Revolution Solution

Bright, Too Patient Design

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:10:00 +0000

It's not too often that I realize I'm using something that features a bright, patient design.

It's almost like using a product or piece of software that was tailored for you, except they predicted the future and released it without ever asking you anything about it. With just with the right pace, you discover the idioms and useful features -- it feels like the software or product is slowly and patiently revealing itself to you, as you learn it.

For a while now, I've been using a Windows Phone 7 and slowly discovering the bright design that it's made of, to the point that I realized it's sometimes too patient. Some examples:

in the phone app, you can tap the small phone icon to make a call directly from the main view, no need to switch to the contact view;
the search button on the phone usually leads to Bing search, but is sometimes contextual within the active app;
when copying and pasting some text, the small clipboard icon disappears from view, but it can still be accessed by dragging the area above the keyboard to the right, so that the "paste" operation can be repeated.

The most recent "Mango" update for Windows Phone 7 brings the levels of patience back down to normal levels, for example the search button now does the same thing all the time (fires up Bing search; apps that support search now have to expose it in their own way) and the clipboard indicator becomes only half hidden after the first "paste" operation.

In my opinion, this is a very good step forward for two reasons:

better exposure of the features to all the users, not just the ones that read 4-page reviews of the software that contain all these gems;
more gratification for advanced users, both in terms of their own daily use of the phone (less friction and variability to access useful functionality) and, as enthusiasts that they are, when ~~showing off~~ explaining the features of the phone to others (no longer having to "teach" them how to use it).

I think that by no means is it an easy feat to create a product that can boast a bright, patient design, but making it too patient can make the product seem incomplete and unsophisticated.
In the case of the phone icon in the phone application of WP7, for example, a periodic, fast color+fade animation would hint the user that those are buttons, not just static icons. Likewise, the clipboard icon could continue its happy secluded life outside the screen, but just making it jump a bit into the screen a few seconds after it went away would remind the users that it's still in town.

It's great to strive for a bright, patient design. Just don't be too patient.

Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:06:00 +0000

Freedom: many human beings still can't take it for granted.

Portugal Day

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:55:00 +0000

Or in portuguese, Dia de Camões, de Portugal e das Comunidades Portuguesas.

Being currently living outside of Portugal, this day had a special meaning for me today. No, I'm not about to cite the "usual bs" about being nostalgic and The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas) being on par with the Iliad and the Odyssey. This day had a special meaning because of someone's initiative: Mr. José Bouza Serrano, the ambassador of Portugal in Denmark.

I spent some hours at his house today, at first mostly with Danish people and then with people mostly from Portugal. It was a very good experience – the chance to talk with Portuguese people living here both for a few (0-4) and many (20+) years was priceless.

On one hand, I had an interesting time just trying to analyse how entusiastic people were about staying in Denmark for some time; On the other hand, I had a few inspiring conversations on how peoople got here, what was their living condition then and now, what plans do they have for the future and how can we make our own lives easier living almost "alone" in this pretty closed society.

That being said, I really haven't made up my mind on whether I'm going to aim at staying here in Copenhagen after the internship or not (remember the first rule of career planning?)... but I certainly have a quite broader perspective on working an living here than I had when I woke up this morning!

Speaking of career planning, while in my previous post I didn't mean to be explicit about how I came in contact with Microsoft Copenhagen, it has been pointed to me that I should perhaps refer that that. So, in my case, I was already percolating in my mind the possibility of an internship abroad and I basically seized an opportunity presented by my faculty – FEUP – and particularly the association of alumni of my programme (Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering) – AlumniEI (formerly AlumniLEIC). Some FEUP teachers and AlumniEI members are really the ones who presented the dots, I just connected them :)

Internship at Microsoft Copenhagen – how did I get it and where to go from here?

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:35:00 +0000

As Marc Andreessen (pmarca) would say:

The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.

Career Cat - McBeth / flickr (Creative Commons)

I read pmarca's posts on career planning at a crucial time in my own career: I was in my last university semester with classes, thinking about what would be the best option to start my career in the so-called software industry. To tell the truth, I wasn't really starting my career as much as re-starting it -- I had previously participated in some projects with real-life goals and real customers, projects that were a bit complex both by social and technical perspectives. I found it really amazing that I was able to review my past choices and bets, matching them with some of the advices Marc gives, just when I was finishing studies to start working full-time.

Of the pmarca career posts I linked earlier, the one that really resonated with me was the one about opportunity. Spotting, evaluating and seizing opportunities were what drove me to where I am now. Call me opportunist, but that's the way it is. (Apart from these three actions that you can "apply" to opportunities, there's only one better action: creating opportunities. But I'm not there quite so often yet.)

