oandre.gal

Category: English

  • Simple made easy

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    Precise words make communication more efficient. Arguably, software development is about managing conceptual complexity. Simple made easy, by Rich Hickey is a talk that tackles those two topics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSwPOpOKr3w Two takeaways from this talk: The differences between simple and easy. Simplicity is an objective measure, and its units are the level of interleaving (of concepts).…

  • Saturday’s occupations

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    Saturday’s occupations.

  • La La Land

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    Now, this is a musical that I like. Entertaining, moving, and complex. I wouldn’t say musicals are my kind of films. My personal favorite is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which is typical Burton. I didn’t like Les Misérables and haven’t watched Moulin Rouge. That’s my track record. Yet, this film is energizing, jazz everywhere, a…

  • To the hackers that grew older

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    A rant about the need to create more community-centered software, instead of focusing too much on the individual.

  • My office i4

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    I’ve been working from home for more than 3 years now, and my setup has gone through several iterations – the current one is i4. After joining Automattic, I was encouraged to think about my office setup. The company sponsors the kind of high-quality office perks that you’ll expect in companies at this level, and…

  • git time machine

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    I really like this interface for navigating the git log. If only I could select a stretch of time and make zoom – that’d be spectacular.  

  • Howdy Automattic

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    This is part of the invitation I was sent to join Automattic. I accepted. Today marks my first day as an automattician, and I am excited to become part of this family. My day-to-day will be filled with the joys and woes of programming but under Automattic’s creed, I feel safe, motivated and happy to…

  • Taking PHP seriously

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    Slack se une al club de los que usan PHP: Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if given the choice; and that some of the most extraordinarily successful projects in history use it. This is not quite…

  • React before React

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    While it might look like an overnight success in hindsight, the story of React is actually a great example of how new ideas often need to go through several rounds of refinement, iteration, and course correction over a long period of time before reaching their full potential. – Our first 50.000 stars.

  • Trois Gymnopédies , de Eric Sattie

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    Trois Gymnopédies, de Eric Sattie. My current favorite for working purposes.

  • Dumb Redux

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    Concepts are the real win, and they can be expressed in many different ways. – Dumb Redux, Tom MacWright.

  • Neal Stephenson on getting big stuff done

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    En esta charla, Stephenson, introduce la idea de que, como sociedad, nos hemos olvidado de cómo llevar a cabo grandes empresas, esas que se consideran imposible. Hasta que se consiguen. Considera que en la raíz de esto está la pérdida de apoyo a lo cientifíco, que se evidencia en detalles diarios como padres que no…

  • Paul Romer

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    In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century. – The politically incorrect guide to ending poverty. A profile of Paul Romer, the new World Bank chief economist.

  • Product listing information

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    3 Key Design Principles for Product Listing Information. A study on how to show product info focused on e-commerce. It also applies to general element lists.

  • Mastering programming

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    Mastering programming, a sketch for a new book by Kent Beck.

  • High-performers?

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    Odds are far better than good that your high performers are achieving what appears to be high levels of productivity by building technical debt into the application by taking shortcuts whether intentionally or unintentionally. Examples of shortcuts are not taking the time to design and architect things well at all levels (low to high — think objects…

  • Hallelujah, por Jeff Buckley

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    Hallelujah, by Jeff Buckley.

  • Stripe contrata equipos

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    Stripe anuncia que ofrecerá contratos a equipos de entre 2 y 5 personas. Las razones: Do you know anyone who makes you incredibly better at what you do? People who motivate and inspire you, complement your strengths and shore up your weaknesses, help you achieve things you could never do on your own? Maybe it’s…

  • So create

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    When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create. – Why The Lucky Stiff.

  • An outsider overview of #sotm13

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    Last weekend I was in Birmingham for the StateOfTheMap, to learn how we could be more involved in OSM in a number of projects we have down the line. Although I’m a casual mapper and I did know some things about OSM and its core technologies, this was my first in-depth immersion into that world.…

  • A new development era

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    Tarek Ziadé has posted a few months ago an interesting essay on his blog: A new development era. Summing up: web technologies (HTML5, JS) are gaining importance to build complex apps in the client (whatever it is: desktop, browser, phone, tablet) and the server side is becoming a proxy of lightweight services to interact with.…

  • Managers, not MBAs

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    «If people want to be managers, there’s a better route to it: get into an industry, know it, prove yourself, get promoted into a managerial position and then, go to a program that uses managerial experience explicitly not other people’s cases, but your own experience.» – Henry Mintzberg, on MBA education. In a debate with Ricardo…

  • (Geo) Database evolution while developing

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    During last year, I followed with interest the different approaches on how to evolve the design of a database being discussed within the postgresql community. Following is my take on that one: how this year I developed a project with an intense evolving DB design using an agile approach. The context My requisites for this project were twofold:…

  • Chain of command

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    «Give ten minutes to transform it into an emergency» — O paper filosófico definitivo para entender as xerarquías e as cadeas de mando (via rvieito).

