Aitor García

Osotu - On Neuroscience

2024-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

This post is part of a series. Feel free to check the other posts:

As I write this post, I’ve already finished Osotu’s training course for teachers (I still have to upload the notes on a few modules), so in retrospect, I can say confidently that this was one of the best sessions of the course for me.

The session started with some basic concepts on the structure of neurons and their connection (dendrites, axons, synaptic endings, etc.). Still, it quickly moved into what has been one of the main discoveries about teaching/learning for me in this course: the executive functions.

The main idea is that for most of the tasks you need to be able to execute to be considered a functional person in society, the use of these functions is critical:

It is about the ability to think about a specific goal and to organize the means to achieve it.

Ustárroz, Javier & García-Molina, Alberto & Rios-Lago, Marcos & Ardila, Alfredo. (2012). Neuropsicología de la corteza prefrontal y las funciones ejecutivas.

To understand what we are talking about, we first need to understand that our brain works as a unit but has some clearly defined areas:

Limbic system is one of the oldest structures in our brain. It is involved in the emotional processing of the inputs you get through your senses. Most of the processes that happen on it are unconscious, automatic, and uncontrollable.
The cognitive, thinking brain that receives notifications from the limbic system and can develop thoughts in real time.
Finally, the Prefrontal Cortex, that part of the brain that allegedly made us take the leap that other hominids didn’t and become homo sapiens. The area is involved in almost all executive functions.

José Ramón Gamo, a well-known Spanish child neuropsychologist, explains the interaction between the different parts with a straightforward example:

While you are sitting on the sofa, your senses can feel something that your limbic system will interpret as “my leg itches”
In a range of 100-600ms, this will transmitted to the cognitive system and transform into a clear thought: “Scratch the itch”.
All that can happen unconsciously, and you may not realize you even scratch yourself until you catch a pimple and it hurts.
But imagine you have developed hives for some reason, and someone told you to “remember to use ice to calm the itch instead of scratching.”
Here is where the frontal lobe can overrule the other parts of the brain and help you inhibit the scratching. Inhibition is one of the executive functions that help us manage the world in our everyday lives.

There are, however, many other executive functions we must develop:

ANTICIPATE
- Ability to foresee the future and anticipate consequences.
TAKE DECISIONS
- Ability to imagine alternative actions and assess the possibility of success.
PLANNING
- Plan, order, and sequence the actions that must be followed at a specific time.
CONCENTRATION
- Ability to focus on critical points (Attention is an involuntary, simultaneous/parallel act of the brain. Concentration is a voluntary and conscious act of voluntarily selecting where I put the focus)
MENTAL FLEXIBILITY
- Rethink the situation, change your attitude, and be flexible if the plan does not go as planned.
- Solve problems that arise and improvise.

It’s very interesting to understand how critical these executive functions are and the biological infrastructure that allows this to happen because that is precisely where many issues that we see in school are rooted. Disorders like ADHD are directly connected with the inability of some kids to properly develop these functions and how adapting the content or, in some cases, medication can help to correct the neurochemical imbalance. Here Elissa Monteiro does a pretty good job of explaining executive functions and how they interact with students:

A modern school (or any other learning environment) should always focus on helping ALL children to develop and improve these executive functions. The different subjects (History, Maths, Music) should be used as the perfect excuse to hone these functions because they are the essential tools that will make any adult a functional part of society.

Not knowing what the Golgi apparatus is can be easily solved with a quick search online, but having the mental scaffolding to handle what to do on your first day at a new job or how to restructure your life after a traumatic event is a much more essential and valuable skill to have.

After we talked at length about how important those executive functions are, Marimar, the teacher who imparts the course, explained to us that all this scientific knowledge should help us design a better education plan, including the spaces where we study, the session timing and planification, the routines… everything.

It was a great, great session and since I attended it, I’ve been reading more and more about executive functions. Additionally, it has helped me understand better the many situations where we met adult people who are intellectually very capable but still struggle with the day-to-day, basic planning and seem to be always stuck in the same thinking. All this things are not innate, they are supposed to be developed and honed, and still our normative educaction systems FAILS completely at doing it.

