Blogs
Towards J!Research 3.0
When I thought I would have to abandon the J!Research project, the calendar gave me a couple of free weeks and thanks to the magic of Christmas I could restart my work in the project. J!Research had been frozen since September 2014 when I announced the version 2.1.3 for Joomla! 2.5.x. The present is Joomla! 3.3.x LTS and we could not stay behind. For this reason and after a significant amount of work, I am announcing the release of J!Research 3.0 Beta 1, the first version of J!Research compatible with the Joomla! 3.3.x series. I am not kidding when I say that this is a very buggy release. This version is only aimed to officially start the way towards a fully functional management solution for Joomla! 3.3.x. But do not get me wrong, the available installation package delivers the basic functionalities of J!Research: managenement of publications, research areas and staff members and you can see it running in my personal website. From now until the release of J!Research 3.0 Stable, our roadmap will consist of a short cycle development with multiple beta releases:
J!Research 2.1.0 Released, starting a new era
After several months of an uncertain future, at J!Research we are happy to announce the release of J!Research 2.1.0 for Joomla! 2.5.
The 2011 for J!Research
I had not still get used either to the idea of the ended holidays or that I have to write 2011 instead of 2010 in dates when Joomla! 1.6 Stable release finished to wake me up from the holidays lassitude. First of all, congratulations to the Joomla! community for this important milestone, result of a tremendous devotion and hard team-work. Now, direct to the point, it is time to turn J!Research developers' effort into 2.0's direction.
Time of challenges
517 days since the release of J!Research 1.1.x, lots of users and two new collaborators are a good summary for this development phase for which I intend to derive some lessons as well as the challenges for the next one.
Even though my initial intention was to have short-period releases, our daily occupations and the fact that most of our work is 100% voluntary prevented to achieve this goal. But let's see it from an optimistic perspective: Five completely divergent and unsynchronized schedules have driven the project to its third major release which includes a huge list of changes and improvements proposed by a growing list of users. This sounds certainly awesome but rises a question: can we do better? As project author and leader, my major challenge is to optimize my colleagues will and commitment in such a way that things move faster and I do not end up doing all the work. Honestly I feel I have not done it optimally and my compromise for next stage is to find better ways to motivate them and exploit their enthusiasm taking into account our very limited time availability. It sounds like the Linear Optimizations problems have been torturing me this semester :P
La ciencia en España en 2010
El 2010 en España será un año duro en lo que a investigación se refiere. Los fondos destinados a la I+D+i se recortarán en al menos un 13% y serán muchos los proyectos en desarrollo que queden sometidos al olvido. Sin duda este será un duro varapalo para todos los jóvenes investigadores que perderán sus puestos de trabajo y en muchos casos se verán obligados a cambiar su vocación o incluso a emigrar del pais en busca de una sociedad que apueste por su trabajo.