Throughout the previous four college years, after weighting my options -- 1) doing the best possible at exams and assignments and doing little else vs. 2) doing acceptable at exams and assignments and have time to pursue other ambitious opportunities -- I can say with some certainty (looking at my grades vs. my resume) that I chose option 2 about 80%-90% of the time. And I absolutely don't regret it. These choices have granted me extra experience, knowledge and personal interactions that I can't really measure. Sure there was also some time that was lost and opportunities that I couldn't pursue, but hey, that's life -- I also learned (a bit by the hard way) that I can't do all I'd like to and that it's important to know when to say no (and being able to do it).

Since I'm all out referencing Marc Andreessen, I might as well point to another article he posted (a bit off-topic): Luck and the entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck. Luck or chance is present in everyone's life. However, I've always been a fan of "you make your own destiny" kind of philosophies, and that's where I find the article interesting (most of the article cites a book by Dr. James Austin, a neurologist and philosopher). To try and sum it up nicely, I'll focus just two points:

you can either walk through life from objective A to objective B (and so forth) focusing on the objectives, or you can pay more attention to the path between each objective while moving;

what sometimes seems a lucky person in the right place at the right time is the result of that person's knowledge, hobbies and day-to-day behaviour -- and those can be controlled/improved.

Of course it's not always possible to do what seems more appealing to our tastes or that would have the best outcome, or seizing opportunities just for the sake of not losing them -- sometimes I really just had to do the right thing. Like not charging a client that asks for some changes to his website two months after he said that it was just perfect, or planning six months in advance to stop accepting projects because of a very important lab class at the university.

So, I guess I've painted a kind of abstract picture of how I came to Microsoft Copenhagen for a one year internship. Well, I guess the title was just an excuse to speak about career, seizing opportunities, luck and doing the right thing.

Where will I go from here? See the first rule of career planning.

Will everything be free?

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:47:00 +0000

Or, more specifically, will every (Web 2.0 or not) service and application be free?

Many Web startups and new services concentrate on collecting a very large user base, and only after thinking about monetizing, which is inevitably ads or has a very strong ads component. That way, they never get customers, only users, because they never get money from them. This uneases me a bit, maybe because I'm not a big fan of marketing and publicity, or maybe because I can't conceive the online publicity model to scale into the de-facto monetizing solution for the Web.

That and I've started following the "There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" motto long ago (I like the Portuguese variant a lot: NHAG - "Não Há Almoços Grátis"), so I don't trust "free" completely anymore.

Well, this was just an oppinion of mine that I summarized quickly as an introduction to point you, my dear reader, to this article written by Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb: The Danger of Free. The article also focuses on the effects of free products in the economy and market competition.

I might get back on the subject with more of my own words later. More goodies after the jump.

Delay sending emails by one minute

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:53:00 +0000

I've told some people that I have configured my MS Outlook to delay sending of emails by one minute. They all acted quite surprised and a few were even confused. "That's right, when I press send, it's only actually sent one minute later."

I've started to use that more than a year ago. At the time, I had to deal with clients in some ongoing projects, faculty assignments, participated in a couple other side projects... I had a lot of context-switching going on, especially with email.

Sometimes when composing or replying to emails, I would press the "send" button and shortly after find myself saying out loud stuff like "damn, I forgot the attachment", "oh no, I didn't write the subject", "oops, forgot to mention subject X" or "shit, I just misspelled his/her name"... Too many times, for sure!

As much as I trained myself to re-read every email before sending, it seemed that the "send" action triggers something else that I couldn't consciously trigger myself, something that often spots some other flaw previously uncovered.

So, I roamed Outlook preferences, filters and rules until I discovered a rule that delays sending of all emails by any amount of minutes. That was what I needed :)

Initially I started with a two-minutes delay, but quickly brought it down to one minute. If you suffer from this "syndrome" I tried to describe here, maybe you'll find this little lifehack useful too!

Easily sorting an ASP.NET GridView binded to an ObjectDataSource

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:17:00 +0000

Last summer, I was involved in building a complex, multi-tiered application in ASP.NET. It has the usual data, business logic and presentation layers, together with some additional modules. Every layer and module exposes a webservice and that's how it's all wired up. The project had all the data needs and operations very well specified and translated into stored procedures. The data layer is abstracted by business objects, that are passed from one service to another and finally to the presentation layer. Very enterprise-ish, wouldn't you say?

When the system was designed it was assumed that the presentation layer, or in other words, the ASP.NET pages, could easily paginate, order, and do other presentation transforms to the lists of business objects returned by the lower layer. The thing is, it was not so simple. More about that in a moment.

ASP.NET 2.0 has evolved in terms of data visualization and interaction, providing easy-to-use but also powerful controls like the GridView and FormView, just to name two of the most popular. There has also been some improvement in terms of integration with different sources of data other than SQL, namely XML and business objects / data objects. For the latter, the ObjectDataSource control, we can provide a type and a method to retrieve data and the wire it with a GridView to display some data. Very nice and easy, about 12 mouse clicks total. Now rinse, repeat in as many pages as you need.

Oh wait, we need sorting and pagination. Well, pagination is implemented by default, no problems there.
«Sorting, let me see... Oh, here is the AllowSorting property, let me just set this to true. It's don... Oh fsck!»

