From Pescara to Bruxelles, Porto, Helsinki and back to Pescara again: when Open Source IdM (also) means face-to-face meetings
During the last month of February, I had the chance to enjoy landscapes, people, weather, food and… IT flavours from three different Countries in Europe - the leitmotif always being Apache Syncope, anyway.
I started with Bruxelles for the second-year rehearsal of the CHOReVOLUTION project: belgian beers, all-time rain, and the tension to present our platform at its best for the reviewers’ examination.
Within the CHOReVOLUTION platform, we have the responsibility to provide the security enablers and to glue together all the other components, thanks to Syncope’s extreme flexibility and customization features.
Then I went to the beautiful Porto, with its early springtime, ups and downs, Fado, polvo à lagareiro, Porto wine, churrasco, droves of tourists and excellent public transportation.
We have been spending our time in the campus of Univerisade do Porto, since its IT staff recently chose Syncope as building block of their upcoming Identity Management platform, and Tirasa to help them getting quickly up to speed. We started with a full-immersion training course, reserving the last couple of days to sketch together an overall design and some starting implementation addressing their most involved needs.
Finally, it was time to fly to Helsinki, and suddenly I was pushed back to wintertime, ice, cold, lappish reindeer, early meal times and again excellent public transportation: a little blast in the past, as in 2001 I was living there for six months during my traineeship at the Nokia Research Center.
We have an enduring and strong relationship with the University of Helsinki, which we are assisting since more than three years with the continuous evolution of their Identity platform: wicked issues - always stimulating Syncope’s growth, by the way - and the chance to present our work to Haka, the identity federation of the Finnish universities.
Now that I am back to Pescara since a few days, I am busy with planning, coordinating with the community at The ASF and developing some interesting new features, which should be rolling with next maintenance release of Apache Syncope: among other things, it seems to be finally the time for SAML 2.0 and JSON Web Tokens...