The Glider Awards are the awards Negonation gives its most valuable collaborators. What’s new to this edition is that all awards have been decided by the Negonation staff (vs. collaborators votes in past editions). This comes in response to a strategy that we have been following since mid last year in order to decrease the number of collaborators and increase the intensity of the collaboration with a few.

The first winner, with an award of 1000 €, is José Luis Gordo Romero. José Gordo is a regular winner of these awards: he already received recognition in past editions and, this time, he’s won first place again, being the first collaborator in Tractis history who has received the title of Glider Hacker twice (the first time being in the first edition of the Awards). Over the past few months –actually, since the beginning of the project–José has been helping us on a regular basis with system administration, server configuration, server certificates, DNS administration, back-ups, etc. Working with him is a real pleasure. He is professional, competent, and honors all of his commitments. Tractis wouldn’t be the same without you, José!

The second Glider Award, also worth 1000 €, goes to Choan Gálvez. We met Choan through Diego Lafuente, our Creative Director. Choan is a true magician of javascript and the creator of Protomean–the contract editor used in Tractis. In addition to handling himself really well in the, poorly documented, javascript world, Choan is an enthusiast of short stories and board games.

Despite not receiving a prize in cash, a special mention goes to Tatiana Nubiola, our linguistic guru, guardian of the style guide and enthusiast of the Academy of the Spanish Language and its dictionaries. She is responsible for most of the English translations and copy choices you see in Tractis. This makes Tatiana the first collaborator awarded with a Glider that (1) is a woman, (2) lives abroad (NY State, for those of you who were wondering), and (3) doesn’t program a single line of code. Tatiana is proof that you don’t need to know how to program to be a hacker.

Congratulations to the winners!

PS I apologize for the late post, I promise to post sooner next time.

David Calavera ran away with the 3rd edition of the Glider Prizes. It was a unanimous decision – without exception, all his peers voted for him. During this release, David Calavera has been responsible for coding the signature front-end (Ruby on Rails), integrating it with the new signature back-end (Java) and, in the same step, added various usability enhancements and prepared the code for integration with the billing module. David worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas and together they have accomplished the following feat: It’s now possible to sign in Tractis with the principal browsers (Explorer, Firefox and Safari) and Operating Systems (Windows, GNU-Linux and Mac). Thanks David.

The second prize-winner is Ernesto Jímenez. Enrensto has focused on refactoring various parts of the application, RESTification, unification of the layouts and various tasks designed to simplify the application and “beautify” the code. Ernesto has collaborated intensely and constantly for the last year and his colleagues therefore wanted to acknowledge his contribution: Ernesto has won a prize in each edition of the Glider Prizes. To stop him “spoiling” future Glider editions, we’ve decided to make him a full-time Negonation employee! Welcome aboard!

The Negonation employee prize has been awarded to Juanse Pérez, our Internationalization expert for his work on FIT. FIT is an open-source “internationalization for human beings” project that we started at the first Conferencia Rails Hispana (Hispanic Rails conference) and is being closely followed by various startups with an international vocation. In the first quarter of 2007, Juanse developed the initial code (watch video), created the mailing list, submitted the code to Rubyforge and the Google Summer of Code (shame they didn’t accept us, but maybe next year…), set up Trac and a demo on the generously donated Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) servers. A just recognition for an impressive level of activity.

A special mention goes to Jean-Michel Garnier. “JM” has become the testing evangelist of the project and has worked hard (Trac documentation, one-to-one meetings, emails, etc…) to inoculate the virus and the goodness of TDD in the team.

Although yesterday we announced the prizes on the developers mailing list and the congratulations duly followed, we had to make it public too. Congratulations to the winners!

The first lucky one with a prize of 1000€ and chosen unanimously by his colleagues is Ernesto Jiménez, who was also honoured in the first edition. I’ve found it very hard to write this part, since it’s complicated to list his achievements given that he touches everything. He has been responsible for much of the ‘cleaning’ that is being done inside Tractis, principally adding helpers to unify the user interface and simplify tasks for the designers. However, lately his work has shifted to the resdesign of the Tractis architecture. His colleagues have also emphasised his proactivity when the brown stuff hits the fan! If you need a programmer awake at 5 in the morning, he’s your man. In fact, right now, while I’m writing this post, he’s pestering me on GTalk.

