History & crew. The connectical backstage.

Connectical is a self-managed laboratory to research new directions in IT, promoting technology as a way to gain freedom and create new ideas to improve the IT sector.

History

Connectical is a self-managed laboratory to research new IT ideas and chanllenges. These are the efforts of a number of engineers enthusiasts, and geeks in general to make technology more affordable for the society and the humanity.
  • The beginning
    Connectical history begins at December 2007, in that year the guys which create Connectical lost their time developing code and promoting free software at one of the LUGs which exists arround the world. Due to they usually works together in a number of projects, they decide to create a platform to publish their code and collaborate with other ones.
  • First age
    In January 2008, they decide to buy the Connectical domains (.org, .net and .com) and the site becomes in a lab central point where upload the projects and the ideas than they was working in. In that age we still working on a number of sysadmin utilities and participating in a number of local talks.
  • Arriving profit
    With the arise of the web 2.0 and the collaborative sites, like github or gitorious, more of the sense of the initial Connectical was gone. At that moment (Jun 2008) they promote Connectical to the point of bussiness startup. At the same time a number of projects that we began years ago was grown, and many of this projects was adopted by third party companies. During this age, Connectical company was categorized as IEBT (technology-based startup), by the University of A Corunna, and we received also the posibility to have an office in the Research Building.
  • Second age
    Ironically, live in the companies is not a blue dream, many ideas cannot be developed as we think that we must do, so the Connectical big aim are now more live than ever... Here started the second age of Connectical.

People

Connectical is a self-managed laboratory to research new IT ideas and chanllenges. These are the efforts of a number of engineers enthusiasts, and geeks in general to make technology more affordable for the society and the humanity. You can meet us in the #connectical room in the jabber server conf.netlab.cz.
  • Adrián Pérez
    Adrián Pérezidenti.caGalaxywide Sysadmin Officer

    Being a self-taught GNU/Linux user and C programmer was the main reason which made me study computer science: I discovered that it was possible to gain control over the electron beams flowing inside computers.

  • Andrés J. Diaz
    Andrés J. Diaztwitteridenti.calinkedinWorldwide Executive Commander

    As a fan of sci-fi tv series, I think that the computer science can change the world, so I made me study the computer degree and I'm working in the IT world for years, specially in large distributed systems.

  • Óscar García
    Óscar Garcíatwitteridenti.cafacebooklinkedinSystems Shaman

    Since I learn some magic spells, like POSIX, virtualization or networking, I become to a 1st level wizard in Connectical. In my free time I was the head developer of Galician Oficial Linux and the official translator of Gallery2 to spanish.

Infrastructure

The Connectical infrastructure is a number of distributed nodes around the world, which are donated gratefully by the staff to maintain basic Connectical services and website. The infrastructure is also used in research and development to test some implementations and provide a basic laboratory to the members of the lab.
  • Worldwide network
    Each member of Connectical must provide a node for the network, so, since we have much members around the world, we maintain a fully worldwide distributed network, with nodes in Spain, Finland or USA, for example.
  • Keeping services
    All services provided by Connectical are stored in our infrastructure, so they are replicated in a number of nodes, distributed around the world. This means that we can provide fault-tolerance and high availability in a elegant way.
  • Hardware classes
    Since each member contribute to the infrastructure, we have a large heterogeneus network, so we design our services to work in any platform with any resources. Neverthless we maintain a subnetwork of ARM systems for research purposes.