As of yesterday, I'm 26 years old

I recently read a blog's about page where the autor mentioned to have 11 years of programming experience, parenthesizing that he started really young. Although I certainly don't think any serious professional experience should include the kind of coding you do as a kid, it made me remember how I started programming myself when I was a a child.

I didn't have my own computer before 1996, when I started secundaria (junior high school). Previously, my only computers' experience had been playing around with Flow on my elementary school's very recent computer lab. Those Commodores were cool but didn't really caught completely my attention. I was slightly surprised when, on late 95 or early 96 I went to my friend's place and saw he had a computer that displayed really neat colors and you could draw freely without a command line interface but with a mouse, a toolbar and all. As I learned later, that must have been Paint on either Windows 3.1 or 95. I was much more interested on that kind of computer action since I was more into paper drawing than the actual computer at the time. But it didn't caught completely my attention either (I was a very lame uninterested kid, I guess). During that time, I started playing with my cousin's machine in Mexico City, running Windows 3.1, but I was very afraid to use it or ask to use it, since I had no clue what to do with it. When my dad bought me my first computer, my cousin Bruno was my first-hand information resource. I remember I asked him if he knew how I could get rid of the "Acer" blue screen that appeared immediately every time I booted the machine. He said "that, I don't know".

I remember I had no Internet connection for like an entire year (come on, it was already late 1996!) and I used the computer primarily as a typewriter. I could do my homework papers in it and pretend I was a graphic designer (I was still into drawing) using Paint. I didn't have (or didn't know it existed) Microsoft Office, but I had this thing installed called Microsoft Works where I used to do it all. In early 1997 I started surfing the Web using Telmex's "Internet Directo Personal", the pre-Prodigy (Mexico's most popular ISP these days) service. At school, I started learning QuickBASIC and since I was some kind of nerd as a child, I also bought some literature around the topic on magazine stands and that way I became very, very interested on the topic of programming. Around 1998, when I was 13 or 14, I used to do a lot of little programs in it, that was really my first experience with code. But I never got too deep into anything, I wonder why now. My family owned and operated a seafood restaurant, and I came up with an entire program (written in QBasic) for the waiters to order on the computer and print their orders in the kitchen where the cooks would pick it up and dispatch it. But I only knew QBasic, all of the food menu was a never-ending list of variables, I had no clue what a database was (I didn't have Access or didn't even know what it was), etc. The entire code was a single file, with a lot of if-then's and goto calls. I wish I still had that code.

What I rescue telling this is that coding as a child was a experience full of fun. I remember I loved to spend hours and hours thinking on how to come up with a better "interface" on the program, if you could call it like that. Sometimes I hope I could still retain that kid momentum when programming or that I could have kept it when I first went to college. The worst part of programming is that one sometimes forgets that it is lots of fun.

 My blog has served me throughout the years as a getaway medium. I've found comfort writing its pages, and more recently, writing a little bit more of my technical life and whereabouts. The personal side of it, in spite of being very well handled in the past, has been left behind in recent times. And I believe Twitter has taken that part of my postings. However, I believe that a lot of the thing I'm currently doing in my life are based on the measurable fact of the impact or weight that those actions would have on my Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) stream and contacts. This has also prevented me from developing further interests and getting deep into more interesting or worthwhile affairs. All the time spent reading and watching what others are doing, what I'm not doing and show what I do or pretend I'm doing has affected social relationships of mine and, as said, damaged, my growing or professional aspiring persona, that it even hurts deep down.

2010 marks the beginning of a lot of stuff and new plans, as usual. But it also marks the end of that ill poison I'm usually infected with. I want to grow up and move on to more interesting matters, retake the life I'm supposed to live and spend with the people I deserve.

Here, then, is for 2010.

The fact that in a few years, we might not have a single person on this planet that was born in the 1800s (or before January 1st, 1900), makes me sad and depresses me.

Living supercentenarians.

Yes, those are twenty-five hands. As of yesterday 8/8, I turned 25. Thanks to all of you who shouted out on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere.

Oh, the ephemeralness of time; adulthood, a low-hanging fruit now.

We got back from Spain yesterday. It was a nice overall vacation experience but a little too long for our own style and like, specially after spending two weeks in Mexico City. Lots of photos (at least some) are on our Flickr and some more on my TwitPic.

I couldn't be happier to be back in New York.

Given an awful work/travel schedule that I couldn't handle in the last days, I wasn't able to get to Lisbon, Portugal to attend YAPC::EU, until today, day one of the conference, I was still looking forward to get a cheapish flight from Madrid, but it was just impossible, schedules wouldn't match with my work and vacation plans. Bummer. Because of this, I will not be able to give my talk Perl in the Time of Social Networks (that I had already revisited and improved) there as it was expected for tomorrow.

No YAPC Europe for me At least not this year, *sob, sob*

After a random series of hazardous events, I'm finally at DebConf 9 in Cáceres, Spain. I'll post more updates later, right now I'm trying to put my sh*t together and find my way through around here for the next couple of weeks. Interested people can always follow my microblogging feed too.