The second prize, also worth 1000€, goes to David Calavera. In the first edition, David was on the point of winning a prize despite his late incorporation into the project. This time, he’s demonstrated his worth especially in one of the most unappealing but critical parts of the project – the digital signature Applet. (Who wants to program in Java when you can do it in Ruby?). For visiting the gloomy part without passing to the dark side, this prize is for him.

Finally, and for the first time, we’ve decided to divide the prize chosen by the employees into two prizes of 500€. The lucky ones are José Gordo, who also won in the first edition and Juanjo Bazán. José Gordo keeps doing an exceptional job keeping our production and development environments up to date as well as investigating alternatives for deploying the application in distributed environments. For his part, Juanjo has developed loads of functionality in Tractis such as the user preferences and a lot more code that, whilst not yet ready for production, will be fundamental to the business.

While he has not received a prize, since he joined the project half way through development of the second release, Luis Miguel Cavallé deserves a special mention. He worked very hard to ensure the application was ready for release and, since the day he joined the project, has been one of the most active collaborators.

Congratulations to the winners!

The first edition was very hard-fought and this one promises to be even more so. Unfortunately we can only give 3 prizes. If we gave one to everyone who deserves it, we’d have a big overdraft!

The deadline for receipt of votes from collaborators is Sunday 17th December at 23:59 UTC.

Good luck to everyone!

Another winner was Juanse Pérez, one of the project’s oldest collaborators. His task in the last few months has also been one of the most invisible for the rest of the team. He has focused on two issues: document comparison, and the creation of Tractis’s entire internationalization infrastructure. Although there are still some details to complete in the latter, the work has been excellent. We are now able to generate gettext’s .PO and .MO files and upload them to our translation application, pootle, with barely any effort. That task, which I first thought was very tedious, is solved with a few actions by the developer thanks to his work. This and his willingness to collaborate in any task at critical times have been a determining factor for the award.

The third winner was Ernesto Jiménez, our guru in Javascript, DHTML and AJAX. He’s in charge of the current editor and of the many visual effects in contract edition and has also worked on more or less experimental issues such as liveclipboard. As we stated in previous posts, we are working on a new editor in order to provide a better experience to users; in any case, his work and willingness have been justly rewarded by his colleagues.

Lastly, though he has not received an award, a special mention goes to David Calavera, one of the latest to join the project. Despite the short period he has been with us, his work has been essential on both the client and server sides. His willingness and the speed with which he has adapted at a difficult time have been evaluated.

What are the Glider Awards?

They are awards that Negonation will give to its most valuable collaborators.
The “most valuable collaborators” are those who, according to their peers, contribute most to meeting our milestone and sharing knowledge with their colleagues. On this occasion, three prizes of 1,000 euros each will be given. Two of the prizes (2 x 1,000 euros) will depend on the collaborators’ votes and the other one (1 x 1,000 euros) on the Negonation employees’ votes.

Where does the name come from?

Eric Raymond, proposed the use of this emblem to identify hackerdom.

In Conway’s Game of Life, a glider is the minimum cell pattern with the ability to move. We believe that this perfectly describes what we are: small but agile. At Negonation, we are fanatics of emerging systems where everything is more than the sum of its parts or where, based on simple rules, complex behaviors are achieved.

Who can vote?

All the collaborators who have participated in any way in meeting the milestone. There isn’t a list. You know whether or not you can vote.

Who can receive the award?

Any collaborator, regardless of when they joined the project. Therefore, Negonation employees are excluded.

How are the votes cast?

If you are a collaborator, choose the two people you think most deserve this recognition and email me the names before Sunday 13 August. The decision is final and will be announced on this blog on Monday 14 August.

When are the awards given?

Every time a milestone is met. There are three milestones for 2006:

1. Tractis Beta – Negotiation and digital signature: 31 July 2006
2. Tractis Beta – Contract administration: 31 September 2006
3. Tractis Beta – Dispute resolution: 31 December 2006