Briefly about me
I'm an Information Systems Engineer from Argentina. I'm 27 years old and I've been working in Smalltalk (for the industry and for teaching) for four years until some months ago, as now I'm studying a master programme at Paris.
I collaborated as co-admin for the ESUG GSoC 2012 and as a student for the ESUG GSoC 2010, but as this is my first summer in years to have all the free time that I want, I decided to run as student again and try to come up with a cool project!
Availability for the GSoC 2013
I am super busy until finishing school, that is on May 18th. On the other hand, I have a two-weeks summer school in August that I think will be pretty intensive, so it's possible that I won't be able to work much on the project during those two weeks.
Then, I start my second year on September 2nd, so the last couple of weeks of the GSoC I will be available part-time (20 hours per week), but luckily I will be on a very good track by then as I will be available full time during most of the program (40 hours per week).
About my study
I studied Information Systems Engineering in the "Universidad Tecnológica Nacional" (UTN - National Technological University) at Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Now I'm studying "Human Computer Interaction and Design" at Université Paris-Sud, a new programme by the EIT ICT Master School, where I'm learning a lot about user interface design, interaction techniques, evaluation of user interfaces and also challenges on implementation. Next year I'm doing my specialization and master theses in KTH, at Stockholm.
My interests
Right now I'm more focused on building and designing user interfaces that bring great user experience. I'm also interested in object oriented design, I enjoy designing systems taking flexibility and simplicity as challenges.
During the last year, as I haven't been working and I had a lot of school assignments, I took the opportunity to learn new programming languages and I think that comparing different tools and features that different languages have is very enriching.
My non-Smalltalk experiences so far
My first programming experiences were with web programming (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Actionscript, SQL...) about 9 years ago, so I'm pretty experienced in those subjects. I've also worked a lot with graphic tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator to design the websites I did as a freelancer for around 4 years.
As part of being a teaching assistant at the UTN I also learned and taught logical programming (with Prolog) and functional programming (with Haskell) for the class "Programming Paradigms". For "Systems Design" I also helped designing and evaluating assignments written in Java.
As I mentioned before, this year I've been experimenting with a several languages for school projects: Javascript (and TypeScript), Java, Objective-C and Scala (and Smalltalk too!). Two of these projects are being used by real users in real environments:
-
A video previews browser and playlist builder for the SIGCHI conference, written in Javascript and TypeScript
-
A mobile app for voting for the songs you want the DJ at an event to play. This project has many components, written in Javascript, Cocoa Touch and Scala. I'm in charge of the server side using the Play Framework for Scala and I'm also part of the interaction design team.
My Smalltalk experiences so far
I started using Dolphin when I first learned object oriented programming. Then I became a teaching assistant and started using Smalltalk for teaching. We moved to Squeak and then to Pharo. In 2010, with Guille Polito, Gise Decuzzi, Nico Passerini and Germán Leiva we built "LOOP - Learning Object Oriented Programming" in Pharo and started using it to teach in several universities like UTN, UNSAM, UNQ and also for OOP trainings for Siemens and Telecom Argentina. We won the 3rd prize on ESUG 2011! For LOOP we used "smallUML", a project I implemented for the GSoC 2010.
On the other hand, I've worked 4 years at the Ministry of Education of Argentina designing and implementing a system for tracking the teachers' salaries of the entire country and building reports with estimations for the future. I used Pharo for developing and then deployed to Gemstone. The UI was written in Seaside. As part of this job I developed a framework to integrate in a Seaside system the possibility to let the final user create reports on the data that the system manages.
All these projects have trained me in user interfaces design and implementation, metaprogramming and advanced object oriented programming.
Why am I interested in Smalltalk?
It's simple and powerful at the same time, it's a very nice and expressive language. Sometimes when I'm using other languages it annoys me that some things take so much work, but I have to say that sometimes it happens the other way around too and I would like to take these few free months that I have ahead to help changing that.
Will I stay with Smalltalk after the project is finished?
Yes, specially if the project is finished :P I want to help building a native IDE for Pharo and also offer a way of building any kind of native UI, which is one of the key tools I believe it's missing to make a lot of people more attracted to use Pharo for the industry.
|