General
I am 30 years old, recently married, and living in Germany. My hobbies include cycling with my wife, and reading books on various topics including science fiction, finance, software security and social responsibility. My favourite charities are UNICEF, CARE, Oxfam and Plan International. I also enjoy teaching and writing.
On the more technical side, I am interested in software development – mainly web applications(Ajax mainly), Perl and functional programming. My favourite Ajax library is jQuery. I am also a fan of open source software, and I have an interest in open standards.
Work and Education
I have a degree in Math and Physics from the University of Toronto. Today I work as a web software developer, mainly working with PHP, MySQL and AJAX. I also support a few Drupal sites for schools.
I primarily develop for software for The Learning Machine Limited, a company dedicated to bringing open source teaching into the classroom. This is done through the Ingots. The Ingots are qualifications in IT that teach students about open source and open standards. They are targeted at the beginner level, and are accredited in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Before my work at The Learning Machine, I was a mathematics instructor and graduate student at the University of Maryland for 3 years and a Teaching Assistant at the University of Toronto for 4 years.
Languages and travel
I am a Venezuelan by birth and a Canadian by choice. As someone who has lived in six countries over four continents (Venezuela, Canada, Hong Kong, USA, England and Germany), I consider myself first and foremost a citizen of the world.
I am fluent in Spanish and English. I am currently trying to improve my German, which is presently at the intermediate level. I live in Germany with my girlfriend.
Books and writing
I enjoy technical writing. I’ve had the pleasure to co-author several books on open source, specifically OpenOffice.org. I co-authored Point and Click OpenOffice.org with Robin Miller, and also Getting Started with OpenOffice.org, the OpenOffice.org Draw Guide and the OpenOffice.org Writer Guide.
Everything I’ve learnt about technical writing I’ve learnt from Jean Hollis Weber and her excellent website Technical Editors’ Eyrie. It has some great articles for aspiring technical writers. Some people may recognize Jean’s name from Taming OpenOffice.org Writer, the very first published book about OpenOffice.org.
