Fernando Oleo Blanco


Personal Information

First things first, my Curriculum Vitae. As a summary, I am an Industrial and Mechanical engineer, and they are two different degrees!

I currently work as a system's engineer in Empresarios Agrupados. Before that I was studying at TUM (Technische Universität München) and doing an intership in Max-Planck Institute für Plasmaphysik.

Hobbies

I am a fairly active person with some diverse... tastes. Here are some of them:

  • Typography. Since I started using LaTeX, I have taken a liking of typeface design and document publishing.
  • LaTeX, of course.
  • Programming. I have always been interested in technology, and programming is the art of controlling silicon-based devices. I focus mostly on the Ada programming language and Embedded Systems programming. Though I also really like Scheme/LISP and Fortran.
  • 3D desing and animation. I started using Cinema 4D when I was... 12? And since then I have found it extremely interesting and fun to learn about it. I switched completely to Blender at the age of 16. Nowadays sadly, I do not have that much time to do anything, but I still follow the industry quite closely!
  • Libre (Open Source) Software. Well... since I learnt about Blender being "free" and "open source" and Linux (more specifically Ubuntu) saving my Windows disk; I have nothing but praise for the GNU, Linux, BSD, and general Open Source community. Thanks to them, I am now much more knowledgeable, capable, aware and independent of all that is related to software and technological in general. I currently sport an installation of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I may move to an immutable Linux System in the future.
  • Some forms of media and art, which include classic and less-known movies, Anime and Manga, Woodblock prints, cartoons and independent videos, such as the ones done in YouTube by independent creators.
  • Machining, as in CNC machining; smelting, forging, etc. Anything that has to do with production of parts and machines. Also building, and constructions.
  • Meeting people of all walks of life and traveling around the world getting to know the locals, their culture and food.
  • German. I should be spending a bit more time with it daily so that I can polish it, currently I still struggle a lot with the vocabulary and some forms of grammar...

Current Projects

The projects and or activities I am working on right now include:

  • Myself. I am exercising a bit more and I need to take more care of my time. The ongoing results are largely a great success, but there is still more to do!
  • Playing the piano. I should play it more frequently and focus on learning more and more songs, not just repeating the parts I already know... And of course, improve my tempo and fingering!
  • The Ada programming language community. I want it to thrive as I believe Ada is a wonderful language.
  • Embedded Systems programming. I have a few boards that I like playing around with. They are an ULX3S 85k FPGA, a HiFive1 Rev B RISC-V board and a couple of Arduinos.
  • Learning about Typography, graphics design and document publishing.
  • Supporting, within my means, the wider libre software community. This includes contributions, documentation and community advocacy.
  • Organising meetups and conferences. They include FOSDEM and the Monthly Meetup among others.
  • Creating and giving presentations and taking care of this website.

Communities

I also frequent the following communities:

  • Code_Aster's forum. I am a hobbist user of the this FEM software and I tend to be active there.
  • Several IRC channels, mostly #ada, #fortran, #bootstrappable...
  • The Ada Language Forum.
  • Lainchan, specially /lambda and /omega.

I also help organise the Ada Monthly Meetup, which takes place usually the first Saturday of each month.

Code Repositories

I self-host my own Fossil instance. This website, along other projects can be found here.

I also have a GitHub and a GitLab account. GitHub is my most active one, though I personally prefer GitLab as it is mostly Open Source and self-hostable.

Contact Information

  • Email: irvise@irvise.xyz.
  • Matrix (Element): irvise:matrix.irvise.xyz and also (but I don't use it so often) irvise:matrix.xyz.
  • IRC: Irvise in Libera.Chat.

Website Information

Originally, in early 2020, this website was created using Emacs' Org-mode and it was hosted on a FreeBSD server. I substituted the FreeBSD server with an Alpine Linux one about a year later. Then as I wanted to make my website prettier and easier to maintain, but still allowing it to be small and responsive (aka, without JavaScript) I started looking for alternatives. Astro started gaining a lot of poppularity and it had a heavy focus on HTML only and lightweight websites. By that time I had started learning a bit more about web technologies and I had used Sli.dev for a couple of Talks, so I felt confident and I rebuilt the entire website in Astro, which is the one you are looking at right now. The migration was greatly helped by Pandoc.

The website is based on the astro-blog-template by Maxi Ferreira.

This website is hosted on netcup, running on a VPS with 2 CPUs and 4Gb of RAM. There is also a Dendrite Matrix server and a couple other services running along side it.