This weekend we had amazing weather in A Coruña. Usually Galicia tends to be rainy but surprisingly, in the middle of April, it was just perfect.

So what should one do when the weather is so good and the city offers nice food and beaches? Go to a Debian conference, of course!

After having convinced my girlfriend that this wasn’t the last sunny weekend this year, I attended DudesConf, which Igalia sponsored together with other organizations. The “Dudes” here stands for something like Spanish Debian Users and Developers.
It remembered me of when I started attending conferences in Spain (mainly in Extremadura) and also the conferences I organized while part of NEEI (Computer Science Students Organization of the University of Évora) for this was an informal event with a really relaxed environment. I could meet people, hack a bit on SeriesFinale and attend some presentations.
The presentation I liked most was given by the Igalian Berto where he presented myths and facts of Emacs, together with some demos. I thank all the members of the staff for organizing such a nice event.

Here is a picture of the participants of DudesConf:

Later, I skipped the event’s lunch and headed for the beach with Helena. This was the first time we went to the beach, summer style (we had walked in it but all dressed up for the cold). We even got sunburnt…
And this is the picture I get just by walking down the street from my home for 3 minutes, heading to the beach, it makes me feel a lucky man:

Today is my last day of vacations. Two weeks ago I went to Portugal, in the pleasant company of my girlfriend, to visit family and friends. I arrived at dinner time on Saturday, had a quite dinner and although I was really tired I still managed to be until 5 AM finishing a paint I wanted for so long give to my cousin. The following day we had a nice supa-lunch with my family, a good beginning for the busy week that would follow. On Monday and Tuesday we were in Évora to meet with some good friends and my crazy brother. The rest of the week was spent in Lagos, the home town of my girlfriend and a land with some of the best beaches in Portugal.

In the middle of this past week we returned to Coruña as we had stuff to take care of but yesterday we went with our friends Victor, Edu and his wife Silvia to the “Festival de Pardiñas”, a very Galician folk music that started 30 years ago. We were supposed to spend the night in the camp but it had been raining a lot and the humidity and mud convinced us it was better to take the invitation of Silvia’s friend Fernando and sleep at his home which was 10 minutes from there.
The music was nice, we were late for the first band and tired for the last one but we could watch the great performances of “La Belle Image Fanfare” (France) and “Hedningarna” (Sweden). Although I think everyone of my party liked the French folks much more, I really enjoyed “Hedningarna”! Some of its songs reminded me of some metal bands I like from Scandinavia and I think it makes sense…

Now, back at home, I upgraded my Wordpress successfully and will watch a movie and relex a bit so I’m all set for tomorrow’s work.

This last weekend was Igalia Spring Summit, my first Igalia summit!

What’s an Igalia summit? It’s a full weekend event where Igalians go to some place out of our cities (Pontevedra and A Coruña)  to hangout with each other and have fun together.

For this summit the main schedule was traditional games on Saturday and going to the thermal waters on Sunday. Of course, among these, there were some presentations and lots of hanging out with fellow Igalians.
In what comes to traditional games, I was almost epically won the egg-on-spoon race but Berto had been training every morning from 5 to 8 PM the last couple of years and ended up winning…
However, I was pronounced SIAUChWiT (Super Impressively, Amazingly and Undoubtedly Champion of Wii Tenis) together with Iago for our continuous victories until 6:15 AM, when we deliberately (of course) lost so our fans would lets us go sleep

What I liked most was the chance to talk and get to know better some of my colleagues, laugh with them and have the never ending Galician vs Portuguese vs Castilian discussion (… of course the sauna was great as well)!

Everybody seemed to be having a blast, it wasn’t the fake and lame HR activities that some big corporations sometimes do.
The result, for most people I guess, was a really fun time, lack of sleep and a hard Monday but with smile on the face.

Igalia is so unique in many ways!
Thank you to the people who organized this great weekend!

So,

Like I said on my last post, I gave an Introduction to Django in the Master en Software Libre Caixanova in Vigo last Friday.

I really enjoyed giving the class. Although the students had different technical levels, many of them could keep up with the example project I was doing with them and I believe they enjoyed it. This project was done as a second part of the class, the first part was the presentation you find embedded here were I give an quick overview of Django.

At the end, we couldn’t finish the whole project in time (there was another class after that) but I think it served at least to give them a feeling of how easy it is to do stuff in Django.

I had the impression they were most surprised by “how can one NOT need to touch SQL”. This is just one of the adjvantages of Django, I said.

After the class and as I got to the hotel I was dead (didn’t get much sleep during the week) but satisfied.
At dinner time I went with my girlfriend to a place I could only read as “Tapas & Cañas” on the door. The food was GREAT! The prices were cheap (as most places here in Galicia ), the beer could be better (San Miguel) but didn’t ruin anything. I had a great night which finished watching the lights reflacting at the sea from the hotel room’s balcony.

On Saturday, on the way back to A Coruña, I passed by Pontevedra and liked it much more than Vigo! The city old part is really pleasant!

I’d like to say thanks to Igalia and Caixanova for having invited me to give this class.

I was invited to give a class in the Master en Software Libre covering an introduction to Django.

So, tomorrow I’m heading south to Vigo and present our favorite web framework (”THE” web framework, for many of us) .

I’ll start by giving an overview of Django, what it’s all about and why people should use it. Then I’ll do a tiny project with the audience so they get a real feel of it.

Although this degree covers several stuff, it is indeed a good thing that they chose to have an introduction to Django as well.
It can only mean Django is getting more and more important like it deserves to be.

Hope the audience enjoys, I’ll try not to be boring!

(I’ll upload the slide afterwards)