family

Wrapping Up 2019

December 31, 2019January 1, 2020

It’s the last night of the year and the decade, and here is the mandatory End of Year’s post.

This year was without a doubt the most difficult in my (still young) life. Things were setting up to be a great year at the beginning, there were big plans for the Hack project I was working on at Endless with my colleagues, and my wife Helena was going to start an illustration course after our son finally started at the kindergarten (in Germany it’s common for kids to enter it when they’re already 2 years old…), besides other personal projects we were preparing.
However, in a visit to the dentist by my wife in order to check something bothering her, she ended up being disagnosed with mouth cancer.
As would happen with anyone, the news really shook us and made us go through all the common wonderings of why would such thing happen to someone who has no family history of such sicknesses, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, etc.

Still this is a positive post! Everything moved very quickly and neatly on the doctors side after the diagnostic. The tests and surgery happened as fast as they could possibly be done, and since apparently it was disagnosed at a very early stage, Helena “only” needed two surgeries and no aggressive treatments.
In the end, we are very thankful to all the doctors, nurses, and staff. It couldn’t have been better, from the great quality of the services, to the friendliness of the people involved. A big and honest thank you again to the great people who dealt with us at Berlin’s Unfallkrankenhaus.

We are extremely lucky to have universal healthcare coverage. Besides the normal (and public) insurance we have, we only had to pay very little extra costs that are even neglegible. I cannot imagine having to worry with the sickness and also with the costs of treatments.

Being away from our family when this happened also made it more difficult as we had to juggle the hospital trips with taking care of our son (who was not yet in the kindergarten when this started) and my work. On the work side, I need to thank Cosimo and Endless, who made it clear I’d have all the time I needed to organize things on my side; that was extremely important. And we also need to thank our neighbor Ilka, who took care of our son a few times while we both were away. Of course, many more people offered their support, and we had Helena’s mother over for a couple of weeks in the second surgery. All the support and nice words was important and we’re grateful to have such great people in our lives.

One last thing to end this subject. I really need to emphasize Helena’s attitude towards her situation. We have been together for a long time, and I knew she was a positive person, but her positive attitude in the face of such a serious case was mind-blowing even for the doctors (one even said “Do you know what this means? …. Yes? Okay, this is weird, I had never had anyone behaving like this after the news…”). I feel like the drama was all mine and she had to recomfort me, even though she was the one who had to endure the initial uncertainty, the surgeries, the recovery…
After so much time together and so many experiences we shared, this problem made me admire even more the person I love. I wish our kids get that attitude to life and not my traditional-and-very-Portuguese fatality 🙂

Work

On the work side things also had a twist. At about the same time Helena was having her second surgery, my work at Endless was about to change too, and I joined Kinvolk for a temporary position, as explained in this post, since I wasn’t sure about mixing friendship and work.
Well, it turns out that I liked the work, the people, and the possibilities at Kinvolk so much that (in November) I accepted the proposal to make it permanent!

Technically, coming from the Linux desktop world, it felt “foreign” to take over a Go + React project like Nebraska, but I already feel very comfortable with this “ecosystem”.

I am genuinely excited about what is coming from Kinvolk, and I will keep working on the company’s existing and new products. We are also looking for great people to help deliver great & 100% Open Source solutions, so check out our open positions.

Community

About GNOME/community work. It’s difficult to find the time and energy to do anything tech-related outside of work, so I cannot realistically think I will be an active contributor in my spare time.
Still, I keep my eye and interest in the GNOME and flatpak communities. Last year (2018) I “flatpaked” two old games (noiz2sa and rRootage) and added them to Flathub, and now I am in the process of getting Robocode into flathub (more on that soon).

That’s it!

And that’s all for this year’s wrap-up! Despite a very difficult situation, we end the decade feeling very happy and fortunate. I wish everybody a great new decade! Love.

Ready for 2019

January 1, 2019January 1, 2019

This blog has not had many posts in 2018 but the “new year’s post” is almost mandatory, so here it goes.

Family

December was similar to last year, spending most of the time in Portugal with the family and coming back to Berlin right before the New Year’s eve.
After 3 years in Berlin, I think I am finally reconciled with the oddities/particularities of the city, my German is improving, and I do enjoy living in here more than last year. We do miss our friends in Geneva and other places, and of course it’s ever more and more difficult to leave our family in Portugal after seeing how much our son and our daughter enjoy being with the grandparents and cousins.

