It looks like it was yesterday that I firstly flew to EU to meet some Fedora guys at the FUDCon in Brno. At that time, September of 2008, I had just finished my GSoC application and lots of ideas were going around our minds (Me and Dimitris Glezos), mainly about what we should do about Transifex.

My first time in Greece, Dimitris’ country, allowed us to discuss many things, including the redesign of Transifex. I remember we realized we had in our hands an idea that, at least for us, could sound very promising and with lots of potential. We were kinda anxious and unsure on how we should push things on, but we had a shared common feeling -  We need to do something.

Time Flies by Bichuas (E. Carton)

In a long short history, I came back to Brazil in November of 2008 and 3 months later I was working full time on Transifex as an Indifexian. February of 2009 was a mark for me. At that period, my life was kinda turned up side down, not in a bad way, just in a complete different way. New challenges and horizons  just shown up and it’s been like this until now, 1 year later.

Today we are not anymore 2 crazy guys, locked down in an apartment, ordering food and hacking most of the time during the night.  The team has increased and we are really happy about it. We keep working hard to hit our goals seeking ways to make ‘Translations a click away’. Talking about it, Transifex 0.8alpha is just out, be sure to take a look at the new features.

Happy translations!

In the end of the day, around 5 o’clock we attended a double talk of Michael Timann until 7 o’clock where it was full! That wasn’t the first time that I saw Michael at FISL. His talks, as I expected, were very good and very valuable to me, personally. As a Fedora contributor I’ve learned some facts about the Fedora’s history that I didn’t know.

Michael’s talks are usually an input of new energy for open sources contributors. The general feeling after his talks was: With the community open source everything is possible, so lets change the world.

Well… changing a bit the issue… lets talk about:

*MY* FUDCon LATAM 2009 thoughts

As I was the only one around here that has already participated in another FUDCon previously in Brno. I took the chance to talk to Dennis and mainly to Toshio about the first FUDCon LATAM. We could see that the model of the FUDCon applied in USA or Europe can not be reflected exactly as it is in the south of America. The reality here is different. We don’t have the same infrastructure and resources to move easily around the continent and the number of developers or people that actually are coding, packaging or doing hacking stuff, still, is not that big.

We took the opportunity of joining the FISL event in order to have more people able to join us at the FUDCon. I would say that it worked pretty well. Some of the talks were completely full and most of the others with a good audience. I guess we can say surely that we have passed the message of what’s been doing in Fedora in the world. Though we missed the hacking part of the FUDCon essence.

On Friday after we had an heads-up in the end of the FUDCon. We’ve talked about this issue and for the next FUDCon we are sure of pushing more for having hacking sessions. We are not talking about just coding, but also practical stuff, like how to actually do something real with tools and issue that the Fedora contributors see often.

For instance, I could say that IMHO this first FUDCon LATAM was more related with a ‘catch up’ among the Fedora contributors and each one of them tried to pass, by using a slot in the schedule, a bit of what it’s been doing around the Fedora sub-projects. That was not bad at all, though. Keeping the FUDCon LATAM connected with bit events for now seems to be the right thing to do. It might bring new potential contributors and an easy way to people gather. So, yes, we are already thinking on the next FUDCon LATAM!

For the end, but not less important, I would like to thank all the Fedora LATAM ambassadors presented or not at FISL. This event for most of us is the unique opportunity to see each other through the year and I was glad to see not just the Fedora guys, but some old and good friends as well. Keep rocking and lets continue working to make Fedora stronger and stronger around the América Latina in the América Latina way.

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Ahh… I can’t resist it… So I’m gonna tell you:

We’ve found a dancer among us.

Since Toshio got Brazil he can’t stop dancing… even when there is no music! (seriously… hahaha).

Does anyone know where is the switch to turn him off?

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Argh I don’t have any photo from Toshio dancing… but I will find it out. I promise!

In the morning, I was the second one to present. I presented the Transifex case around 10 o’clock AM and had some good questions and discussions about the new horizon that Transifex has as a goal. People, including Toshio, were quite impressed by the current features of the new Transifex written in Django, compared to the old version. The Lotte Web editor thing and the possibility of monitoring any file or whole projects through the system, were the more impressive things, I think.

For dinner today we went to a place with traditional barbecue and dances. Even the Brazilians that have never been in the south of Brazil enjoyed very much the time there. Cool!

Yesterday night I got the hotel and I met the Fedora guys. We have people from Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina and US. Among those guys, I could met for the first time Toshio Kuratomi, one of the guys that help us a lot in the infrastructure issues in the Fedora Project. After everybody get some rest, we went to eat something near by to catch up things and laugh a bit.

Today, the first day of the event, started quite busy. First of all, the bus (contracted) has broken before we leave the hotel in the morning. When we, finally, could get the event place, we started to organize the booth and the fedora users group spot. A lot of people were passing by our booth to get media, fryers, sticks and also to know the status of the new Fedora 11 Leonidas. Lots of talking… pictures… laugh and besides that, the guys from the Fedora Project had three talks in the normal schedule of the event during the day:

• Fedora Project -  Rodrigo Padula
• Spacewake – Dennis Gilmore
• Fedora Localization/Internationalization – Diego Búrigo Zacarão and Igor Pires Soares

The balance of the whole day was quite positive and we already got some new machines in the event running Fedora 11 Leonidas. It’s very nice to meet/remeet some cool guys at this big event and it seems that it will be all fun during the next days.

Tomorrow the FUDCon LATAM 2009 starts and apparently we will have another busy day.

/me is going to bed after just have a quite heavy dinner