This was aproximately my mental monologue some months ago when asked to add sorting to a GridView and encountering a nasty error. A quick Google-ing leads me to a Microsoft MSDN page that explains what must be done in order to add sorting capabilities to an ObjectDataSource. Long story short, it was necessary to create an overload to every method that returns data, with two additional parameters (SortExpression and SortDirection, if I recall correctly).

We were on a pretty tight schedule to present a prototype to the client, so there was not much time to go around modifying every method to include sorting support. And there definitely wasn't enough time to traverse all the layers so that sorting was introduced at the stored procedures level, which is where it belonged in the first place!

When push comes to shove, it's time for "Reflection and XORs".
(I love this expression! It's used by some friends of mine to express unnecessary complexity of design and/or implementation.)

My quick (and a little dirty) solution to this problem – which I've already shared with some people and might be useful for others, so that's why I'm making this post – was to create a user control that "catches" the sorting events on the GridView and transforms the data coming from the ObjectDataSource so that it reaches the grid sorted as expected. The downside is that in the headings of the table there are no visual cues to what is being sorted or in what direction.

I didn't have to use XORs, but I sure used a lot of reflection, because I didn't know beforehand what type of objects and which properties I would be sorting. It was also interesting to explore the reflection world of generics, particularly creating a generic delegate in run-time!

Here is the most interesting method in the code:

protected void DataSource_Selected(object sender, ObjectDataSourceStatusEventArgs e) {
if(e.ReturnValue != null) {
  if(sortExpression != null && sortExpression != string.Empty) {
    MethodInfo sort = new List(e.ReturnValue.GetType().GetMethods()).Find(
      delegate(MethodInfo m) { return m.ToString().ToLower().StartsWith("void sort(system.comparison"); });
    if(sort != null) {
      object helper = Activator.CreateInstance(
        typeof(ComparisonDelegateHelper<>).MakeGenericType(sort.GetParameters()[0].ParameterType.GetGenericArguments()[0]));
      MethodInfo generateComparisonDelegate = new List(helper.GetType().GetMethods()).Find(
        delegate(MethodInfo m) { return m.ToString().Contains("GenerateComparisonDelegate"); });
      sort.Invoke(e.ReturnValue,
                  new object[] {generateComparisonDelegate.Invoke(helper, new object[] {sortExpression, sortAscending})});
    }
  }
}
}

If it comes in handy or you're just curious, download the whole thing.

The usage of the GridViewSorter control is as simple as this:

<gv:GridViewSorter runat="server" ID="gvs" EnableViewState="true"
  GridViewID="SomeGridView" DataSourceID="SomeDataSource">
</gv:GridViewSorter>

Temporary variables regarding the last sorted field and direction are kept on the viewstate, but could also be as hidden fields on the form or even in the session (the latter would have to take care of collisions with other pages or even the same page open in two browser windows).

Hope your Christmas was good. Happy New Year!

I don't use Social Web stuff... so why Twitter?

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:21:00 +0000

I don't use Hi5, don't like MySpace and deleted (or should I say, disabled) my Facebook account. So, why do I use and even like Twitter?

On social networks, I have to post personal information, keep it updated, reply to friends, decide whether or not to install some viral widget... I have to commit to spending time on it.

I don't mean that all of the social web is a time-waster, the Social Web can be useful. The extreme example is possibly LinkedIn, the social network meant for people who don't want to or can't afford to lose time. But to take something useful out of it, we still have to commit.

For me, that's the main advantage of Twitter: it doesn't require commitment!

I can have my client on for a whole week or not even visit the website the next week, because using Twitter is communicating non-essential information.

Twitter can be valuable if you somehow leverage the relations you have with the persons on your network, it's a matter of seizing opportunities. But most of the time you can just do with it something useful, fun, or simply post whatever you want. No commitments.

"This Project Will Be the First of a Series..."

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:39:00 +0000

How many times have you heard something like "This project is the first of a possible series of <insert number greater than 2>"? Well, I wouldn't be rich, but it would certainly save me a few cinema tickets if I had €1 for each time I heard it!
(€1 or $1, or £1, or ¥100, or something like that... you know).

How Things Go

The projects arrived in two ways: an interesting project that isn't really your (company's) stronger ability, or a semi-interesting project much like some other project that you've tackled before.
However, there is a catch. There is always a catch.
It might be a low budget at the moment. It might be that there are really no users to contact, or some stakeholders are still (or forever) undefined. Or you might not be seeing the catch right away, because they will tell you a nice story.

They paint you a bright picture: they tell you how their Company is succeding on their business 1.0, how they see this Web 2.0 things can improve customer relationships, attract new customers, ease internal processes, or something like that. But the important part of their story is that this is just the first of a series of projects. This one is planting the seed of a new shiny Company 2.0.

If your company has a solid market position, or are very specialized, or have a strong character leadership when it comes to evaluating project proposals, a few times you won't come to an agreement with the client. Lucky you. However, you always think that this one might really be a good opportunity, if you did it right. So, you might actually make some concessions, thinking of the other N projects that you can get from this client.