A picture of Lagos in Portugal, showing a landscape with big rocks and a cliff by the sea. — Lagos, Portugal, where I spent part of my vacation

Still on the personal side, the biggest event this year has been my daughter’s surgery. She needed a throat surgery to remove part of her tonsils, in order to breath and sleep better, among other things that would improve as a result (having more energy, eating and growing more, etc.). It was a “simple” throat surgery, but not without risks (we spent 5 days in the hospital for the post-surgery recovery and observation). I tried to explain it to her as if it were a special sleep-over at the hospital where the folks there would help her breath and sleep better, so much that she was disappointed when we had to reschedule the surgery 3 times (2 times because she was sick, 1 time because the hospital organization is not the best and they lost our appointment!). She faced the event like the brave girl she is and she was always patient too. In the end, the results were amazing and could be seen almost immediately: she now has much more energy, sleeps well, eats and speaks better… like night and day!
I hope my son doesn’t have the same condition, but judging on how much energy, strength, and overall physical agility he has, I’d say he’s fine 🙂

I cannot emphasize enough though, that even if the surgery scheduling was a mess, the surgery and post-surgery care could not have been better. From the doctors, to the nurses, and other assistants, everybody was really nice, patient, and professional. Having any surgery on your child is always something very delicate and challenging to deal with, and the staff did make me feel like my daughter was in the best hands possible. Of course, this care was the same anyone would get with a normal/public coverage in Germany, and thus it’s even more remarkable. Even though in the EU we sometimes take Universal Health Coverage for granted, it’s good to remind ourselves how precious it is.

Work

2018 also meant some changes in my daily work at Endless as I joined a new team to help deliver a new project with a different type of users. This project is called Hack, and aims to deliver a desktop computer experience that integrates elements to teach programming and computing concepts to users from age 8 and up. This also meant that I traveled twice to work with the rest of the team from the San Francisco office, and it’s always nice to hang out with my colleagues directly.
We have already shipped the first computers around Christmas in a great effort from everyone involved (in this team and others), and I am proud of what we’ve achieved! There is still a lot of work to be done, so be sure to follow the news about the project.

With this new project and being a father of two means I didn’t really have much more time/energy left for side projects but I still managed to give a presentation about ostree and Flatpak at CERN, and at the Linux Technologies Berlin meetup, which I really enjoyed and hope to have the opportunity of giving more presentations this new year too.

I guess that’s already a good enough summary for the small attention span we all have in this decade, so I will leave it here.

Have a great 2019, everyone!

I’ve built a box

July 22, 2018July 23, 2018

This is not the typical post I use to write (which is usually about what I do at work, often related to GNOME, so if you’re not interested, just skip it…). But a couple of months ago I did something different that I still want to write about. That thing was a wooden box (sorry if you were expecting a Gavin Box) that I was asked to carve by my brother for his wedding, to be used for carrying the wedding rings.

The wedding had a Game of Thrones’s theme (there was not blood in it though, if you’re wondering), so naturally my brother wanted some of that in the box. Thus, my initial idea was to just buy a box and carve something to do with GoT and include their names. Something like this, as my brother sent me for inspiration.

However, upon ordering some box online, I noticed that not only was the box too small to carve (and the Targaryen’s dragon has a lot of details), it was also extremely poor quality: the wood was too light, the hinges were so loose they made clicking sounds just by moving the box. I also couldn’t find other boxes that seemed to fit my requirements online, so I resorted to building one myself.
When I was a kid, I loved to make stuff with wood, and I would use some spares from a local carpentry to build stuff like tiny houses, swords, crossbows, … So building a box shouldn’t be so difficult. I went and bought the wood, but the only issue actually was that I had only a handsaw… And cutting straight with a handsaw is not easy. So I had to borrow an electrical circular saw from my friend Chris, who also let me borrow a few other useful tools like clamps (thank you for that) which helped a lot when I glued the pieces together.

After I had the box glued together and the lid cut out, I felt it had some rough look but I liked that. So I proceeded with the carving. I put together the design I wanted on Inkscape and transferred it to the lid, then proceeded with the carving, using a nice tool set I bought online. I had never really carved anything worth before, so after a few rough beginnings I got it as I wanted. The letters were, as expected, extremely tricky, but I found the whole activity very zen. Since I work usually until a bit later in the evening, and we need to put the kids to bed, etc., on week days I’d just do a couple of letters after dinner, which would take me around one hour or so.
In the beginning I was going to carve only the design elements, but my artistic wife told me that maybe I should just carve the space between the elements too, and I am happy I listened to her. In the end, I decided to do these long carved waves all over the sides of the box too, and I am glad with the effect. The inside of the lid was also looking very flat (it was a single piece of wood), so I carved it in just for it too look more like a traditional box lid.

Like any decent software engineer, this project couldn’t go bug free. Turns out I made a mistake in the date, printing JUL instead of JUN… And I only noticed it after I had carved the L letter and realized that July would be after our flight back from Portugal (and moving the wedding to accommodate my error was inconvenient). So I had to fix it by making the L disappear and changing the date style (since there was no more space left).

The final steps were to add a closing mechanism (a hole to insert a small round magnet, to hold the lid and the bottom of the box together), paint it with a wood-special paint, and add the hinges (which was a bit challenging since I did it only using the carving tools and sandpaper).

Since the purpose was for it to carry the wedding rings, I bought some wine color fabric, stuffed it with whatever-the-stuffing-material-is-called, and added a couple of strings for tying the rings (unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of it). The interior was not glued to the box, as I wanted it to be used after the wedding for whatever they want.

And that was it! It took me more than a month in total, but I am quite happy with the result and enjoyed the process a lot. Working with a computer all day, there’s something very relaxing about doing something more physical with one’s hands. So if your work and free time usually involve staring at a screen, and you feel like you could use an artistic hobby, I hope this post inspires you to do some wood carving.