SUSE Hack Week Spotlight: Xabier Arbulu

SUSE Hack Week is a week-long sprint permitting developers time off from their day jobs to work on something entirely of their own design or wishes. This week we will be showcasing some of the amazing projects coming out of SUSE Hack Week and the brilliant minds behind them. Stay tuned all week long for more features. 

Give us a few details about yourself, your background, your role at SUSE, any interesting facts?

My name is Xabier Arbulu and I’m from Spain (Basque country), even though I live in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria enjoying a better weather. I have been working as a Software engineer around 6 years now, and I joined SUSE a bit more than a year ago. One of the major motivations was that I wanted to feel and explore how is to work in an organization where Open Source is more than just business. I really think that collaboration and transparency are the way to go. I work in the SLES4SAP and HA team where we provide solutions to the customers with critical mission applications.

One of my hobbies is to enjoy the nature (and the sports around this like hiking, surfing…), so it’s totally aligned with the path that SUSE started against the climate change and our planet conservation.

What is your SUSE Hack Week project and how is it beneficial?

“Egunean behin” (means “Once a day” in Basque) is a really popular Phone app/game in the Basque country.
https://www.codesyntax.com/es/proyectos/egunean-behin (sorry, the description in English doesn’t exist yet…)
https://github.com/egunean-behin

It’s a “trivial” kind of a game, where every day, you need to answer 10 questions in order to get a score. Them you compete with other people to see who knows more! Most of the questions are around the Basque country region, and the goal is to promote our culture and history. The game is in Basque language by the way.

Recently, they have created a challenge where any developer can submit “question creator algorithms” to give the users the option to create their own script (mostly oriented to university students). All of them will be open source, and with that they want to promote the free software usage engaging among the students and making them aware of this. The best algorithms will be used in the app.
From my side, as I like the game and I want to help to promote our culture and history (and of course free software), I will try to submit some code.

What do you enjoy most about Hack Week?
The freedom that gives us to work in projects that we see valuable for the company, and beyond that the society. We always have ideas that we want to work on what after 8 hours workday is hard to find the energy.

What is the most difficult or most interesting project you’ve worked on?
It’s hard to say, nowadays most of the projects are really complex.

How do you dare to be different? Or what does it mean to you?
For me to be different means to be aware of the things we do during our day. Most of the times we put the automatic pilot and we lose sight of the important things. In that sense, I always try to be positive and calm, looking for the things that really matters and affects to me. I find this important in this world where it looks like people like to be angry all the time by default.

Favorite quote and why
“The best moment to plant a tree was 25 years ago, the second best moment is now”. For me, this means that we need to life the things we love now, without waiting for a better moment (that might not come). And besides that, that the time flies and we really need to think and reevaluate what is important for us in our life.