  • Designing for growth

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    «Code should grow by addition rather than mutation.» The best example of that axiom I ever found is the one in Beck’s Implementation patterns. What goes next is almost an exact reproduction of the book. After reading this post, if you liked, I’d strongly recommend you to buy a copy. Imagine a graphic editor where…

  • Why we rock

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    While money can help produce good software, clear communication channels between developers and users and a unified team can easily outperform more rigid development environments. – I feel sorry for closed-source developers, Bruce Momjian.

  • Big transitions in small steps

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    Software G Forces: the effects of acceleration was one of my favorite talks this year, which together with the book Continuous delivery bring to life again the big theme of agile movement: how to better build software. Today I ran into a video by Kent Beck, where he talks about the strategies to take into account when evolving…

  • Valve: on failure

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    Screwing up is a great way to find out that your assumptions were wrong or that your model of the world was a little bit off. As long as you update your model and move forward with a better picture, you’re doing it right. […] There are still some bad ways to fail. Repeating the same mistake over…

  • Software never lies

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    «When you run a business, if your software has a bug, your customers don’t care if it is your fault or Linus’ or some random Rails developer’s. They care that your software is bugged. Everyone’s software becomes my software because all of their bugs are my bugs. When something goes wrong, you need to seek…

  • How Linux is built: 2012

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    The Linux Foundation has released the Who writes Linux (2012 data) report. Interesting to see how it has been internalized as a marketing tool to show how vibrant is the community. Check it out and compare it to LibreOffice report and ours on FOSS4G desktop.

  • Analysis of free software communities (VI): coda

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    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). As you can see in my last posts (Introduction (I), Adoption (II), Activity (III), Work hours (IV) and Generations (V)), I finally managed to translate the paper we presented last year in V jornadas de SIG Libre. It…

  • Analysis of free software communities (V): generations

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    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). Data patterns This indicator gives us some sense on how the leadership changed and how the knowledge transfer was done in every project. The paper elaborates a bit more the points of turnover and integration of new blood…

  • Analysis of free software communities (IV): work hours

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    This post is part of a series: introduction (I), adoption (II), activity (III), work hours (IV), generations (V), and coda (VI). Data patterns This indicator is intended to give us some information on the patterns of behavior of contributors. Specifically, we can track how is a typical week for the core developers in every project: the timeline shows when the integration happened,…

  • Programming on principle

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    If you only watch a keynote this year, make it this one: Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle. The serendipity again: I found this video few days after I finished reading Implementation patterns, by Kent Beck. Both two are connected, in the sense that Bret Victor talks about the importance of values and principles in our life and…

  • Open source vs Open project

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    «An open project and its community are the sum of individual people doing what they care about. It’s flat-out wrong to think that any healthy open project is a pool of developers who can be assigned priorities that “make sense” globally. There’s no product manager. The community priorities are simply the union of all community-member…

  • On delivering software

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    More than ten years ago, some visionaries got together in the mountains of Utah to relax, ski and discuss on the challenges of their profession. That was the very moment when the Agile movement cristallized. They wrote a manifest and 12 principles. The first gem goes like: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early…

  • LibreOffice stats

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    Have you seen the LibreOffice stats shown at FOSDEM? They have got a lot of momentum from its very beginning and seem doing well. I’d like to see the source of that, though, to compare how they build the report with ours.

  • History of science fiction

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    A good map to navigate through the themes, authors and styles of the so-called scifi.

  • On meritocracy and self-promotion

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    Just as demagogues may subvert democracy, so self-promotion may subvert meritocracy. – Open Source Projects and the meritocracy myth.

  • Institucional memory

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    Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were). – On institucional memory and reverse smuggling.

  • It has to work

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    If you’re try­ing to make a suc­cess­ful tech prod­uct, 90% of the bat­tle is that it works at all. – It has to work, Havoc Pennington.

  • Lovelace and Babagge VS The economy!

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    Just found this online-ongoing comic by Sidney Padua created to the Ada Lovelace day in 2009. She depicts a steampunk alternative past where Charles Babagge and Ada Lovelace got to build the difference engine … to fight crime!! LOL. Here the chapters. Don’t miss this one: Lovelace and Babagge VS The economy, where they fight against the economic crisis of…