Love, D.

I attended YAPC|10 during this past week. The overall experience was quite particular, with ups and downs, but after all I made it back in one piece.

I rode a Greyhound bus on my crusade of saving a few bucks. I always had issues with buses, when I was a child I used to go from Celaya to Mexico City (and back) almost every weekend for a couple of years and I developed a phobia against the whole bus experience. Even though, getting to Pittsburgh from New York City was cheaper riding a bus than the other alternatives anyway, flying or train. Anyways, it was an awful experience that prevented me from being complete recovered after each travel leg.

Staying at the CMU dorms was also a nice and pleasant experience, feeling for three days like I was a kid on a nice American college. I might want to do that some time in the future pursuing a Master's degree (some day).

At YAPC, I had the nice chance to get to know a lot of people I'd only known by mailing lists and CPAN modules authors that I use on a daily basis. I also had attended YAPC 08 last year in Chicago, so I already knew a small group of mongers.

I delivered my talk about Perl and social networks on Tuesday. I gave it an small twist by moving it into a more motivational, business perspective for hackers, in the last minute. I was overall satisfied with it, and I also think some things were not well done and had to be changed. Fortunately, quite some people came to me and gave good, positive, constructive feedback about it, that I was very thankful to receive, and unfortunately some people also threw destructive criticism that only makes you think how douche-baggy people in the community you can be. In any way, I was happy and satisfied, some observations:

• I have to take out a lot of personal stuff I poured into it because people don't care (and it's not their fault, it's mine).
• Focusing more on actual code. I can try to focus on motivating people to adventure into social networks application development using Perl, but the YAPC audience is more into actual development and coding techniques than money-making ideas.
• I still have to practice my speech. I took the time to write my lines scripts for each one of the slides, but that makes the interaction with the people a bit more difficult to establish.

And some interesting points around YAPC in general:

• In the auction, event that is done every year helping TPF raise some funds and that a similar approach would be great to have in conferences like DebConf, the highest bid for a lunch with Larry Wall reached one thousand dollars. I was a bit surprised.
• They took us in a tour at Heinz Field, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, it was awesome, although it was already a bit late and couldn't take good pictures of the field. Pictures are on this Flickr set.
• I had some time at the end of my stay in Pittsburgh so I took the opportunity to go to PNC Park and watch the Pittsburgh Pirates kick one of their greatest rivals (as I learned there, because of the proximity), the Cleveland Indians. Pictures are on this set.
• Some people outside the venue also joined me on the conference as I setup an improvised ustream transmission. Unfortunately, I never got to press the "Start recording" button, so no video of it. Bummer. However, God willing, I will record my next delivery of the talk on YAPC::EU in Lisbon, in early August.

I've placed the slides on a PDF here. You can also clone the entire repository containing the source Keynote file.

Raquel and I came to San Francisco for a couple of days during this week, mainly to attend the MySpace DevJam. It was a great experience to get to know the west coast as we hadn't have the chance to come over. We also had the opportunity to meet with my great friend Marco Manzo, who is working for Leap Frog in the Bay Area.

On the MySpace side, I'm glad to see that some real and good improvements are being made to open the platform as much as possible. I think this is crucial to them, in order to re-gain the market that they have been losing over to Facebook. They are making great effort by following the Open Social 0.8 spec and working together for the upcoming 0.9 release. Offerpal is also doing good, with an attractive business model for virtual economy. Props to them who organized the little get-together. Also, it's going to be interesting to see how things go with the newly introduced OpenSocial markup language (OSML) and its integration into the MySpace platform. Some of the new interesting features are also notifications and the activities report. I'm looking forward to toy around with it later.

Anyway, we didn't tour that much of San Francisco, since we were also working most of Thursday and Friday. We visited the Mission district, which feels a little bit like the hood I was probably supposed to grow up into, but never did. It feels a little bit like the multicultural harmonic Mexico that we all would like to have, it really makes a lot of sense why a lot of Mexican people come either legally or illegally to these towns. I also bought some bread on a Mexican bakery, had tortas and ate a bit of jícama con chile on a fruit stand; most of the people is friendly, unlike real Mexico We also went to the Golden Gate bridge, which is an amazing piece of technology, it's just amazing. Pictures will be uploaded to our Flickr photostream.

Finally, I'd like to point at how amazed I am right now. I'm currently sitting on a plane, but I'm not saving this blog post to publish it later, I'm fucking online on-flight! This is amazingly possible thanks to Gogo, which is a company that it's enabling these services for some American Airlines flights, and other airlines apparently (see their Wikipedia page too). Apparently, they have some sort of land towers where they send some kind of signal to only some equipped planes. And it's quite cheap, 12 or 13 bucks for the service; given that this is a 6-hr flight, it's totally worth it. If your laptop's battery dies, you can still use your portable handheld device or other computer even. The speed? It's pretty shitty on upload, but it's decent on download, it just kinds of reminds me of a regular aDSL connection in Mexico. I just wish planes would give people the ability to plug themselves into electricity, that'd kick ass too.

Whoops, a bit of turbulence now