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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Mozilla, Mobile and Students

A month ago

Évora

I went to Évora this week to give a talk about Mozilla and our mobile projects (Firefox Mobile, B2G, Open Web Apps, Identify, etc) at an event organized by the students’ union of the local university. Here’s my talk’s deck of slides (in Portuguese)—not very useful as it has very little content but it does contain a few useful links.

My main conclusion from this event is that we, Mozillians, should probably dedicate some more time spreading the word about our mission and projects to Uni students, especially in CS. There seems to be little awareness of why we’re different, why our mission matters, and what we’re working on right now.

From my experience, universities are usually a great source of potential long-term open source contributors. Getting students excited about our projects is likely to help us have a constant flow of new contributors in our community.

Big thanks to the event organizers for inviting me and for the hospitality! It was great to see Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) again and also meet interesting people like Thomas Perl (gPodder) and Steven Goldfarb (CERN). It was a quick yet pleasant visit to Portugal.

FOSDEM 2012

February 09, 2012

Mobillians by Brian King (CC-BY-NC)

This year’s FOSDEM was a special one for me. It was the first time I attended it as a Mozillian! I had already met quite a few European community members at MozCamp Europe last year but this FOSDEM was a great opportunity to meet even more Mozillians face-to-face. I stayed at the Mozilla DevRoom most of the conference but also spent some time catching up with my fellow GNOME hackers.

Chris and I gave a “State of Firefox Mobile” talk on Sunday. I usually don’t share my slides because they tend to be too short in content to be useful. However, we wrote some speaker notes that give enough information and context on what we talked about. So, here’s the deck alternating between slides and speaker notes—I wish Speaker Deck had proper support for speaker notes…

All in all, I had a great time at FOSDEM this year! PS: The weather during the conference was quite special too—in a painful way!

4 Years Abroad

October 14, 2010

Back in 2006

It turns out that today is a special date which I almost forgot. Back in 2006, on this same date, 14th of October, Carol and I took a flight from Rio de Janeiro—where my parents-in-law live—to Helsinki where I started working for Nokia as a member of the Maemo UI gang. Today we complete 4 years living abroad.

Since then, I participated on the development three great gadgets, left Nokia to join my current gig at litl, went through a rather painful process to get our UK visa, moved to London, we became parents of the most beautiful little girl in the whole universe, met a lot of awesome people from all parts of the world and a few very special friends, learnt more about other cultures and about our own, and more. Much more.

What an awesome journey!

Visiting English towns

September 03, 2010

Brighton

This year, Carol and I decided to plan for some quick visits to smaller cities around London. The reason is twofold. First, we wanted to explore a bit more the country where we live. Secondly, we wanted to “practice” how it was to travel with our little daughter before our vacation in Brazil. We’ve made 1-day trips to three towns: Windsor, Cambridge, and Brighton.

Windsor. We visited Windsor in the end of 2009 when my father and his wife came to London to spend Xmas and new year with us. We went there for an obvious reason: the famous Windsor castle, one of England’s most popular places for tourists. It was a quite cold day but we managed to enjoy the sightseeing anyway. Windsor, the town, is cute and very quiet.

Cambridge. This was the first time we made a trip with Julia. Cambridge is a university-oriented town full of students all around. We took the sightseeing bus and walked around quite a bit – a very tiring experience to carry Julia in a sling during the whole time. We went to some of the Cambridge’s classic locations such as King’s College Chapel and Fitzwilliam Museum. Got a pretty good impression of Cambridge, even though it seemed a bit too crowded with students.

Brighton. That was definitely our favourite town. Brighton is on the south coast of England. The pebble beach is a nice place to relax. Brightonians seem to be easy-going people. It’s amazing how the sea affects people’s behaviour and attitude. To be honest, Carol and I even considered moving there after the visit but it would be a bit impractical to work in London and live there.

What all those towns have in common? A very obvious thing: you see more English people. It may sound weird to say that but in London you don’t really experience English culture because the city is very cosmopolitan. Even though those towns are not so far from London, it was interesting to notice that they are more homogeneously English than London. I took some photos from all three towns.

Where are we going next? We have some obvious suspects in mind: Oxford, Bath, Stonehenge, Cotswolds, and others. We’re also planning a weekend trip to Edinburgh and surrounding locations. There’s so much to see that is hard to decide! But we have no hurry and summer is almost gone now. Maybe next year, let’s see.