new job

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:19:43 +0200
academia, dpl, france, irill, lang/english, planet-debian

LDAP's "Country" entry reads "France"

The correlation among quiet times for a blog and quiet times in its owner's life is often negative. My past two months are no exception.

Beside my regular Debian activities, I've used a good chunk of my day time to (try) settle down and stop wandering around Europe, one temporary academic position after another. In the end, it has turned out very well. Starting September 1st, I'll be joinining the PPS laboratory as a Maître de Conférences, a tenured academic position roughly equivalent to US' Associate Professor (at least according to Wikipedia; see the high quality references that tenured people resort to use?).

More specifically, I'll continue to work in the context of IRILL (Research and Innovation on Free Software), an exciting new entity that I've helped bootstraping over the past couple of years. Thanks to IRILL and to his director Roberto Di Cosmo, I've been able not only to pursue quite some research on FOSS distros, but I've also been supported (rather than discriminated) in my Debian activities, including acting as DPL around the world. Last but not least, within IRILL I have also been able to offer support to several Free Software communities such as: Debian itself (hosting Sprints and sponsoring DebConf hardware), GNU, OSI, OCaml, Darcs, and many others. I realize how lucky I've been ending up in a place like IRILL and I'm glad to know I'll be around here for quite some time.

The main change I'll expect to happen from September on is that I'll get back to do some teaching, trading-off time from research activities. I've been teaching only on and off since I've moved to France in 2008 and I miss that quite a bit. It looks like that next year I'll be teaching various classes on FOSS-related (or at the very least UNIX-y) topics. Time looks scarce, but who knows, maybe I'll also find a way to mix-in the nice packaging tutorial that Lucas has recently put together.

Wish me luck!