Archive for the 'Blablabla' category

Contributing to open source

published on March 17, 2011.

Often times people ask me why do I contribute to open source, why do I “waste money and time” on free stuff when I could easily do the same thing for money? Don’t have I enough of staring at the computer at work where, well, I do the same thing - hack on code? Ummm. No.

Honestly, I don’t earn much. Enough for the rent, bills, food, but giving the fact that I don’t have a family, it’s enough for me, for now. So, I don’t make a s**t loads of money, but am still willing to work for free? Ummm. No.

Thing is, I really don’t consider this to be work. This is fun. This is hacking. This is creating stuff. This is solving problems. This is my passion. So no, I don’t work for free. I don’t work. I code, I hack.

But why open source?

Giving back

Giving back is nice. Not necessarily giving back to the same project, but just giving back to the open source community in general. It just makes you a better and nicer person :)

Knowledge

Both in high school and in college the fastest way for me to gain knowledge was to learn, collaborate with other students. Open source gives me the chance to share knowledge with hackers from all over the world; from Portugal, via Nova Scotia to Texas. It gives me the chance to be taught and to teach.

Experience

Open source gives the opportunity to work with people from every part of the globe. Getting ideas across by the means of email, chat, irc can be hard. Open source gives me the chance to improve my communication skills. Heck, I sometimes even have troubles explaining my ideas to my co-workers who sits right next to me.

Reading other peoples code, fixing bugs, writing documentation, adding new features, testing. Hack skills ++

Also, each and every accepted patch and merged pull request gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Contacts

Open source introduces you to new people. Who knows what can come out of these random introductions? Can’t be bad, that’s for sure.

This is why I contribute to open source: it is fun, it is hacking, it is creating stuff, it is solving problems.

It is my passion.

Ideas of March

published on March 15, 2011.

Apparently there’s this new movement in the PHP community, "Ideas of March", where we all pledge that we will blog more about PHP and web dev and the community in general. So here I am, doing the same :)

This will be a real test for me because for the 2 and a half years of this blog I’ve published merely 60 posts. Why? Mostly because I was (am?) scared to just write more about things I’m interested in. But, as I really do like blogging and letting my thoughts out I’ll just have to do my best to write more :) and yes, it’ll still mostly be PHP related with some linux or javascript stuff here and there :)

To see who pledged to blog more in March, check out the list on PHPDeveloper or follow the movement on Twitter #ideasofmarch.

Happy bloggin’!

Moved

published on July 11, 2010.

As I said 2 weeks earlier, I decided to move my stuff over to linode. Well, I did it. Kinda.

First step was to change the nameservers of the domain. I thought it’s gonna take a while, so I took my time with moving the files and the database, but (at least on my end) the dns changes were alive and kickin’ under an hour.

My original idea was to run everything on nginx, but that soon turned out to be a bad idea cause there was no way I could setup properly the rewriting - if PHP was working right, CSS was broken. If CSS was working right, PHP was broken. At one point I broke everything. Hooray for me. Then I just took down nginx and all that php-fastcgi stuff and installed apache. Everything is lovely once again, the world is all shiny and pink and full of rainbows and unicorns. But fear not, I will not let nginx beat me in this mad game of rewrites! Just have to do that somewhere else, not on a live server.

Now to setup the emails and my job here is done. Oh, and the sidebar is a tad broken. Sorry bout that.

Carry on now, nothing left to see here.

Tags: about, me, moving.
Categories: Blablabla.

I'll be moving soon...

published on June 27, 2010.

Just a little heads up to all of you who stumble upon this place: I’ll be moving servers and stuff in the coming month to linode and most likely there’ll be some downtimes and fuckups so just thought to let you all know (this sounds like there’s someone reading this blog at all, heh).

Hope I won’t forget to make backups.

Tags: about, me, moving.
Categories: Blablabla.

2009 in a few words

published on January 02, 2010.

In 2009 some good stuff happened and some bad stuff happened. All in all, a crappy year. Hopefully, this year will be a lot better…

I graduated on June 26th, the topic was a Python desktop application that communicates with a web service; both sending and receiving data is possible. Started working on July 1st at Online Solutions as a PHP dev and started to “officially” give back to the Open Source community by joining the ZF Bug Hunt Days - so far few minor patches submitted and applied. Wrote a review on a ZF book and another one on jQuery and PHP is in the drafts.

I ain’t making plans for this year, cause I have failed miserably to realize my most important plan for 2009; I’ll just improvise throughout the year.

Dear 2009 - up yours. 2010 - bring it on.

Happy new year!

Tags: about, fail, me, random.
Categories: Blablabla, Free time.
Robert Basic

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