Francesco Crippa

My work often requires me to select (or develop) different kind of technologies. Every time I’ve got to make a choice between “traditional approach” and “OpenSource approach”, the questions I ask to myself are (more or less) always the same:

• Is this new technology able to stay alive for a long long time?
• Is it able to keep itself on the top of most used technologies?
• Is it able to move people from old style approach into new OpenSource world?
• …

…but since a couple of months ago, I’ve started asking to myself another important question:

• Is this technology able to keep close to itself key people (basically the “community”)? Or it is only able to keep the “maintainers”, but not the innovators?

I think the ask for this question is very important to know the future of a product. Some time ago, I’ve blogged a post about “80% and 20% of developers“, where the real innovators are (IMHO) only a few people, and lose these people could be the end of a project.

I think OpenSource community needs to move over new and exciting technologies day by day. And innovators ARE OpenSource community. No way to keep a good innovator stopped to a technology for long time. Technology has to change and grow up fast if it wants to benefit by these extraordinary geeks.

So, here’s why you have to run out of town from static “huge” technologies (usually defined “enterprise”): best guys, best developers, best architects need to “go west”, to find new lands, looking for new opportunities to innovate world and make it better.

RedHat and Fedora (and, of course, Byte-Code! ) are the best example I know (and they rock! Great innovations in Fedora make RedHat a REAL enterprise technology)

OpenSource community should be considered a “quality guarantee” by everyone, also when it try to head straight for new and unknown ways.

Just my two cents

Luca, a friend of mine and also the latest “apprentice” of Byte-Code has done his “Master Degree” in Information Technology last week. I’m really happy for his “Summa cum Laude” (for all Italian guys: “110 e lode“)

Congratulations for all your work!

Now it’s time to think about your future into the labor market! And I hope we can still colleagues for a long long time in Byte-Code.

Enjoy your new Job Luca, and good luck (you need it!)

Last weekend I was in Brussels, during FOSDEM 2008. For me it was the first time at this event, but surely not the last!

It attire geeks from all countries over the world, and not only form the Europe: I’ve met a lot of people coming from USA and Canada (just to say that it really is a international event).

All the FOSDEM days were very busy. The event was very crowded. Location (Brussels University) was good, but the booth (actually it was a couple of simple desktops) were placed into a very small hall, and you know how many people Fedora attract!

Result is what you can see on this flickr photos set: a really crowded room …and without a free buffet!!!

Great occasion also to meet different developers from all kind of projects (especially thanks to Lillian and Thomas from RedHat IcedTea Java team: all information they presented is very useful for my job on JBoss and other Java related stuff. Really happy to join their session).

I’m so sorry to not having the time yet to fix “Fedora Ambassadors Stats Script” with Fabian. I hope to have enough time this week to publish a skeleton for new improvements and (maybe) start a project to make statistics abut Fedora Project easily.

But for me (and not only for me) this event represents something more important: with other European Fedora Ambassadors, we’ve founded “Fedora EMEA”, a NPO (non-profit organization) with the goal to improve support for fedora community in all EMEA countries.

After the event, Fedora Ambassadors had a dinner on Saturday evening (thanks to Kanarip to show me what is a “Steak Tartre” in the real world, and also thanks to the restaurant to have a lot of other things in the menu!), where we have signed the statutes of new Fedora EMEA NPO.

Really good trip where I’ve met new friends that I hope to meet again as soon as possible.

Yesterday night was a Fedora Night! “Fedora by Night” attracted a lot of Linux enthusiasts from Lodi and near zones.

Thanks to LOLUG for help, availability and visibility.

Night started with quick introduction by Davide Cerri about LOLUG, Linux and other useful stuff, continued with my presentation about Fedora Project and the Community behind Fedora, and closed by Simone Pucci with a rapid overview about how Fedora is built and managed.

Questions and answers time was pretty exciting. More then 40 minutes of questions from the crowd about Fedora and the future of Linux (Microsoft, Novell and Mono/.NET involvements were the main delicate issues we discussed).

