For quite some time that I don’t write anything here. Contrary to what may seem this is not due to lack of ideas about what to write, but due the lack of time that I’ve been feeling.

Ironically the last post was about time management and the wonderful advices of Randy Pausch. Even with these advices in mind and trying to put some in practice it becomes difficult to perform miracles when our days have twenty hours instead of the normal twenty-four.

This reduction in hours is due to some recent major changes in my life. Although I haven’t finished my Master degree yet (still missing one course and the Master Thesis) and as you may have noticed in a previous post, I’ve decided to look for a job. To be honest all the spare time was driving me insane.

At the moment I’ve returned to my homeland and left Évora behind. So I’m currently working in Lisbon and living in Setúbal (temporary solution, I hope), which are distant about 40 km’s and make me lose roughly four hours a day just on travels.

But not everything is bad, in fact, this must be the only “not so good” thing because I’ve managed to get exactly what I wanted, and that was:

1. Find a great business company in Lisbon.
2. Work in Web Development with Open Source technologies.
3. Try to make my final Master Thesis integrated in the business company that I’m in.
4. Learn new things with more experienced people while working as a team.

Now about the place that I’m working in.

It’s name is DRI – Open Solutions for Open Mind and we work as an Open Source integrator which delivers low cost technological solutions with high quality and efficiency. If you want you can read more about us at our company’s blog or website.

One thing that got me amazed is the work environment which is surprisingly relaxed and informal.

So far I had the opportunity to work with SugarCRM, ExtJS, jQuery and Zend Framework. Some of these tools were already known, others less so, which in itself is a big plus to who wants to leave it’s comfort zone and learn new things.

Another interesting point is related to my final Master Thesis. If the proposal which was suggested at DRI is approved, my goal will be to develop a specific module for SugarCRM in order to automate some of the processes at our company, I’ll talk more about this in another post.

In summary and at the time the balance is very positive.