Dr. Julen Larrucea - Web

Hello!
My name is Julen Larrucea and I am a proactive as I am versatile. This is why I made this site, as a personal "catalog".

I worked on on the field of quantum chemistry for many years. I developed projects on different areas, such as Materials Science, Condensed Matter Physics or Nanotechnology. I have an H-index of 7, which is not bad given my number of publications and the fact that I am single author in some of them. Here is a picture of one of the amino acids I studied during my PhD study.

People often speculate around my origin, and say funny things like that I look Finnish, I have an Irish accent or that I am definitely Dutch. Well... Sorry to disappoint you all, but Nope! I am neither of those.
I am basque, which means that I come originally from the Basque Country. Check out he picture or visit the Wikipedia article for more information.

Scientist

Some of the topics include: Toxicity of Aluminum, Fase-Change material prototypes, Bismuth nanoparticles or biomimetic magnetic thin layers. Multiple self driven international collaborations.

IT-Specialist

After so many years programming stuff about molecules and running big jobs in some of the biggest supercomputers, well... the computer skills become something natural. Add to the mixture an extra "geek" factor, and you get yourself a Linux/Open-Source specialist :)

Developer

I did plenty of programming during my scientific career, mostly for data analysis and post-processing and I also participated actively in Open-Source communities. But once I switched to IT, I met the real "Pro"s, and I got to learn about real programming. I'm proud of creating BOMSI, a unique OpenStack installer, and joined the core-team of OpenStack (training-labs).

Teacher

In many universities teaching is mandatory for researchers. For some reason, I was never required to teach anything, but I chose to do it voluntarily. I have taught Physics to 1^st year physicist and Programming to engineers. And of course... tons of talks in conferences.

Languages

I was born bilingual, but then I went to Finland, into scientific writing, ... and then to Germany. I used to be quite into linguistics too and I have done plenty of translation jobs, including software. For example a big part of Avogadro.

My old blog about atomistic simulations and computer tricks.
I used to document some of my scripts in there, but at some point I started to push the code into repositories, so the documentation was either in the README or as comment.

OpenStack is the leading Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) platform for private cloud. It took me quite some effort to get started with it, but after some time I created my own product to help others get started with it. After some time I ended up joining the training-labs team which serves a similar purpose.

BOMSI was my OpenStack installer, the first one with a GUI and capable to build a whole environment by creating fully automated pendrives.

Suomitar is the Basque Country-Finland cultural association, which I joined around 2006. I co-authored the first Basque-Finnish dictionary with them and I take care of the on-line issues as a volunteer.

I have founded and/or joined many music bands, from Pop-Rock to Death-Metal or Fussion. Initially as guitarrist, then bassist and later on as drummer. I used to write songs with a lot of personality. My first band was Exum in my hometown, and my favorite Xau.