If the Project Actually Starts

Most times, the project will find its way to kick off.
Most times the project starts, it will finish, as in getting to a point where you and your customer agree that the project has come to an end.
Most times the project finishes, it will actually be successful, the client being happy with what you built for them.

However, something changes in the client's mind.
Sometimes it's that they discovered how troublesome it is to actually decide over petty things like what they really want to achieve with their new website while they have to manage the Company. Other times there may actually be a marketing representative that steers the projects' goals, but the net result doesn't suit the executives' vision, and of course it's your fault.

Or it might be that there are some limitations that keep itching the users, who then complain to their bosses, it percolates up, etc. When they finally call you a few weeks or months later to know if the users don't know how to use it correctly or it's actually a limitation, you promptly reply "But we agreed that there would be such limitations, because of the limited budget, am I right?". You are. But the 1.0 Company has never really had time or patience to fully read the requirements document for the new 2.0 project that was sprouting. Or they read it, but the precision degree it carried was surprisingly not enough to prevent the client from having new ideas.

And the first in a series of projects easily becomes a one-shot.

Bottom Line

Most of the times the project doesn't start, it's probably a good thing. I've had a few of these, in one case further digging and contacts with the company that got the project confirmed that it didn't pay off. However, it's not good to lose many projects, you might be missing a good client and an even better project.

If you really feel like you should place your bet on that project, it's better to mostly ignore the part when the client says "this project will be one of N". Evaluating your participation based on future projects might lead to too many concessions on this project. That situation ultimatly puts your team in a position where too much work for too little gain is in the order of the day, because, you know, clients change their minds.

In the end, if you can really pull it off and create a very shiny and functional product, projects will keep coming, regardless of wether you lowered the money bar or not on that "first" project. Wether it is from this client or from others. So please, keep your standards.

The State of Agile Development

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:36:00 +0000

A few days ago I came across interesting news (I've been digesting it a bit), following up on my first post about Agile Software Development and the Enterprise World (SCRUM + CMMI).

A survey conducted by VersionOne entitled "The State of Agile Development" (PDF) reports on various indicators regarding Agile Development and its impact on organizations, both positive and negative outcomes. The survey reached nearly 1700 individuals across 71 countries. Vishal Sharma's blog is the source where I found this, he has posted some highlights about the survey.

As my perception is that many companies still don't benefit from Agile development and management, I was curious to see who within the organizations has driven and supported most the transition (corresponding to the question "What role most closely identifies the initial champion of Agile development in your organization"):

Team Lead / Dev Management: 22%
VP / Director of Development: 19%
C-Level Executive: 18%
Project Manager: 15%

Maybe because upper level management perceives too many risks or is misinformed and developers simply don't have the necessary influence, it seems that middle management plays a key role when it comes to adopting Agile practices.

But ultimately the executives have to be convinced it's worth it to adopt Agile methodologies, so here are some figures for them, regarding what has improved or significantly improved since the adoption of Agile practices by the surveyed companies:

Enhanced ability to manage changing priorities: 92%
Improved project visibility: 83%
Improved team morale: 82%
Increased productivity: 80%
Enhanced software quality: 77%
Reduced project risk: 75%

[This does not mean that productivity increased 80%, it means that 80% of cases productivity increased or increased significantly.]

Incidentally, I read today an article titled "Welcome to the First World, Now Your Labor Rates are Too High" by Michael Hugos. The vision expressed is part of what attracts me so much into Agile development and management practices: more and more, timing is key to deliver successfully, as reducing waste is important to keep costs not too high. We're not in the days when delaying a project or product by months is an option anymore (except maybe for very big companies, but it costs them!).

Companies must empower teams and individuals if they plan to stay competitive. So, what are you waiting for?

Extending the Timetable Combinator

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:52:00 +0000

I received quite some feedback on the Timetable Combinator, and the number of accesses was quite motivating:

Saturday 15:00 - 0 hits
Sunday 16:00 - ~1200 hits
Monday 10:45 - ~2400 hits

So, I took some time yesterday to implement stuff.

Firstly, I listened to a request I received a few times: the possibility to toggle theoretical classes. It was quite easy, just inserting a parameter in a few methods.

The second improvement has more to do with jQuery and is performance-related. I noticed that when having too many URLs to load, the browser would eat up too much processing power and sometimes the server would refuse to serve some pages. So, I thought about implementing some kind of AJAX request queueing.

Then, I thought again and googled quickly for some implementation of AJAX request queueing for jQuery. It was very easy to find and worked like a charm. However, now the resources were being wasted, because one request at a time would take to long to complete if the URL list was too long. It took me some minutes to implement support for multiple queues, just check the source code if you're interested.

Experimenting with jQuery

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 13:38:00 +0000

Today I concluded a little exploration journey through jQuery.

