I was a Ph.D candidate in 2009, in the Electrical Engineering department, at Université catholique de Louvain. A coleague of mine, Russian, told me about this conference in Saint Petersburg and asked me if I wanted to submit a paper. I agreed, we wrote it together and it got accepted. Since she was in Moscow at the time, I thought she would present the paper, but our lab had a policy that they could only pay for trips from Belgium to Russia, not from Russia to Russia. So, I had to go.

I’m over a year working in the healthcare industry. Before that, I was involved in education and finance. These are industries with significant impact on people’s lives, but the impact of healthcare is far more important because we may be poor or poorly educated, but being poorly healthy is a life threatening situation. A bug in an education system is upsetting, but it can be fixed without major impact. A bug in a financial system is troublesome to many people but they all have a chance to recover with the help of government and insurance companies. In a healthcare system, a bug can kill people. Loosing a simple allergy reaction record can represent severe complications during a surgery, for example.

The City of Waterloo, located in Ontario - Canada, has an Open Data Portal that publishes raw data about infrastructure, services, environment, transportation, etc. Residents can use the data to oversee public investments and services, identify gaps, discover development opportunities, and even create new business. We figured out another use for the Portal: test Roma. It publishes a variety of CSV files. Among them, we found a an inventory of every single tree planted on the streets of Waterloo. Isn’t it cool?!

I didn’t even go too far building my portfolio and I’m already rethinking my repositories. After some meditation, I didn’t feel compelled enough to pursue one of the domains and I noticed that two repositories were covering the same feature. Maybe it’s better to change my mind now, when things are still unclear than later, when I may end up abandoning repositories for lack of enthusiasm. So, what is about to change?