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Summary of last year

I’m not much fond of the “Let’s hope for the new year, let’s look at the past year“ posts, but this time around I’ll make an exception, because in my life, this year have been an exceptional year indeed, in good and bad of course.

For what concerns my personal life, this year was the first complete year as Diego Elio Pettenò (I legally changed my name in October 2008 to include “Elio” — the name of my grandfather on my mother’s side), and that somewhat made me feel a bit of a new man already. Not only I finally decided to take the step of registering as a professional freelancer in the IT world (which basically consists of getting an Italian VAT ID), but I was also able to fly!

The two things are not unrelated: since this has been the first year I worked almost full time (earlier, I only could get sparse consultancy jobs), I felt the need of getting some real vacation, again for the first time in my life. Thanks to my friends Marco and Angela, the opportunity came up last August to finally get a vacation and fight against my fear of planes, which is now moderate enough for me to want to go to FOSDEM.

And this was also the first year I spent new year’s eve night out of home, thanks to Erica and Alessandro.

For what concerns my health, with the exception of one (biggish) health scare concerning my blood sugar, and my now confirmed type 2 diabetes, it all went fine. No hospitals, which is the most important part of it. Unfortunately something bad happened this year as well, but instead of involving my health it involved my family, which has been messed up badly by an internal earthquake. It doesn’t really make anything extremely bad, but it set back my plans of trying moving to London, and at the same time reduced my freedom of expenses.

Outside of work, and family, this was the year that my friend Alberto went all the way in on his passion, and started an amateur movies group , directing his first long-running movie (1h15), which was not only projected in a local (church) theatre, but also went on air on (local) TV! I’m proud of standing by his side when I’m needed, as a technician.

On the Gentoo-side of things this year has been devoted mostly to the Tinderbox which soon should be able to graduate into a much more important project for Gentoo as a whole, and to the implementation of new Ruby eclasses which have been added in tree recently and are making me, Alex and Hans crazy to port the ebuilds to the new standard.

I’m pretty glad how things turned out with both projects, even if I do get some grief and attacks over both, they are showing that improvement is possible, even when it takes a long time to do it: the tinderbox is still evolving, but from what it started (a call to ls followed by emerge), it definitely reached a point where it’s quite usable and has very important results to provide; the eclasses were developed for over six months and are still undergoing improvements, but they are giving us all the chance to properly support multiple Ruby implementations: 1.8, 1.9, JRuby and I think Alex is already working on Ruby Enterprise Edition as I write this.

On the whole, I sincerely hope that 2010 can proceed on the same trend 2009 went off by.

Comments 2
  1. I’m glad for you: you seem to have achieved quite a lot of stuff this year despite adversity and that’s inspiring, making me want to keep fighting towards achieving mine.So thanks for sharing this with the rest of the world and keep up the good job.Happy 2010.

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