Busy period: moving to France, starting my freelance business, open-source and stuff

This summer was quite busy for me. At the beginning of July I moved from Dublin (Ireland) to Lyon (France) where I started my own business as a freelance Software Engineer.

I am becoming quite proficient to switch countries, after having been an expat in Germany (twice) and Ireland. However this time I had the additional difficulty of not being fluent in the language and having to deal with a fair amount of burocracy. In the end I managed to do the usual stuff (getting a bank account, find an accomodation) and to find a good business consultant. I am now ready to get started at full steam in September.

Moving to France and setting up my business was not the only thing I did this summer. Among the others:

• We released JavaParser under the Apache License I am pretty excited about that because I think that it makes possible to use JavaParser in a larger set of scenarios.
• I started working on a symbol solver for Java this is far from being finished and I consider the actually implementation a prototype but it is already able to calculate the type of most expressions and deal with generic, type inference, method resolution, etc.
• I have been hired to work on a well-known application for iOS and Android me and a friend of mine have been working on this application (I cannot name it at the moment). It was fairly interesting because it involved playing with multimedia library (this friend of mine is one of the main contributors of libav)
• We created an application to manage patches projects like the Linux kernel or libav receive and discuss patches on mailing lists. When you have tons of them it could be difficult to remember which ones you accepted, which ones you rejected and which ones still require to be reviewed. So we created plaid and deployed it for libav: http://plaid.libav.org/
• I reviewed a couple of books for the Pragmatic Bookshelf. As always it was an interesting experience and gave me the opportunity to keep my skills up to date.

So it was a fairly productive summer. Now I just need to improve my commercial skills: I have still much to learn about promoting myself and selling my services. Likely I have some interesting working experience on my CV and it helps opening a few doors.

If you happen to have suggestions or you think I could help you feel free to drop me an e-mail at any time at federico at tomassetti dot me.