I already had some experience with Prototype (and Script.aculo.us, building the website of the Portuguese Museum of Ancient Art), so I had some expectations regarding jQuery. I have to admit that jQuery blew them away quite easily.

jQuery is more intuitive than Prototype in many aspects, allows developers to do more with less coding and already contains many effects that can be found in Script.aculo.us. The documentation is very complete (including useful examples) and, of course, supports plugins and provides AJAX to your applications.

The main advantage is precisely its "querying" abilities: it's very easy to find multiple elements on the DOM and manipulate them in various ways (including attributes and CSS). jQuery supports CSS expressions, XPath expressions and even some custom expressions (for example, to select all even nodes that match some expression).

To experiment with jQuery, I picked up something I did some time ago and turned it into what is now known as the Timetable Combinator :)

I'm sorry, I opened it with IE, Opera and Safari for Windows but I think it only works in Firefox. I think it wouldn't be too hard to cross-browserize it, but I don't have the time. If you want to take it to the next level, drop me a line.

Agile or Waterfall?

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:12:00 +0000

At school / university, they mostly teach and (we) practise software development by the book. I mean, requirements before design, before architecture, before development, before testing, ... Waterfall. Any project that requires documentation values that phased way of building software.

Management is oriented pretty much by that same principles. Documentation and well-defined process. After all, this same style of management has always served the various engineering disciplines with proved results, so it must be right, right?.

When companies are competing in the enterprise market, they abide by these rules. It shows how reliable and professional they are. There are even the CMMI and other kinds of enterprise certifications, which seem to push the company in the more-process-and-documentation direction, which in turn makes them more enterprise-ish.

But there's the flipside of the coin

In the past few months, I've been reading pretty much everything I could find about agile methodologies. Heck, I've even used agile management practises and an agile development process in the last project (namely, Feature Driven Development, FDD). However, as it was pretty much self-instructed, we always felt like there was something not quite right there (nevertheless, the project was very successful from the client's point of view and development run pretty smoothly).

Looking for defined and more complete agile methodologies, I've been reading about SCRUM lately. I've read soft-evangelism and user experiences, mostly. The various articles, testimonies and other resources on the Web were a very good source of information, of course, but it was too much to process in such a short time. I'll be digesting it for the next months. Maybe I'll have a chance to try it in a class I'm taking this semester, called Agile Software Development Methodologies.

Summarizing, SCRUM advocates short development iterations, nearly constant user and/or customer interaction, daily team synchronization (yes, management can be present), among other practises. It doesn't exclude things like Extreme Programming (XP) or other development practises, but upwards (in the management layers) some action must be taken to accommodate SCRUM.

And that brings me back to the initial subject. Management likes status reports, documentation and organizations like processes. By this perspective, SCRUM probably brings additional risks to a project. And many times, it's the case that a proposition must be made with a closed budget, for which the agile method might not seem so suitable. So, it's not easy to convince management. Some of the articles I've read about SCRUM mention this transition difficulty, and recommend starting by the small projects, not upfront disrupting the existing practises (they wouldn't let you, anyway).

Adopting SCRUM would be a whole other topic, and besides that, I don't think I could provide meaningful knowledge about it, as I've never been there doing that (I actually met someone at BarCamp Portugal who does it since February -- Ricardo Mestre, we didn't talk much but he promised that next year he would make a talk or workshop about that).

Why can't they co-exist?

However passionate or reluctant opinions I read, I was never completely convinced that one approach or the other was completely right or completely wrong. I believe there are cases where Waterfall might be the best option, but I was mostly convinced by Agile approaches.

I was always someone who tries to bring different perspectives together, especially when their representatives are passionate about it, because it means that there must be some value in their ideas. So, today I was thrilled when I read a post by Richard Banks stating that SCRUM and CMMI not only can work together, but yield extraordinary results! The organization in question, Systematic Software Engineering, is actually CMMI level 5 certified! And not only are they using SCRUM but also Lean. (The original report on the subject is from Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of SCRUM.)

I believe this is not a coincidence or simply bright people being in the right place and time. CMMI 5 indicates an organization with continuous process improvement and high process maturity. Perhaps only a very mature organization is able to change itself into adopting agile practises, at such a large scale. But wouldn't it be better if your organization changed before it reached such a large scale?

Footnote:
It's hard to list in a logical way all the stuff I've been reading on this matter. If you're interested, just explore my del.icio.us bookmarks regarding the agile and scrum categories.

Buzzwords / Acronyms:

Waterfall Model (Wikipedia)
CMMI - Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMU, Wikipedia)
SCRUM (Wikipedia)
XP - Extreme Programming (xp.org)
Lean Software Development (poppendieck.com, Wikipedia)
FDD - Feature Driven Development (fdd.com, Wikipedia)

Update: Added the name of the person I met at BarCamp that uses SCRUM.

Presentation and Code Examples are Online

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:11:00 +0000

Regarding my BarCamp presentation, I've just uploaded the presentation (pdf or view online, strange fonts) and a very stripped down development version of OncologiaPediatrica.org packaged in a zip file, with just one model and a bit of additional documentation. I call it a development version because some settings are set to 'debug' and stuff like that, I just wanted to release this ASAP.

