Feelings about Archimedes

I am very sorry to have to post this but I can no longer endure that feeling alone. I am getting seriously tired of being questioned about when Archimedes will have a better documentation and the new features and 64 bits support and updated informations on the site and a better site and this and that. Believe when I say I would love to provide every single one of those things but I am NOT being payed by anyone (except maybe myself) to work on this project. I am NOT unemployed or full time free to do whatever I want and most of all: I am not even a USER of Archimedes. I honestly and truly work on this project out of my good will!

Although I would really like to be paid to work on Archimedes, I do not expect people to raise money to afford my work. What I am expecting is that people stop complaining about me not doing to work and start doing it themselves. Start providing instalation tutorials for all platforms for instance, then maybe use tutorials directed to architects. Suggest a different page format. Update websites you have access on such as wikis and reports. Understand that anything that I do that does not involves programming Archimedes itself, features will NOT get implemented. So if you can take off anything what so ever from my duties, it means I get to program more (which is the part I like) and implement more features, correct more bugs and solve more problems.

And finally, if none of this is possible to you, try gathering architecture offices and professionals to donate any mount of money to the project that could be reverted into freeing me some time and working more on the project. If you do not feel comfortable with that, hire a local developer in your country to contribute with the project and ask me to give you feedback about his work if you don't feel secure to measure it.

It pains me to have to make this post especially because it is a clear signal that I am getting tired of the project. But I am getting each time more disapointed with the architect's community since it is not able to unite for a simple matter. Free and open source software should mean collaboration from everyone! Not just me working and you waiting for the job to be done. Especially considering that the greatests beneficiaries are the users of the software, a group from which I am NOT part.

Well, enought of complaining. Now to the news: during my talk at Campus Party, I promised attendees that I would release a new version of Archimedes. It will happen within the next 2 weeks because I will need to release some version for my graduation student team but I will delay it as much as I can in order to produce all the infra-structure I am working on. New versions that include features and improvements to users should only be available by the end of march. Let's hope I can keep that promise!

A week at Campus Party

Hello everyone,
It has now been two weeks since I started going to Campus Party and eight days since I stopped it. It was a very nice experience where I could meet a couple persons I wanted to.

I must admit I was a bit disapointed with the audience since I was expecting a bit more people interested in development activities such as Archimedes and Coding Dojos or an eXtreme Programming (XP) laboratory. I had something like 10 attendees from start to the end and another 10 passing by during Archimedes demonstration, the Coding Dojo had about 8 newcomers while the XP lab managed to reach amazing 4 attendees.

Besides hanging on with friends during the whole week and seeing computer geeks getting a lot of attention from the press (which I had some but threw away by being busy), Campus party was mostly a big lan party with tons of file sharing, game play and robots wandering around hiting people or waking them up with music.
I think I earned three good experiences with the event:

1. Learned to disassemble executable code and debug it with gdb (this will make a post later when I achieve my goal with it).
2. Worked on Archimedes and got some feedback from users about wether or not it is decent. While people told me it was great, nobody (except one person maybe, as far as I know) really started to use it.
3. Met Akita that suggested that we produced a couple of screencasts about Seaside. I though about it and since I am the teaching assistant for the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) course and we are going to work with it, I will probably do it. I will post them here when it's done.
   

Finally I could meet with people from 4Linux again which is always fun, especially when Maddog is also around. So that was basically Campus Party for me. As far as I am concerned, it is an interesting event but more focused to fun and meetings than serious work or talks.

Anyway, next posts will cover my promises about Archimedes, news about the courses in São Carlos, my next works on OOP for graduation students and posts to session in Agile 2008. See you in a bit.