Thanks to a crazy 1000 Monero anonymous donation I'll be working on the OurBigBook Project full time for one year: https://cirosantilli.com/sponsor Project updates at: https://mastodon.social/@ourbigbook

Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous.How to get there: create a website that incentives learners (notably university students taking courses) to write freely licensed university-level natural science books/lecture notes in their own words for free. Their motivation for doing that are 1) getting their knowledge globally recognized and thus better jobs 2) improving the world 3) learning by teachingCool features:1) topics: view the best articles by other users for every single section, e.g. https://ourbigbook.com/go/topic/proof-of-the-fundamental-theorem-of-calculus Docs: https://docs.ourbigbook.com/#ourbigbook-web-topics2) ability to store your personal knowledge base in lightweight markup files locally on your computer and publish to either ourbigbook.com (multi-user website with multi-use features) or to a static website (e.g. GitHub Pages)3) infinitely deep article tree and tables of content, e.g. https://ourbigbook.com/cirosantill

v1 attempt of ourbigbook.com, then called: https://github.com/booktree/booktree Adapt GitLab (Rails) as a web front-end for the creation of collaborative textbooks.Towards the end I understood that the idea/approach was crap, too much focus on Git integration/markup, where recommendation system/metrics were the key.And too much trying to upstream stuff onto GitLab, which did not have a similar goals.But hey, you gotta start failing somewhere, so you can fail in a different way in v2.And at least I got to chat with now likely multi-millionaire Sid Sijbrandij in his then gloomy looking kitchen, let's see his actual net worth after IPO.Also, this made me respect web developers. Their work is HARD. It is partly their own fault though, but not only.

C, Assembly, Python scripting, Zephyr OS. Most of the effort went into understanding the Network Interface Cards to model it and help firmware development for board bringup. Worked on a SmartNIC and a HFT low-latency card. I also used Veloce emulator by Mentor Graphics, and looked a little bit into the Verilog which was fun.

Interested in computationally intensive workloads and accelerators.Document a lot of undocumented infrastructure and improve automation.Work closely with the model users so that they can get their jobs done.Several improvements to the "boring" stuff that annoys everyone but no one wants/has time to fix: build system, debug mechanisms, ...Reduced CI test wall run time from 8 hours to 2 hours by more intelligently using the cluster, and automatically removed old artifacts to save space. Tests started to not break every other day as before for some reason.

Learned a bit of hardware internals, GPGPU applications and Linux kernel on own initiative.Made the de-facto "new starter page" for the subdepartment out of my own initiative, covering a wide range of technical HOWTO subjects that were previously sparsely/insufficiently documented. Spent countless weekends trying to learn how stuff truly worked for fun/passion, but mostly failed.Also ended up playing table football with other crazy single colleagues who were also hanging out there after hours, and played for the first time in my life with a VR headset the company had bought to familiarize employees with the technology: an Oculus. The console was wonky, but it made a big impression, especially that Rec Room game in multiplayer.That was fun. If companies knew how to hire, recognize, and channel such crazy people, they would... win.

Work on an open source, mostly decentralized, video call/chat/conference software, focus on video codec hardware acceleration on Android app.The people in that company are simply a bunch of open source saints.This job taught me that anything lower level than the Java API in Android is a Hell, and that FOSDEM is heaven.My task was to do the video acceleration with the Android C++ API, and it was really undocumented, I'm quite sure big companies doing similar things have had to look into AOSP source code to find out, an older Ciro would have at least tried that, because I lost the fear of source later on. And since I didn't manage to do the task after 3 months, I was fired. Me having to learn C++ and improving the build system a bit contributed to slow me down as well. But hey, debugging a memory leak due to not understanding std::unique_ptr would have taken 10x longer.But the true major problem were my communication skills, which was not helped by this being a remote position. I should have shouted much louder and much earlier: hey guys, this task is impossible, give me something else!This job also kickstarted my obsession with learning to do useless things with FFmpeg from the CLI. Can you believe that I was motivated to buy my first smartphone ever because I was going to start this job? 2015 was wayyy after average for my social class, I had some embedded-OS Motorola before that I think. It did have a Breakout clone though.

Develop a Java-based OLAP database engine and surrounding products, primarily for financial applications. Yes, the previous project not working out made me go _that_ low, all the way to finance. Luckily I still couldn't code back then and got fired. Nothing wrong with the company though, I really liked some other employees, I just sucked. Overly strong labor laws are bad for you country BTW, as smaller companies lose the ability to train people on the job, and have to fire before trial periods end. We should tax the rich and redistribute like that instead.I distinctly remember being in awe of using a GUI debugger for the first time: Netbeans. University should teach that! Or how to Google... I became somewhat obsessed with debuggers after this experience. I also started to hate open plan offices due to noise.I feel bad for going to their amazing employee ski resort gathering in another town in the country despite having being there for such a short time, but they didn't give me a choice when I brought it up :-) I had never seen so much snow before... shame I wouldn't dare ski because of the knee.