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Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

I would be a sellout, but there's not much demand.

For Sale Portobello Mkt
For Sale Portobello Mkt by Jason Jones, under a CC-by-nc-sa license.

It would be nat­u­ral to any­one who does­n't know me to be­lieve I live a life of lux­u­ry, in­ter­na­tion­al trav­el and ex­ot­ic plea­sures [1] but there is a small thing I am kin­da ashamed of:

I hard­ly ev­er got paid to code.

Re­al­ly! Most of the mon­ey I live on has ab­so­lute­ly noth­ing to do with what­ev­er you read about on my blog.

I make my liv­ing do­ing things like in­stalling As­ter­isk in call cen­ter­s, or con­fig­ur­ing MySQL repli­ca­tion, or con­fig­ur­ing VP­Ns us­ing as­sort­ed piece-of-crap routers and by all means if you need that kind of work done, please con­tact Net Man­agers we are freaky good at it and charge rea­son­able rates.

But while I like that kind of thing [2] I like oth­er things bet­ter. I like pro­gram­ming much more than I like con­fig­ur­ing As­ter­isk!

Then again, I am not a re­al­ly great pro­gram­mer. I am just about an av­er­age coder, ex­cept that I am faster than most.

And late­ly, an in­ter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non has tak­en place.

How much mon­ey I earned thanks to my first 14 years of open source and free soft­ware de­vel­op­men­t? $0 [3]

How much mon­ey have I earned in the last year of FLOSS de­vel­op­men­t? $500 (and it is bound to be more than that soon).

To a first-­worlder that may seem like peanut­s, but down here in the land of cheap beef, that's... about 100 pounds of good meat! Or 10 nice din­ners in fine restau­rants for me and my wife. [4]

I am won­der­ing, is this part of a trend? Have oth­ers been re­ceiv­ing more ap­pre­ci­a­tion in the form of mon­ey late­ly?

In any case, it's a great feel­ing when a work of love (and trust me, noone does some­thing for 14 years for free if he does­n't love it) is ap­pre­ci­at­ed.

Just in case: this does­n't mean you have to pay me to get a bug fixed, or to get a fea­ture im­ple­ment­ed. How­ev­er, it does mean that if you like or use any of my pro­grams and want me to feel good about the time I spent writ­ing them... well, you can just send me a nice email, I will be just as hap­py. Re­al­ly!


Lisandro Pérez Meyer / 2010-09-28 16:39:

En éstos últimos días recibí parches para QAntenna y ofrecimientos para traducir el programa al italiano. Creo que vos si te vas a saber dar una idea lo contento que me puso :-)

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-28 17:02:

Más vale :-)

Lisandro Pérez Meyer / 2010-09-28 16:40:

OK, I should have done that comment in english ;)

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-28 16:50:

Los comentarios en ingles y en castellano van a la misma pagina ;-)

Lisandro Pérez Meyer / 2010-09-30 16:24:

Mmm, quizás eso me convenza algún día de dejar mi cuenta en blogspot y ponerme un blog en mi server... Pero no sé si vale la pena el lío del spam y demás.

Discuss está bueno, pero al OpenID a veces no anda :-(

Roberto Alsina / 2010-10-01 15:22:

Yo sigo con mi blog propio mas que nada por inercia, hay 10 años de posts no quiero ni pensar en omo corno mover todo a otro lado, o que hacer si lo tengo que volver a mudar después :-(

edvm / 2010-09-28 16:46:

Me pregunto si se dara la misma situacion para con los developers de openvpn o tantos proyectos libres que utilizamos en IT ^^ (algo me dice que si :\)

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-28 16:50:

Ojalá!

Giacomo Lacava / 2010-09-28 20:20:

This sounds like a thinly veiled call for a job offer ;)

You're among the best PyQt developers around, which are few and far between. Why don't you drop an email to Phil Thompson or the Google guys ? They're constantly looking for PyQt (and C++) people. If only I could make sense of C++, I'd have done that myself!

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-28 20:30:

I have been called by Google for sysadmin work, and I just don't fit their expectations:

* I have no college degree
* I live in Argentina

I am happy with programming staying a hobby. I would love if it could become a profitable one, but I am ok with having my company too. So... not really a job request, unless someone can just blow my mind with an offer :-)

jjay69 / 2010-09-30 15:37:

Next time i would appreciate it if you asked my permission before using my photos on your website / blog or at the very least credit me somewhere in the picture.

I'll do it myself this time

www.flickr.com/jjay69

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-30 16:03:

You are absolutely right and I will fix it in a moment. However:

a) Your photo was under a creative commons license. That means you are authorizing me to use it, not that I need to ask your permission to use it. For that, you should put it as "all rights reserved"

b) The photo is placed here with Flickr's "share this photo" HTML code. That used to include an attribution ("whatever, by whoever, under whatever license", see here, for example: http://lateral.netmanagers.com.ar/weblog/posts/BB679.html). It seems it doesn't anymore, and I didn't check to make sure it included proper attribution on the final post.

So, I will upload the attribution in a minute, but if you want people to ask for permission, you shouldn't put things under CC licenses.

Obviously I was not trying to avoid attribution, or I would have removed the link ;-)


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