Thanks to all people who helped me and Lolug to organize this event! I hope to see now and again something like that with more and more attendees!

Then, beer@pub!

All photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcrippa/sets/72157603949413659/

Today (after a week-end with low GRPS mobile bandwidth), I ran python script for stats for all entries in Ambassadors Country List (on high performance connection). It takes more than an hour :-/

Now, you can download:

• CSV file (row data) generated by the script (from revision 1 to revision 663)
• A simple OpenOffice Calc sheet with an example chart
• python script

Script (a wiki reg-ex crawler) may contain bugs (for example I’m not sure about some sparse “dot” on the wiki page). But I hope this open the way to make more significant stats for Fedora Project.

For the moment I’ve publish the first draft of this script (very “quick and dirty”). During next days I’ll try to package this actions into a pythons module, to make more reusable and more readable this kind of object. I hope to see something like:

import FedoraStats
foo = FedoraStats.Ambassadors()
foo.save_to_csv("/tmp/bar.csv")

Here you are the current draft:
Read the rest of this entry »

Today I’ve spent some hours to write a very “quick and dirty” python script to create some automatic statistics to show how Fedora ambassadors grow up fast.

For the moment script produce a simple command separated value file, useful to be opened with OpenOffice and make some charts.

Here you are a simple chart that shows number of ambassadors during last 10 months.

The script (for the moment) produce a table with months as rows and world area as columns. It takes data from fedora wiki.

Here you are some examples:

And here you are a chart only for South Europe Area:

As soon as possible I’ll write some classes to produce chart directly, without need to pass through OpenOffice, and (of course) put all scripts online.

Only two days ago I blogged a post to tell to the world about my new RHCA Certification, and today, Alberto Trivellato (a friend of mine and one of my best colleagues), takes Sun Java Enterprise Architect certification (the full name of cert. is quite long: “Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for Java Platform Enterprise Edition Technology”). It is the highest certification in Sun Java panorama as well as RHCA is the highest certification in Linux panorama.

I’ve spent a lot of my time into java environments and I know how hard this certification is. So, I’m really proud to work with Alberto and it’s for me an honor to join with this kind of high-skilled people.

Congratulations Alberto! I hope to follow your way as soon as possible

…and now it’s time to buy an expensive Italian wine and make a party!

RHCA is one of the most interesting certification I’ve never seen in information technology marketplace. To pass all exams you’ve got to DO what you have to know, not only make a check into multiple choice questions.

It was hard, but I’m happy because yesterday I received  the result of my last exam: passed!

Today, I am RHCA!

For the first time I think to have a “valid” certification to show my own skills In Italy it’s pretty unusual. University degrees, certifications and so on are usually not related to practically experiences: you can have a master degree in information technology or computer science without know how using your mouse…

Changing this point of view is hard, but I think it’s not impossible. RHCA is a reality. I hope other companies will follow RedHat way. I think it’s the right way.

An entire night dedicated to Fedora next February, 19th!

The event is organized in collaboration with LOLUG (Lodi Linux User Group). After a short introduction about Fedora, we’re going to talk about:

• How does fedora live? The community behind fedora
• How does fedora work? Building Processes and Tools to deploy and deliver fedora

Here you are some links to obtain more information about where and where:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/FedoraByNight

http://www.lodi.linux.it/

Enjoy!

Murphy never makes a mistake!

In a project with tons of “overhead complexity”, what do you expect after hard months of work? When you’re so near to the goal… When you can feel it on your fingers…

…simply new architecture. x86_64? Itanium? PowerPC?

Too simple (…and too smart…).

Just i386…

…with 16Gb RAM machines…

…with full x86_64 yum repositories (with custom rpms for WebSphere and other strange things)…

…with complete puppet and puppet-team 64bit config support…

…we now have to rebuild all provisioning and configuration management subsystem in order to support “new” i386 machines…

So, we never forget the past. Never.

Amiga500, I’m waiting for you next upgrade!!!