User:Fholtena

Federico was born in 1978 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and grew up in the outskirts of the Argentine capital. He graduated high school in 1995 and graduated from theatre school in 1997 from a program offered by the local municipality. From childhood he had taken a keen interest and shown a great disposition for computing. By the time he graduated high school he was a proficient PC Technician and after theatre school he was hired in that capacity at a big computer supplier firm that held large contracts with major corporations in town. In 2000 he made a career change when he was offered a position as an actor in a touring educational theatre company that produced theatre to compliment ESL school programs across South America. After his first season he was promoted to assistant director, an umbrella role that encompassed duties in play production, set building and tour organizing and management. In this capacity he was responsible for the actors and crew during bus tours as they travelled across Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, stopping in towns small and large to perform. The financial and political crisis that shook Argentina in 2001 had a great impact on his family, driving his parents and one younger brother to eventually emigrate to Ontario, Canada in 2003. A path he followed two years later, as he started a degree in Theatre and Liberal Arts at Brock University, in St. Catharines, Ontario, where his family had set new roots. In 2007, together with his would-be-wife Danielle and a couple of fellow Brock Students, he founded Stolen Theatre Collective, an independent professional theatre company that went on to produce 5 original plays in addition to several others that had already been published but which the company staged with novel immersive techniques. Given the very limited resources of the company he was at once Artistic Director, Playwright, Actor, Production Manager, Set Builder, Program Designer, Web designer, and generally the one to whom any other necessary odd task would fall to. He graduated Brock University in 2010 and in the face of the financial uncertainty common to any career in the arts, he completed a 12 month apprenticeship as a Master Dog Trainer to compliment his income. As it turned out, earnings from Dog Training did not suffice and he was forced to return to school in pursuit of a more stable and better paying career, at which point he enrolled in Niagara College for their Enology and Viticulture program. Southbrook Vineyards, one of the best reputed organic wineries in the Niagara region offered him a position to complete the student placement requirement of the program and once that was finished offered him a full time position as lead hand. In this role he was involved in all aspects of the winery, from work in the fields, to duties inside the winery and cellar, to caretaking of the flock of 40 sheep that were part of the operation. His responsibilities included the frequent operation of heavy machinery such as tractors, fork lifts, hydraulic trailers, etc; supervision of the farm crew; vine management and pest control; irrigation planning; soil health management; laboratory analysis and chemical stabilization of wines; pasture management for the livestock; and undoubtedly lots of wine tasting both for educational purposes and also for quality control. In 2016 he moved on from Southbrook Vineyards to open his own establishment, a boutique educational winery in Port Dalhousie, St. Catharines, Ontario. Winemaker’s Vintage became one of the many victims of the 2001 COVID pandemic after an exciting 6 year run. He initially attempted to move the business into his home, but soon after life brought some unexpected changes as a demented and fragile mother-in-law moved in with him and his wife and made it impossible to focus on mostly anything else. In 2014 he started his Karate practice and received his 1st degree black belt in 2019. He was due for his 2nd degree in 2001 but once again the pandemic put a halt to that, he eventually was able to test for it in 2023. He is now preparing for his 3rd degree test to take place in the summer of 2026. Throughout his life he always displayed an inclination for the crafts. He developed a basic understanding of electrical circuits and networks in Argentina thanks to his computing background and also out of sheer curiosity. Once in Canada, he engaged in large renovation projects in his home, such as kitchen rebuilding, opening up spaces previously divided by walls, bathroom rebuilds, etc. He was also exposed to a large variety of skills and improvised solutions while working at Southbrook Vineyards. As a consequence he became acquainted and proficient with many of the trades such as framing, flooring, plumbing, electrical, general carpentry, concrete pouring, form building, brick work, welding and metal working. Albeit he cannot claim mastery of any of these, he has developed certain familiarity with them all. In addition, he has also experimented with Arduino and raspberry Pi computers for task automation. He has yet to learn to code in Python but had experience in his youth coding in a now forgotten language called Turbo Pascal. He is intimately familiar with the logic behind programming and feels confident that given the proper circumstances he can become proficient with both Python and the simpler Arduino code. His mother-in-law had to be institutionalized in the summer of 2025, after 3 years that felt like 3000. Many things changed for him during this time and he became aware that he wanted to engage in work that was more meaningful than what he had done until then. Thats when he found the Open Source Ecology project and it immediately spoke to him as a means to become a true contributor to humanities betterment.