About me / CV

I’m a twenty-some year old nerd geek hiding in Europe. In my “free” time I like pretending to study, meta-discussing trivialities and pretending I’m a freelancer, as well as riding bikes, telling (really) bad jokes and cooking (salty and greasy) international food.

Personal data

• Name: Israel Saeta Pérez.
• Living in: Barcelona, Spain.
• Contact: israel.saeta (at) dukebody (dot) com.

Education

• Studying a Master in Artificial Intelligence at UPC/UB/URV (last year) sponsored by a scholarship from La Caixa, including:
  • Machine Learning and Adavanced Machine Learning Techniques.
  • Data Mining.
  • Information Retrieval. (Indexing, search strategies optimization, genetic search algorithms)
  • Self-Organized Multi-Agent Systems.
  • Probabilistic Graphical Models. (Project in algorithms for learning Bayesian Networks structure)
  • Neural Networks in Finance.
  • Object and Human Recognition. (Applied Computer Vision)
  • Computational Intelligence. (ANNs and Fuzzy Logics)
  • Normative Dynamic Virtual Worlds. (Project in applying A-SVM techniques to avatars’ movements)
  • Cognitive Interaction with Robots. (Practical project with the Nao platform and A-SVMs)
• Physics graduate by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) (2011).
• Studied Physics as an exchange (SICUE) student at Universidad de Barcelona during the 2010/2011 course.
• Studied Engineering Physics as an Erasmus student at KTH, Stockholm, during the 2009/2010 course.
• Studied a Degree in Physics at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) from 2005 to 2009.
• Science and Nature High School Degree at IES Alameda de Osuna (2005).

Other courses, conferences and awards

• Course in Advanced Computers Security (Spain 2010), including topics like proactive security, rootkits, firewalls or security auditing.
• Attended the Plone Conference 2010 in Bristol, UK.
• Attended the Plone European Symposium 2010 in Sorrento, Italy, working on tiles development.
• Attended the Plone Cathedral Sprint 2010, focusing on Plone 4 documentation work.
• Attended the Free Culture X Conference (2010) in Washington, D.C.
• Attended the Free Culture Forum 2009 in Barcelona.
• Speaker and student in the summer course “Desaprendiendo la propiedad intelectual” (Unlearning Intellectual Property), held in Cáceres, Spain, 2008.
• Premio Nacional de Bachillerato 2004-2005 (National Baccalaureate Award).
• Premio Extraordinario de Bachillerato Madrid 2004-2005 (Extraordinary Baccalaureate Award).
• Comunidad de Madrid Excellency Scholarship Holder (2005).
• Silver medal at the national phase of the XXXVI International Physics Olympiad (2005).

Languages

• Spanish: Mother tongue. Speak, read and write it fluently.
• English: Advanced reading, writing and speaking. Specialized in technical texts (see translating experience below).
• Catalan. Intermediate. Passed a C1 course.
• Programming: Basic C++, PHP and Javascript; advanced Python and standards-compliant (X)HTML & CSS.

Technical skills

• Zope (2 and 3) and Plone developer. See experience below.
• Worked with SVN, GIT and Mercurial version control systems. Set-up Mercurial and SVN remote servers, for Alqua and Zassh.com, respectively.
• Deployed Apache, lighttpd, Squid, Varnish and other server software.
• Linux power user. Installed, configured and worked with several Linux distributions, including Gentoo, Archlinux, Debian and Ubuntu.

Experience

• Worked as a volunteer in an organic farm in Monforte de Lemos (Galicia, Spain) within the WWOOF project. Read about my experience here (sorry, only Spanish).
• Contractual web development for AcentoWeb since 2010. See my repositories at github for examples.
• Google Summer of Code 2010 student, working with Plone on Core tiles development, mentored by Martin Aspeli.
• Web development at Webworks Sweden and Betahaus since September 2009. Pair programming to develop and deploy websites with custom content-types, workflows and themes, using Plone.
• Plone Editorial Board Member from October 2008 to May 2011.
  • Garden the Developing for Plone documentation section, with more than 100 articles, reviewing new submissions, writing some articles and reorganizing existing content.
  • Coordinated the efforts to integrate any changes introduced in the product by accepted PLIPs in the official documentation for Plone 3.3 and 4.0.
• Researcher within the <e-UCM> group from the Complutense University of Madrid from December 2008 to February 2009.
  • Studied the benefits of virtual environments and video games in learning processes.
  • Helped to manage a C++ introductory programming course and evaluate its students.
• Worked from July 2008 to the end of October 2008 for Zassh.com, a dot-com company which developed a sports-related social networking website powered by Plone.
  • Re-structured the development environment from a “custom skin layer” one to a buildout based one, with several file-system products under SVN control, and a Trac instance to organize tasks.
  • Programmed an utility to upload, retrieve and modify videos in YouTube using the GData API and Zope 3.
  • Programmed a web-based system for the site to organize sport competitions based on SQLAlchemy queries.
  • Deployed the site using lighttpd as a light web server to redirect requests to Zope, and Squid as a reverse-proxy.
• Member of the Alqua editorial project 2006-2010.
  • Maintained the Alqua Plone web site (Plone-based) and communication & marketing-lead in Spain.
  • Programmed the current Cheetah-based template system.
  • Participated in round-table discussions and conferences on this project: “Unlearning the Intellectual property”, held in Cáceres, Spain (2008) and “Free Software in the University”, held in Madrid (2009).
• Participated in Mozilla Hispano, the Mozilla community for Spanish speakers.
  • Programmed a l10n QA tool targeted to non-techie users under the Django framework: mini-litmus.
  • Provided support to average users in forums, write news articles and documentation from July 2007 to December 200.
• Lead Flock‘s community l10n efforts together with Stefan Splewako and Mike Dosik from early 2008 to December 2008.
  • Lead existing localization teams and helped to consolidate new ones.
  • Translated technical texts, including the browser and some web pages about release notes.