Some of the best router hackers of the world came to FON headquarters in Madrid last month.
Felix Fietkau aka nbd, a young Computer Science student based in Hamburg who is one of the big boys behind the openwrt, Sebastian Gottschall aka Brainslayer (seen in RedHerring), a fancy hacker that leads all alone the dd-wrt project with the help and back of some other developers and Imre Kaloz, a Hungarian hardware integration artist, also one of the pilars of openwrt, came to visit us at FON.
From left to right: Sebastian, me, Felix and Imre
—
Felix has been helping us since february. He started supporting us from the OpenWrt side and now is very integrated and a crucial guy in our development. He is still a student, but works better, faster and more than any other guy I met previously.
Sebastian joined us also in the same time Felix did. Initially he made his very advanced firmware be FONready, but as time passed, we noticed one version ofthe firmware was enough work to cope with and now, we are all focused on the OpenWrt based firmware, including Sebastian himself. Of course, every bit of work he can reuse for his personal project, he is allowed to.
Imre is the newest incorporation. As Felix and Sebastian do, he works from home. Being an expert on hardware integration, he is doing the background work on the future fonera device. He works hard and even though he didn’t have that much time yet, he already demonstrated that getting him was a worthy movement.
Florian Fainelli, also developer member of the OpenWrt project was here to. He came from France (he is currently studying in Paris). He is very busy right now with his studies but is eager to help FON and join the great team we are building. He already did a very nice patch for our next firmware and will take more projects in the future.
As I said, they came to Madrid, to see what FON is like in the inside; to feel integrated with the team (everybody was very nice with them, even though the Spanish non-techies were thinking of them as crazy geeks); to see what the future plans are and what do we count with them for.
The encounter was a great success. we all enjoyed a lot and even went out for dinner on the second day. We took some brown tequila (Sebastian’s favorite) and Rhum. Imre and Sebastian, who were not very friendly to each other in the past (some geeks might know this), got on VERY well and ended up taking tequila altogether.
Teo (backrow in front of Felix) and Florian (front row rightside) also joined the dinner
FON is really gathering the best talents of the world in OpenSource firmwares. They enjoy the kind of work we offer them and they are happy because they get what they like: new drivers for bleeding edge devices, amazing routers, gadgets, support from manufacturers (atheros, accton, Linksys,…). It’s a great symbiosis. And me, personaly, I’m learning a great deal of things!We will, for sure, make another meeting like this. Hopefully, we’ll have an even better team with many more great hackers! (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/iurgi for some nice pics of the event)