Maybee I should explain a little better what's going on under the hood, but I think that if people get the big picture and really consider CodeIgniter (CI) as a valid alternative, they'll get to know CI really well really fast.

Fell free to contact me about this.

Kick-starting

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:09:00 +0000

In the latest months (or perhaps one or two years), I've read lots of interesting stuff and met some very interesting persons. Also, I've gained a lot of personal and, above all, professional experience in the areas of software development (both Web and standalone), teamwork, management and related.

I don't think I could ever list everything that influenced and inspired me during that time, but along with the Project Management Laboratory class I took last semester and my experience at JuniFEUP, two events played a major role lately: TakeOff 2007 and BarCamp Portugal 2007. The key factor was the diversity of interesting and inspiring people that I met there (or simply watched and heard, in some cases).

There are quite some reviews around, but since TakeOff is probably old news, I'll just leave a link to Alcides' Blog, which has the most complete review of BarCamp I could find, split through several posts. I agree with most of what he wrote and I like that he has a mostly impartial view on what happened -- it's in Portuguese, since this was BarCamp Portugal :P

And there I did it: went to BarCamp, had an active role there, and blogged about it! [These were the rules I remembered when I finished reading the concept of BarCamp] What was the active role? I made a presentation about CodeIgniter and my experience using it to build OncologiaPediátrica.org. Details will be posted shortly at the BarCamp wiki.

The above are most of the main reasons that compelled me to restart my blog. The reasons that prevented me from doing it until now are gone (fear of not having anything to write about, mainly) so, it was natural evolution, I guess :)

Also, this date is quite meaningful, since it was exactly two years ago that I wrote the last post here. The old posts are still available, but they're in Portuguese and not related to anything that will follow.

Depois de me "esquecer" disto durante tanto tempo...

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 10:24:00 +0000

Voltei!!! Mas estive tanto tempo sem vir ao blog que hoje tive de usar a opção "recover username"..... shame on me.

O próximo passo é adicionar uns links ao menu lateral e dar uns toques no photoshop para fazer um logotipo... isto sem imagens não está com nada ;p

Na minha deambulação diária pela rede, ocorreu-me uma forma fácil de manter isto mais actualizado: de vez em quando vou criar um post com o título "Featured site" (ok talvez não este título... parece um bocado snob) para divulgar websites, eventos, pessoas.. enfim, o que vier à rede!

Para não ficar a impressão que isto é um post vazio, fica um comentário feito ontem numa conversa enquanto falávamos de uma coluna de fumo que se via ao longe: "O dinheiro dos subsídios para reconstrução e replantação está a sair do bolso de todos... Se o governo anunciasse que poderia haver aumentos de salários mas que, por causa dos fogos, esses aumentos vão ser congelados... se calhar as pessoas deixávam de atear fogos!" [anteriormente tinha-se referido que a grande maioria dos fogos são iniciados por mão humana]

Acho que vale a pena pensar nisto. Até porque a maioria das pessoas não se preocupa muito com a floresta antes de ela arder...

Arte antiga, humor renovado!

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 23:51:00 +0000

Hoje fui ao teatro. Já não via uma peça de teatro há algum tempo, e para dizer a verdade nem sou muito fã. Mas a actuação de hoje e o trabalho que um grupo de teatro tem vindo a fazer na Murtosa merecem um grande aplauso!

Conheco a maior parte das pessoas que vi a actuar, mas isso não impediu de passar metade da peça a rir com as atitudes e palavras dos personagens... esqueci-me completamente de quem estava a ver representar e fui absorvido para o universo da peça. Eu e toda a gente que lá estava :D

De vez em quando até sai qualquer coisa digna de nota aqui da minha terra! Não quero com isto dizer que vai haver um surto de actores murtoenses a saltar para a ribalta do mundo do espetáculo... mas lá jeito têm eles, e até vão actuar em S. Jacinto (e S. João da Madeira se não estou em erro) em breve. Força aí!

Água e outros recursos, ou a falta deles...

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 16:41:00 +0000

Após um fim-de-semana muito cansativo e quase uma semana em que o PC só serviu para ler manga, decidi fazer um post sobre uma coisa que já me preocupa há algum tempo e que este fim-de-semana voltou ao meu pensamento.
Houve duas razões para começar a pensar nisto outra vez. A primeira foi saber que em Espanha cortam o abastecimento público de água durante a noite para poupar água (bem, a maior parte das pessoas está a dormir, por isso esta medida só afecta quem tentar regar a relva à noite :p). A segunda causa foi o nível realmente baixo que vi nas duas barragens por que passei na zona de Montalegre.

Já pensámos a sério nos recursos do planeta que usamos?
E não estou a falar de coisas tipo a extracção de petróleo... falo de recursos tão simples como água gasta, lixo produzido, poluição do ar, reciclagem que podia ser feita, etc. Vale mesmo a pena pensar nisto, porque tão cedo não vamos viver para Marte...

