it won't be. Even with all my "artistic talents" I cannot mask it (or I'm too lazy to do it). Even if it would be nice to have an anniversary blog post in which to do a recap of the last year, it won't happen.

@ Strasbourg II

Finally, no more Romulus blogging, McDonalds dinners and hanging out on the schools hallways: I am connected with the world wide web from my room but that means that now I'm working all day and don't have time to blog anymore...


In the mean time, I took some more pictures of the city, walked around, did some more papers and even got to school (the thing that looks like a UFO) in the Parc d'Innovation d'Illkirch. The stuff look simple for now, I understand something around 50% of what my teachers say and realize that I already knew that stuff (maybe the new things are in the parts I don't understand). My classmates are ok but we're very few girls in classes, of course (I should have expected that when I left home but I forgot to)


So it's vacantion right now (fr school rules, we just started and we're already in vacation) and I take advantage of this to code a little, then go visit the XWiki office in Paris and then go to FOSDEM next weekend.


So, overall, besides feeling a little lonely and lost sometimes, it is all ok (I have internet hence I have all my friends with me) and I only expect better!

I'm leaving today

Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I'm gonna be a part of it
Strasbourg, Strasbourg

I will be leaving in a couple of hours for Strasbourg, with a Paris stop tomorrow. I will be there through the whole spring, for my second semester of master studies, at Université Louis Pasteur. While there, I plan a lot of visits all over France: the XWiki office in Paris, Sergiu and Marta in Lille, fosdem (I know that's actually in Brussels, don't worry) , and a little piece of Germany, no matter where.

The non bright side of the story is that I will miss a lot of things from home: my family, my friends and the places (when I left Iaşi today I couldn't believe it was for 5 months!)

And I hope I will manage to make some time for my blog, too, starting tonight!

Blogged with Flock

XWiki Iaşi team @ Durău

The last weekend we gathered 'all' the XWiki Iaşi team to go to the mountains, as some sort of goodbye party for JV who left Iaşi this week. Well, 'all' the XWiki team meant, after all, without Marius (who had some school assignments he had to finish until monday) and without Evelina & Cristi who also had some school deadline changed to monday without notice. Finally, the XWiki team was: me, Raluca, Jerome and Jean-Vincent (JV for short) and Petru (who is a xwikier only 'by association').
Friday afternoon was shopping afternoon ('Let's go to the mall, today!'): after a tough negotiation for boots (J and JV wanted the same shoes and are the same size but there weren't 2 pairs available in the shop), and a 'girlie-girl' shopping style from me (3-4-5-6 shops but no boots for me to like :D) we deviced the next day's wake-up plan and went home.
Saturday morning we left Iaşi at 6:00 am and, after a 'niiiiice' 3 hours trip and some sleep (only for some of us) we arrived in Durău: nice fresh air smell and some snow here-and-there. We checked in at the hotel, grabbed something fast to eat and then left for the trip to Fântânele.

From XWiki @ Durău

Once we got there, we had a cup of hot wine, took some pictures with the nice view and, despite the original plan to get to Fântânele, drink, and then return to Durău, decided to go further until we can see the "Izvorul Muntelui" lake and then return.

From XWiki @ Durau

A kind caban dog lead the way towards Dochia caban: he went on and, when we stopped it stopped and returned to see if we all are OK. At 'La morminte' (around 1300m altitude), the path started to be snowy: it was not dangerous (yet) but still, it was a sign that we cannot go further without proper equipment. We went a little further to see the lake, took pictures (to testify that we indeed were there), Raluca gave her share of food to the dog (who was clearly planning to continue the path to Dochia) and then returned to 'La Morminte'. There we had a nice picnic below 0 degrees Celsius with bread and french camembert. We continued our trip back to Durău through Fântânele and then through 'Poiana Viezuri'. In Durău, we had a romanian dinner with 'Tochitura Moldoveneasca' and red wine at the hotel and a very 'personal' interpretation of some famous international songs from the guy at the keyboard in the hotel restaurant.
Although some of us were very sleepy, the night continued with a delightful cards game, romanian Whist and, upon Raluca's request -- who was tempted by the music she heard from outside, with a visit to the 'disco'. And when I say visit, I mean visit, i.e. 30 minutes. The 'disco' was actually a lame 'village club' (you know the kind of club I'm talking about), which made the visit 2 times more fun!

