Polom

I'm a multitask geek since 1992, with selfmade but confirmed skills in graphic design, network engineering, system administration, software development, collaborative operations and community management.

I have been very involved in Tikiwiki community from 2003 to 2007. Here is the short story of how it happened.

In march 2003 I lost my job of development manager in a software company that had to reduce employees level for economical reasons (it was the end of the internet bubble effect). I then had unemployment insurance money guaranteed for 1 or 2 years, and I invested my time in community projects related to free software. I needed a wiki and found tikiwiki, liked it and hacked it days and nights. So when Luis Argerich, the author of Tikiwiki, decided that it was time to get back to his family life, it left an empty space that I used to organise some aspects of the community activity the way I was thinking it should be done.

So I have helped building the early tikiwiki community with some websites like http://tikiwiki.org on my own server in june 2003, worked actively in community administrative tasks, animated the irc channel, recruited like crazy, and managed software engineering operations in cvs repository. My contribution in coding was very prolific and intense, because I had time for it, as well as in the release management during the early years. I was labelled by Marc Laporte as the reluctant leader of the community (my anarchist principles are going against any kind of leadership). But that was just because I was always here, always active, and taking initiatives.

On the peak of my implication in the community I had up to 50 instances of tikiwiki on my server. I developed various features like multitiki, intertiki, the tracker, added various themes and modules. But all of this belongs to the past now and is obsolete.

When time passed I had to get back to work, became more busy on other things and slowly passed the stick.

In 2008 I left France to Taiwan to learn chinese, now I'm technical manager at http://codegreenit.com and I learnt java and ruby on rails on the way. I don't do much php anymore. See my full (almost) up to date resume on http://mose.fr

In the pantheon of Tiki, I'm from another age, a dusty shadow of the past. But I created the 3 Rules, established a lot of basic principle that are still perpetuated in the community (and many are not anymore).

I even introduced the word "polom" in the tacit dictionary of the irc channel. It was refering to the humming that Tom Bombadilom was emitting when walking in the wilderness to warn the inhabitants of his presence so they can take him in account in the ecosystem. This sound has the same purpose when arriving on the irc channel. It's not, like some people seem to think, a synonym of hello, it means more something like "hey, I'm here".

Faces of mose