Respect Driven Development
I think that one of the most overlooked components on any sane company culture is Respect. That’s probably true also for any relationship, also outside work environment, but I think is usually forgotten when nice places to work are described. When I look back about the things that bothered me the most, most of them are related to disrespect, even in relatively minor form. It can be personal disrespect or not respecting the work itself or even the customers. Probably because is something engraved, it’s easy to take for granted when it exists, and… Read More
Compendium of Wondrous Links vol II
60 hour work week is not a badge of honour. I talked about something similar here some time ago. Social Aspects of Success and Failure in Cultural Markets. Follow up about the Flappy Bird issue, and about the unpredictability of success. About retaining team members, which is not an aspect of companies that is not as discussed as recruiting. Some interesting Unix tricks and recipes, in a very simple txt format. Very graphic display on how conditional probability works. Levels of excellence. Interesting view on learning. It is fascinating how sometimes it truly… Read More
First job in a startup considered harmful
Well, at least is not ideal from my point of view… At the moment there seems to be a lot of hype about startups. And why not? They are the places where the cool stuff happen. Filled with purpose, excitement, high stakes, fantastic teams, growth opportunities and the rare chance of maybe becoming a multibillionaire at a young age. I’ve worked in big and small companies (including startups), and I definitively prefer to work on smaller ones. You’re impact is bigger, the team works closer, way less corporate BS, etc… But, while… Read More
Compendium of Wondrous Links vol I
As a way of collecting interesting reads across the Internet, I plan to keep a relatively regular posts with some articles and posts that I’ve read, mostly related to development, software and tech world in general. Here it goes the first edition. Your Progress As A Programmer Is All Up To You Theory and practice Short and simple, but nice Every line of code is always documented Nice ways to use version control to our advantage when navigating through unknown code When random isn’t random enough or why randomness is a more complicated problem than… Read More
Online community biases
There are a lot of discussion online about a huge number of different topics. That’s fantastic news, I’d love to had a learning tool that powerful when I was in school. To share some of my interests, and have other people to talk about “cool stuff” and learn from them. Online communities have speed up personal and technological growth intensely, allowing people from around the world to share knowledge and to feel close. But, on the other hand, these kind of communities get naturally and subtlety biased. While this is normal, and probably unavoidable, anyone… Read More
First moment of truth in recruiting
I read this post and liked it: So what does all this have to do with recruiting? A lot actually. An candidate will begin to form an idea of who you are as an employer over time, your employer brand, through articles, tweets, consumer ads…etc….maybe even a friend who already works there. When she walks into your office for the first time, all this could come crashing down or on the contrary, it could live up to the hype. … Take a minute and think about all the candidate touchpoints from inital… Read More
Some characteristics of the best developers I worked with
I had a conversation last November on the PyConEs, when I was on a conversation stating that I am working with truly brilliant people in DemonWare, and then someone asked me: “Do you have problems agreeing in what to do? Normally great developers have problems reaching consensus on tech discussions”. My answer something like: “Well, in my experience, truly awesome developers know when to have a strong argument and they usually are ok reaching an agreement in a reasonable time”. So, I wanted to, as sort of follow-up, summarise what are the characteristics… Read More
My concerns with Bitcoin as a currency
Today I retweeted this brilliant tweet: 2014 year of the bitcoin desktop — Charles HooperLee (@charleshooper) January 1, 2014 So, to start the year, I’ve decided to share some of my thought on the bit coin issue, and some of the problems I see. As I am not an economist, I’m not going to go into the deflation / long term scenario. For what I know, that’s very bad, but as that can lead to a deep economic conversation, one I don’t really want to get into, as I lack of the… Read More
“Blog is dead” and the change in information consumption
I read this post about the “Blogs are dead (we’ll not really/but they are)” thing… Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly… Read More
Agile important bits
There is a lot of Agile talking and I think it has reached a point where it is, if not standard, at least a common way of doing software. But, even if there is a lot talking about Agile methodologies, and companies telling that the are doing Agile, are they really doing it? I’m not so sure. When relating to Agile, I always come back to the source, which is the Agile manifesto. I really like its simplicity. Let me copy it here We are uncovering better ways of developing software by… Read More
Wrong Side of Memphis 