From XWiki @ Durau

The next day, we were supposed to wake up at 6 o'clock so that we can go to 'Duruitoarea' waterfall too. Of course, I only woke up to make a couple of calls to the others and agree that it is better to sleep on and see more about it later, when everybody was up. At 10, we talked about staying some more and leaving Durău in the evening but the unavailability of the bus seats in the evening ruined our plans. The trip ended with a walk around Durău, a visit to the monastery and some more pictures of the surroundings.

From XWiki @ Durau

The trip back was 'spectacular', as usual in Romanian buses (I really need to buy a car!): a lot of people going in and out of the bus, the driver's stops for each one of them, loud conversations, people crushing into each other to fit the size of the bus, and the eternal travelers that know that the bus might be too crowded but never, ever make reservations, etc, etc.
All in all it was a successful outing, and until the next one, we will enjoy the pictures:

What have I been doing in the past few months?

Yes, it's been a long break and, as you already assume, here comes a (long) post with a bulleted list of all that happened in the mean time and deserves to be mentioned:

• First of all (I've been trying to write this for a while now) I started working for XWiki Iasi. We are a team of 9 people but only 7 of us are in Iasi and only 5 of us are Iasi employees: Sergiu and Marta are in France for studies, Jerome and Jean-Vincent are employees from the Paris office that came in Iasi to help setup the team here. The romanian team is made of: Evelina, Raluca, Cristi, Marius and me, closely collaborating with the big french team in Paris.
  I must mention that this is my first job and I'm learning things as they happen: the development process of a big project, the teamwork, the communication, the skills, getting used to "doing only one thing" (as opposed to school where I was doing a different thing everyday, writing code in 3 different programming languages at the same time, learning and trying new technologies, banging the head against the wall for all these reasons but enjoying every minute of it). Still, XWiki is a nice place to do "more-than-one-thing": there are various areas where you can spread your work if you want and creativity is encouraged.
  We also had a nice XWiki Iasi launch party in october where we invited a lot of friends (some pictures can be found on picasaweb).
  I also learned that cultural barriers are no barriers at all and all it takes is just a little time to get used... (a subject that deserves a post of its own...)




• Second of all, I started the master courses at infoiasi that compensate the "doing-only-one-thing" at work. Not too many opinions on this yet, besides the shock that, after trying for 2 years (the final years) to teach us how to write code and how to look at things from the practical side, they are now going back to the theoretical side (that gave us nightmares in the first 2 years at the faculty) and expect us to understand everything and agree... I know, it is supposed to be like that and it is OUR job to put the two together, etc, etc, but it is a little hard to bear anyway...




• Third, I started my classes at the faculty: I am teaching web technologies laboratories to the fourth year students. This whole "getting on the other side" experience is very interesting on its own and deserves a full post, too (maybe I'll do it, just maybe). I can say that I am having a lot of fun teaching, although you should probably get some opinions from my students too...




• Fourth of all, I wrote a chapter about web recommendations using microformats embedded data for the "Web 2.0 Programming" book (in Romanian) to appear at Polirom. While doing this, I finally finalized the Java Firefox extension example that I talked about in the last post, realized that it's incredibly hard to talk about some things you are very familiar with while trying to be clear enough and explain that stuff to someone who potentially does not know a thing about them, and also learned how valuable good feedback is! The blog dedicated to the book is at http://webpro20.blogspot.com/, designated for communication with the readers of the book, so feel free!