Há algum tempo fiz um teste cuja conclusão foi que seriam precisos 1.5 planetas Terra se toda a gente tivesse hábitos semelhantes aos meus... tenho ainda de melhorar!

Recomendo que façam o mesmo teste e pensem um bocado no nosso planeta...

Os 3 amigos (+1) e a Casa da Música

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 10:29:00 +0000

[Qualquer coincidencia com "Os 3 porquinhos e o lobo mau" é coincidência. Mesmo!]

Ontem fiquei tão absorvido pelo concerto em si que nem conseguia pensar em mais nada! Mas vale a pena fazer mais uma referência à noite de ontem. Entre a saída da estação de metro e a chegada à Casa da Música, o nervosismo só aumentava.. mas quando lá cheguei, encontrei-me quase de seguida com o Telmo e o Zé (Devezas, porque toda a gente é Zé [private :p]) num dos corredores-bares e a tensão desvaneceu-se em pouco tempo, muito por causa de estar a conversar com eles mas também por causa do espaço em si. Para os que estiverem a pensar quem é o "+1", estou a falar do Cláudio que ainda consegui encontrar-nos no final do concerto colados (ok, eu colado) ao balcao de merchandising hehe.. Cláudio da próxima aviso-te dos concertos assim que souber... shame on me. Quanto ao resto...:

A Casa da Música é mesmo espetacular... o envolvimento exterior a lembrar um deserto perturbado, os corredores transformados em bares em que o ambiente é bastante relaxante e principalmente a sala 1 (sala do concerto), além de ser visualmente agradável, tem uma acústica mesmo incrível! E os materiais utilizados são confortáveis e super-estéticos por toda a Casa da Música.. Tudo isso aliado fez-me pensar que todo o tempo e dinheiro gastos a mais na construção justificam o resultado final (apesar de ter sido mesmo muito tempo e dinheiro a mais...).

Bem, como já estava na altura de me desviciar de blogar, vou já hoje para Montalegre e passo lá o fim-de-semana, por isso não vale a pena virem cá três vezes (COF) por dia ver se já há novos posts hehe.

Vou estar envolvido na organização da última prova do Portugal Eco Aventura, o II Troféu Aventura Outdoor do Alto Tâmega e Barroso. Já estive antes na organização de uma prova de aventura, mas em comparação com os 4+1/2 dias da última, acho que estes 2+1/2 dias vão passar muito mais facilmente :D

Espetááááculo!!

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 02:00:00 +0000

Este concerto do Thievery Corporation destrói por completo qualquer suspeita de que o Cosmic Game (o seu último álbum) tem pouco a ver com os seus trabalhos anteriores...
Foram perfeitamente encaixados os temas mais recentes, os grandes clássicos (se assim se podem chamar) da banda e versões de músicas menos conhecidas mas não menos espetaculares... Todos marcados por um baixo sempre presente a dar aquele tom groove às músicas ou às vezes mais agressivo, uma percussão constante e super-criativa nos momentos chave e um alternar entre guitarra e cítara (acho que se chama assim) tocadas de modo discreto mas a dar corpo às músicas.

Eric Hilton e Rob Garza naturalmente tomaram conta da parte de MC, com duas excepções: uma incursão pelo baixo por parte de Eric na primeira música (The Cosmic Gate), em que só estiveram Eric e Rob em palco, e nas duas últimas músicas (depois da segunda reentrada em palco!) Rob Garza tocou guitarra acústica.

Como participações convidadas, estiveram Lou Lou, Sista Pat, Princess Carina, Wayne Coyne (e de mais dois cantores que não consigo identificar de momento, rastafari old school como eles afirmaram mais de uma vez :), gostei especialmente de Lou Lou e dos dois aqui não identificados! A Lou Lou deu um ambiente mais intimista à actuação, enquanto os outros dois cantores puseram toda a plateia ao saltos ao darem voz aos tais temas mais "clássicos" da banda e também alguns temas do novo Cosmic Game.

Tenho também de fazer uma referência aos vídeos projectados nas três (sim, três!) telas montadas por trás do palco, que estiveram quase sempre na melhor das consonâncias com a música.

Só posso concluir que foi um concerto ainda acima das minhas espectativas! E ainda por cima acabou com os Thievery & associates a convidarem o público para ir para o palco... eu estava na segunda fila... devia ter ido....... arghhh pq é q tive um ataque de vergonha?!?! :X

Enfim, um dos concertos com que sonhava aconteceu mesmo!

