October 2011, 6th, I refuse one job proposal and reply back with sorry messages to another 2 emails. Later, one of the guys whom I refuse, picks up the Cluj CoWork concept, and builds probably the most awesome working space for freelancers in Cluj-Napoca (website to be launched soon).

First release in production since 6th of Oct. Nailed! Happy new year! http://t.co/1CXEZoER

31 Dec, 2011 19:34 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Risktronics

Risktronics

Meanwhile, 3 months later, the reason I refused those great people with interesting teams and projects gets online: Risktronics.net (about what I still can not disclose much, and yes, the deploy ended like 3 hours before 2012 New Year).
During these 3 months, with some cash from last GSoC, and a fuzzy idea, I switch to Ruby to build the startup that hopefully can “fix banks” or at least help people get credits easier, all this together with two old friends of mine.

Lately, here we are now, with a working prototype that after some tweaks will become open to public beta testing. As you expect, with no money, and no certain future :)

Looking back, recalling my mum and some friends question, “is it worth?”, the answer is definitely positive, but not in a “pinkish way”. Actually, deciding to do the opposite, would probably forever leave me with a sense of regret, and would never motivate myself enough doing something else than what I know already.

What would be fair to mention is that, jumping from one set of tools to another, makes you discover a lot of great stuff and needs which basically invites you to explore.

Updated Pagina gem, ditched Sinatra for plain Rack, code simplified a lot! https://t.co/lZLo5RIs

5 Jan, 2012 23:53 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Suscov

Stas Sușcov

To confirm the above, the same time, I wrote Pagina, which is a Rack web app, that came up from a simple idea of having your website content in your Dropbox (Stumbled upon Drop Pages later in winter 2011). Later Pagina is used to build the Coursewa.re and helps some friends of mine (they work as attorneys) finally integrate their website management tasks into daily workflow (they use Dropbox a lot for collaboration).

Check out the new version of #BuddyPress Courseware, and its beautiful new website! http://t.co/OHY8tEku @Suscov

2 Feb, 2012 0:54 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@boone

Boone B. Gorges

Coursewa.re meanwhile brings no money/big-real-world-projects, but a lot of interest which both upsets me and pleases. Hopefully I can roll out in spring the SaaS platform I’ve been planing for one year or so…

To wrap up, there was a lot of fun for last couple of months, and I’m lucky I could meet so many great people and use so much great code.

Well I got bored, and I rewrote my old Lug Map plugin (now it’s called Simple Google Maps), I helped a friend and wrote a Simple Content Restriction plugin to allow only users see the content, and I updated the Correct Romanian Diacritics plugin.

Can you believe it’s still January!?! Bring some soup…

I used both, the beloved (by Facebook) PHP library for that and the Python library, and (not) surprisingly I found that writing Facebook apps on Python (and mostly because you have the handy AppEngine for deploying those) is way easier and needs no special treatment from your customers (you handle them the code and access to the application panel).

So along with my projects I used mostly the same approach, ending up with the code I published today on github.

This is a simple MVC like framework, which I recommend checking out to anyone who wants to try writing the Facebook apps on Google’s AppEngine.

With this article I would like to explain what are the next plans for Courseware.

First things first. I will start working on an authentication solution like LDAP/AD for Courseware. As a LMS it will make sense to allow people connect their existing databases to our system. Making it a snap and perfectly integrating it (with automatic Teachers discovery functionality) might open for us a new userbase.

Next, I was keeping this in secret, but we will likely ally with guys from LabRemote, and integrate Courseware with their app. This can also bring us to a new level of users, where mobility for teachers matters.

The final news is that Courseware will likely become my thesis work, if I graduate this year… So I will work on the tests/quizes functionality for it. This isn’t an easy task, I would call it a challenge. If we can offer a secure and guaranteed online evaluation solution for our system, this will totally change the way virtual education is percepted today.

Also, I must say, BuddyPress (and) Courseware was a great success at WordCamp Bucharest (slides here, if you missed it)!

If you share the plans I described, leave me a comment or explain your position if you think different, maybe we can make it even better.
Keep in touch.

The BuddyPress Courseware today got it’s home, along with the first stable version: 0.1

I’m very happy to report that this was an awesome experience, and the final results kick ass.
Not to forget my mentors that helped a lot during the last 3 months: Jeremy Boggs and Boone B. Gorges, and a whole community of colleagues!

Thanks and come join the team, since the project development continues!

I completely rewrote my plugin we use to list/maintain the Romanian FLOSS communities index. Recently I was asked to improve it with some features, but the code (it was a hack mostly) was horrible so the first step was to rewrite it.
The changelog speaks for itself. Now we got GeoRSS and jQuery power behind.

The SVN changeset and log can be checked out on trac.

If you are interested, checkout the project: WordPress Loco Theme or get the code: bzr branch lp:~sushkov/wordpress-loco/trunk. Branching is welcomed!

The plans for future… Knowing that ubuntu.com will get re-branded, I’m interested to continue the wordpress-loco development to reflect new brand changes. Maybe even rewrite the plugins needed for loco teams to connect to Launchpad.

Time will show, so far I’m trying to bring up some loco activity in Moldova, and I hope we’ll even get a release party for upcoming Lucid 10.4…

Full technical, specific descriptions and kudos list is available in the README file.

This is the first time this plugin is updated, and a lot of stuff changed. The location of the images has changed, the limits that were in the 1.0 are now obsolete. The upgrade should be flawless, but I still advise you to backup the images folder.

• Changelog
• SVN Log
• Demo
• Another Demo