Category: English
-
Experimento de renta básica
Un experimento de YCombinator para dotar de renta básica durante 5 años a una serie de personas seleccionadas entre la población de Oakland.
-
High-performers?
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…
-
Stripe contrata equipos
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
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
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
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
«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
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
«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
«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
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. – Bruce Momjian, I feel sorry for closed-source developers.
-
Big transitions in small steps
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
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
«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
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
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
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
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
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
«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
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
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.