Bem, só tenho pena de me ter esquecido de carregar as pilhas da máq. fotográfica... assim tive de tirar fotos sem flash, as fotos que ainda se aproveitam são estas:

[Lou Lou. Rob Garza & Eric Hilton turning tables in the background]

[O baixista cujo nome não sei mas cujo talento é muito! Princess Carina passava por trás dele..
queria apanhá-los lado a lado mas ela ia muito rápido :p]

Thievery Corporation vs. Casa da Música

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 18:27:00 +0000

Estou a poucas horas de assistir ao concerto de uma das bandas (ou talvez da banda) de que sou maior fã - Thievery Corporation! E o pior é que a espectativa ainda sobe mais depois de tudo o que ouvi acerca da Casa da Música... ainda lá não entrei, apesar de já ter tido oportunidade para tal. Acho que preferi deixar a primeira impressão da Casa da Música para quando fosse lá ouvir música!

Só espero não estar com espectativas demasiado grandes... mas estou seguro de que vai ser um concerto em grande, literalmente. Se conseguir passar pela segurança com uma máquina fotógráfica, prometo pôr aqui as melhores fotos amanhã... :D

Ai Murtosa, Murtosa...

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:35:00 +0000

Li ontem no blog do MytyMyky (e posteriormente a história mais completa noutros blogs abaixo referidos) mais um exemplo de.... nem sei como dizer.. talvez falta de visão cultural por parte da Câmara Municipal da Murtosa (ou de algumas pessoas lá dentro que não sei exactamente quem são mas que acabam por não conseguir dar boa imagem à CMM) no que diz respeito a aproveitar oportunidades que aparecem poucas vezes (ou uma vez, como acredito ser o caso do Michael Bry) e apoiá-las para manter as pessoas motivadas ou, se o apoio não fosse genuíno ou se não tiveressem a certeza de ser uma boa aposta, pelo menos mostravam que se preocupam.

Mas o que tem mais (ou menos) piada é que a CMM nunca foi muito diferente.

Um caso relativamente recente em que estive envolvido foi a organização de uma prova de orientação na praia da Torreira em pleno fim-de-semana das festas de S. Paio 2004. Pode dizer-se que a CMM cumpriu o seu "dever" e deu a autorização necessária para ser utilizada a nova escola que ainda nem tinha sido estreada por alunos e para a prova ser realizada mesmo no centro da vila. O que a CMM não sabe (e também não quis saber/dar importância) são os custos que uma prova de orientação tem, especialmente quando é necessário fazer um novo mapa do local onde a prova vai ser realizada, como foi o caso. No entanto, à parte as cedências já referidas, mais algumas em termos de algum material (barreiras protectoras se não estou em erro) e uma visita de um fiscal a perguntar se tínhamos licença/protocolo/algo do género (visita que eu acredito ter vindo directamente da vontade da pessoa em questão e não por ordem da CMM... a Câmara não ia mandá-lo trabalhar ao domingo, ainda por cima tendo sido todas as negociações já concluídas com a mesma...) isso foi o máximo apoio que recebemos, mas apoio esse que eu não deixo de agradecer.
Só acho é que a CMM só teria a ganhar se tivesse marcado esta iniciativa como também sua, até porque decorriam as festas mais conhecidas e concorridas da Murtosa e a prova em questão era um campenoato nacional, ou seja, aliando o útil ao agradável, teria sido possível obter um melhor feedback tanto das pessoas do concelho como das pessoas de todo o país que lá se deslocaram.

Lembrei-me também hoje de uma história um pouco mais antiga também relacionada com desporto, mas essa fica para outro dia que eu hoje já ressabiei o suficiente...

Nota: não referi nomes nem vou referir, pois a intenção deste blog não é denunciar pessoas, quando muito será revelar certas situações.

[esta foto encontra-se no site de Michael Bry]

Voltando ao assunto Michael Bry, ficam algumas referências que vale a pena ler (a razão por que não escrevi este post ontem à noite foi precisamente porque andei a lê-las):

Notícia off-journal no blog de um jornal murtoense

Divas e contrabaixos

Site do fotógrafo Michael Bry

A fotografia de Michael Bry em exposição
Afinal a obra dele não foi esquecida. E ainda bem!

A abrir

noreply@blogger.com (Joaquim Rendeiro) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Hoje deu-me para criar um blog! Foi muito mais difícil do que parecia à primeira vista, por causa de escolher o nome que ia aparecer antes de .blogspot.com.... basicamente experimentei limitless (este tinha de ser o primeiro, claro..), deliverance, intheshell, foreverchanging, lifeisbliss, calmlikeabomb, firewalker, thievery, ...já nem sei mais quantos, e todos já existem! O que mais me irritou foi que a maior parte deles ou foi criado recentemente por gente que diz ah e tal não sei se vou fazer alguma coisa com isto ou que então não tem (nem tenciona ter) nada de jeito lá...

Mas pacience is bliss e lá persisti até conseguir criar um blog com um nome que me agrada :D
Também dediquei algum tempo a personalizar isto porque se há coisa de que não gosto, o nome dela é default ;p e ainda tenciono ir modificando o template ao longo do tempo.

Quando me deparar com algo que valha a pena partilhar com a blogosfera (hehe estes termos geek em português ficam ainda mais geek), vai estar aqui!

revolution is the solution!