Tag: endless

Whereabouts

Posted on

It’s been almost two months since my last day at Endless, and some people keep asking me what am I up to now. The change was nothing top-secret so I told my closest friends and colleagues about what I was doing, but I have been so busy — first with the job change, personal life (whose events I will leave for a later post), then with some vacation time in Portugal, and this past week with my son’s first days in the Kindergarten — that I kept neglecting writing a post about that.

I had met Endless when it was still a small startup, in a shared working space in San Francisco, and joined it a few years after that, because it was all I could think about. Having spent almost 4 years with the company, it is and will always be a special place for me, not only because of its mission, but also because of its people and the experiences we shared, and I will keep rooting for their success.

So “where” am I currently? I am still a doughnut resident of Berlin and I have been working with the great people at Kinvolk on its new products (more details to be announced soon). This is a temporary/contractor position though, so we’ll see what happens in a few months, but I am enjoying what I am doing and that I get to spend some time with the folks at the Berlin office.

Kinvolk is also a very special company to me. I have been friends with Chris and Iago (two of the three co-founders) for years, having introduced them to each other and followed the company creation/growth closely since then (also worked for a while from their first office when I moved to Berlin).
This friendship was the reason I always pushed back on the idea of joining them (I didn’t want to risk spoiling it with any eventual work conflicts), but this temporary job was the perfect opportunity with the perfect timing; so I am looking forward to seeing the company’s growth from the inside now, and contribute to it as much as I can.
Kinvolk is also still hiring, so if you are interested in joining, check out the careers page.

And that’s it for now. As usual, I hope I can keep posting more frequently. We’ll see ๐Ÿ™‚

ostree & Flatpak at CERN

Posted on

A week and a half ago I spent a few days in Geneva and gave a presentation about ostree and Flatpak at the CERN Computing Seminar. I started by briefly introducing Endless to give some context of the problems we’re trying to solve and how we’re using ostree and Flatpak for that, then proceeded to talk more in detail about these technologies. In the end, there were several questions, and I was happy to learn afterwards that among the audience there were some of the people working at the CVMFS project: a software distribution service to help deploy data-processing infrastructure and tools. I don’t know the full details about the project’s implementation, but from the problems they’re trying to solve it seems like ostree (or more specifically libostree) could perhaps be used to replace part of the core, which would leverage all the niceties of using a complex Open Source project (more eyeballs looking into bugs, more testing, etc.). I also think more use-cases could be found in the organization, so I hope my talk was a small seed to help introduce these projects at CERN in the medium/long term. The presentation has been recorded if you’re interested.

Getting authorization to access CERN this time was also different, as for the first time I got an entrance pass as a member of the CERN Alumni. So I would like to thank Antonella Del Rosso for the Alumni initiative and also for allowing me to kindly borrow her EU-CH power adapter when I forgot mine at my friends’ home. In the end Antonella also interviewed me about my experience at CERN and after I left, and produced this summary if you want to check it out.
I would also like to thank Miguel รngel Marquina of the CERN Computing Seminar for organizing the presentation and all the details around it.

Photo showing the author and his daughter sitting close to the lake in Geneva.
Sitting by the lake with my daughter

Having spent more than 2 years in the region, it is the friends we have there that we miss the most. So it was great to meet them and old colleagues again.
My family traveled there with me and we stayed with friends from Spain, so it was funny to see our daughter (who used to play with those friends’ kids all the time when we lived there) excusing her shyness for not speaking Spanish. But after a day or two they were all successfully playing together; it’s amazing how children can get along no matter what differences or barriers they find, while adults often resort to stupid feelings and dangerous actions.
The mountains landscape is another thing we miss in Berlin and the Spring’s clear weather allowed us to fully gaze at the Jura or the Mont Blanc which should last us for another few more months. After that, I guess I’ll try to find some graffiti of mountains around Berlin ๐Ÿ™‚