Freedows and me and the story of my life in the past couple of years

I've got a new job (actually I've had this job for about 4-5 months). In telling where I work now, I started to realise why I've been away from KDE development in the past two years.

I used to work for a greatly underrated distribution called Conectiva. I had the time of my life there (although I've also met hell sometimes). Anyways, in late 2002, Conectiva signed a deal with the Brazilian Army for the development of some software. I was the lead developer and gladly welcomed the opportunity to get to know the Military Sector (something like the Pentagon is for the US) in Brasilia, our capital. I had done something for the navy and learned a lot there, so the army seemed to be cool. Silly me.

As it turned out, the commercial deal was a little obscure and ambiguous, making a project that should last 3-4 months take the whole of 2003. As lead developer, I got really envolved in the project and visited Brasilia so many times that I actually can't stand it anymore. I now hate Brasilia :-)

Anyways, this took the rest of time I still might have in 2002. Well, by late Decembre 2003, the project was technically over and all that remained was a fierce battle between Conectiva's managenment and the Army representatives regarding some details of cost and stuff. As I was virtually free from the project, I was given my first vacation since time_t was 0. Two weeks after I got back to work, Conectiva layed off 70% of its employees. According to some of the partners, they had to get back to being a small company to survive. I was layed off. Me and a couple of friends from the dev team that happened to be in the same bad situation: we were not actively working for any important customer at that moment. Bad timing... humpf.

Two weeks into my 30-days notice, I got a rang from former Conectiva president and founder, Sandro Henrique. We talked and all of a sudden I had a new job.

The interesting part is that at the time I had only a rough idea about what I was going to work on. I had to sign a NDA because I was going to be working on a secret project for the largest bank in Brazil. Part of the project was to become a new linux distribution called Freedows. Freedows, as coolo eloquently put it once, sounds like dog food, but is in fact a linux distribution with a specific goal: to be as much like Microsoft Windows as possible. Yes, I work for a Windows look-alike. Not particularly proud of it, but it sure pays well and I can use the money. Of course, Freedows is about more than just looking like Windows. It's about behaviour.

And I must mention that even though all the development team considers that KDE is better and easier to work with, the former project leader decided that we should use - oh my! I'm about to say it - GNOME. Yep, that's it. I've said it. I work for a GNOME-based distro.

But in fact I have fun, because I do not get to work on the GUI most of the time and I do a lot of coding. I usually works on backends and infrastructure coding, so I have a lot of fun. Better than the mix of coding/managing job I had at Conectiva (no hard feelings, I still use Conectiva - even at work!)

The cool part of all this is that working with GNOME gave me more motivation to actually work on KDE again. In the past couple of weeks I have been playing with code, testing the new stuff that got done in the past two years. I'm even bringing KNode into the 21st Century. It's fun to be sort of back :-)