Urias recently won our October Thank You Award. He decided to donate the money back into the award because he already owned two Haiku golf shirts!

We thought it would be a good idea ask if the winners wouldn't mind answering some questions in a brief interview - Urias agreed, and here are the results:


How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

I'm currently 31 years old. For those interested, I also have three
awesome daughters and a lovely wife.

For my day job currently (for the last 8 years), I write policy
management software for public risk insurance (usually
government-sanctioned self-insured pools). This is generally pretty
boring stuff (unless you're the administrator of a self-insurance
pool) and our flagship product is currently written in C# using a
Microsoft SQL Server database backend. My responsibilities range from
the software development aspect, to some internal IT administration,
as well as business analyst and customer training on occasion.
To clarify, I certainly wouldn't attest that we've returned Haiku Inc.
to a solid, viable state quite yet. We're still very much working on
the legal details internally. Over the last year since Michael Phipps
retirement from the project, I had taken more of an "assistant" role.
I have been helping to keep some of the assets maintained such as the
domain management, the donations, the Haiku store, and a few other
mundane details. Only recently have I stepped up my involvement
somewhat to help get things back on track from a legal perspective and
also taking on some additional responsibilities that Jorge had been
doing previously.

I also have assisted on some of the marketing/PR aspects wherever I
could, including doing much of the footwork to make LinuxWorld 2008
happen for Haiku this year (however, I could not have done this
without Jorge Mare).

As far as difficulty to accomplish some of the tasks, it's difficult
to say in retrospect. The difficulty usually ends up being lack of
time, and many things take time and patience to push through to
completion.

LinuxWorld for example was something we started working on in February
when we originally submitted our application for a booth spot in the
FREE .Org Pavilion. In May, we found out that our .Org Pavilion
application was rejected, and instead we were offered a
cheaper-than-normal rate on a turnkey booth, but still much more
expensive than we could afford.

Ultimately we were able to share the booth space with ReactOS, and
also negotiated a rock-bottom rate with IDG for the space, but we
didn't actually have a signed confirmation that we were actually
attending until mid-July. I could not have managed all the
back-and-forth communication, negotiation, or planning without Jorge's
expertise and assistance during this time, it simply would not have
happened. I also learned a lot during this process, and I feel I'm
better prepared for the next time.

Many in the Haiku community don't know this, but I have also helped
the ReactOS project get their code online with Coverity in the last
month as well (with great success).

Working with Coverity has also been a bit challenging at times. We
started our discussions with David Maxwell (who is very, very busy) in
April, but there were some setbacks preventing Coverity from moving
forward and publishing our results to the developers. After
LinuxWorld, I had resumed our efforts with Erinn at Coverity, and she
has been quite helpful in getting our requests processed and
implemented. I think this was a great opportunity for Haiku, and I'm
very glad I was able to assist in bringing this service to the
developers.
I'd love to have better C/C++ experience so I could actually jump into
the code and start developing as well :) Unfortunately, I haven't had
the time and motivation to start teaching myself the skills I need for
this; perhaps in the future when I have fewer personal projects on my
plate this might become a reality.
This is actually a hard question for me... the only thing I can think
of offhand is a shameless plug for Team Haiku's site
and on IRC at: irc://irc.freenode.net:6667/teamhaiku. Team Haiku
is always in need of more members and devoted crunchers to help us
increase up through the ranks and shine as a successful project and
distributed computing team. The Team Haiku distributed computing team
has been diligently plugging away at 80+ different distributed
computing projects now for several years. This is a great way to
increase awareness of Haiku and use your computer to help solve
complicated mathematical/science related issues for the world at the
same time.