Joaquim Rocha
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What a year!

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    Name
    Joaquim Rocha
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  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

What a crazy year this was! In 2013 many important events happened in my life that would make this a very busy year. To start, I began the year looking for a new job after 4 years working for Igalia. This meant that I had to travel a lot and move (with Helena) from the place I felt like home (the city of Coruña), having to say good bye to many good friends.

This search also took me to the U.S.A. for first time where I met a very interesting company and people. Since Helena and I didn’t do our traditional travelling this year, going to San Francisco was definitely the most interesting trip of the year for me. I really want to visit it again some day together with Helena. Then I ended up joining Red Hat, where I kept working with GNOME technologies — mainly on the Wacom related pieces — together with some of the best Open Source developers in the world. I also moved to Berlin, the city I am in love with, which meant fulfilling a dream we had for a few years. My dear friend Chris Kühl helped make this move smoother so I have to thank him here again.

After just a few months in Berlin, I received the positive result of an application to CERN that I had done before all this and I had to make yet another decision. We decided to do it and we moved out of Berlin just shortly after knowing that we will become a family of 3 next year! Our little girl Olivia will be born next March and we cannot express how excited we are about it!

Life in this region is very different from Berlin’s (not bad, just different) but CERN is a very unique place and I am enjoying the experience. Our arrival here was also easier because of Quim and his wife Ana Marta, a couple of friends from University who really couldn’t have helped us more. Together with our good friend Nacho, they are really “5 stars” as we say in Portuguese 🙂 I need also to mention my parents who not only helped us with moving out of Spain but also drove all the way from Portugal to France in order to visit us and bring us our stuff.

Technically, I live in France, in a small town called St Genis Pouilly, close to CERN on the French side of the border but it’s really still Geneva’s area. A curious thing about Geneva is that its largest foreign community is the Portuguese. I hear more people speaking Portuguese at the supermarkets in here than in Algarve 🙂 One of the things I miss from Berlin is the possibility to easily ride a bike anywhere. In here it is dangerous (drivers are crazy and there’s no bike lanes) and less convenient (Berlin is flat, here it isn’t) but I found another physical activity to compensate a bit my sedentary job: I started playing squash and I love it!

As a result of all these changes, my personal projects got a bit neglected. I released only one new version of Skeltrack and OCRFeeder (actually I got a new version of OCRFeeder almost ready to ship) and I did a couple of quick hacks with the Leap Motion Controller. The number of books I read was also lower than ever this year. I read a couple of books by Cory Doctorow and a spy thriller called The Shanghai Factor.

Not all things in 2013 were as great as my words might indicate. My grandmother (to whom I was very close) passed away a month ago. It was a very sad event, but she lived a long life and had her family beside her in every moment.

About 2014, my biggest wish is that everything goes well with the baby and Helena. I think I will probably have to miss some of the Open Source events I usually attend but I got a good excuse, right? I hope it’ll be a quieter year than 2013 in terms of moving and that I can still dedicate time to my personal projects.

2013 was a year I will surely remember all my life. I am a lucky person to have had the opportunity of different experiences, to have friends in many places and to have my wife and family supporting me all the time.

I wish you all an excellent 2014!

Olivia in Helena's belly!