Osotu - On Emotions

2024-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

This post is part of a series. Feel free to check the other posts: On Competences & Skills

I just attended the second session of the training course for teachers on Osotu. This time, we discussed the role of emotions in the learning process.

This time, it was hard to find parallelisms between general team leadership and teaching. The reason is not that adults have less trouble managing emotions than kids; far from that. Do you think a 7yo may struggle with impulse control or a 12yo with peer pressure? Imagine the amount of emotional baggage that a recently divorced 42yo with two kids brings to the office or how feelings can conflict with the daily work of a 33yo intern who is still living with their parents and feels stuck in place.

No, the absence of emotions is not the reason. The reason is that even if we all bring emotions to the workplace daily, we have been consistently trained to hide them at all costs at the risk of being deemed unprofessional. There are reasonable arguments for trying to create a siloed life with a clear division between home and work (although, as a decades-long self-employed person, I could argue about most of them :) but the reality is that suppressing the feelings (or even worse repressing them if you get to that point) does not help you in any way to perform better and in many cases you see coworkers struggling to cope in silence with them while trying to maintain the business-as-usual appearance. A nasty dissonance is created as “let’s just skip work for a few days” is not an option for most people.

Anyway. To begin with, we were asked to create a list of emotions. The most common ones were quick to mind: sadness, happiness, fear, surprise… but then after just a few seconds, we started to find things that felt like something “different”: melancholy, resentment, ambition, etc. What were those exactly? Are feelings and emotions the same thing? If not, what exactly is the difference?

To develop a sense of what is going on, we were introduced to the work of Roberto Aguado, a psychologist and teacher who has dedicated his life to exploring this field, starting from first principles and the physiological roots of what we feel.

He has created some handy tables for what is described as Universal Basic Emotions, probably leveraging the work Paul Ekman did in the 70s. These emotions and their physical manifestations have been historically shared across cultures, ethnic groups, and ages and are familiar and understood by all humans, sometimes even some non-human mammals.

So, for example, this is the table for the Rage emotion:

Emotional Spectrum (from lesser to greater intensity)	Activated Biochemistry (action platform: ATTACK)	Activated Neurological Structures (emotion)	Physiological Response	Body and Facial Communication
Irritation, annoyance, resentment, frustration, hostility, spite, revenge, rage, fury, envy, jealousy, hate, wrath, violence	Norepinephrine and dopamine (high glutamate level). The higher the presence of the neurotransmitters, the closer it is to violence.	Substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area, striatum, amygdalae, hypothalamus, pre-periductal grey region	Blood rushes to the head. Blood in muscle periphery. Increased sympathetic tone. Muscle tension. Mandible tension. Agitated thoracic respiration.	Thinned lips. Raised upper eyelids. Lowered eyebrows. Guttural voice tone. Sighs. Agitated breathing. Sensation of heat.

Here are a few great insights into this approach:

We can point at specific neurotransmitters and link them to each of the basic emotions, bridging the gap between what is physically going on in our bodies, what is physiologically expressed on the outside and our cognitive interpretation of those changes. So no new-age bullshit on “vibes” and “energies” :).
Emotions are always found on a spectrum. So, starting from the basic emotion of rage, we can go up (to, for instance, wrath) and down (to, for example, annoyance), depending on the intensity of the underlying biochemistry.

After checking these basic emotions, the one I instantly connected with my professional world was Curiosity. We developers are intensely curious beasts. We love to find a problem, take it apart in a million tiny pieces, see precisely how they are connected and find an abstract and general solution to solve it. However, after thinking about it a bit more, I found another one that is very often present in software development: guilt. It manifests in many different ways, but two came instantly to my mind because of its frequency between developers:

The embarrassment and self-shaming that sometimes occur when developers realize they have deployed an important bug to production. Man, there is no worse feeling.
The infamous Impostor Syndrome where self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments cripples and distorts our ability to objectively evaluate ourselves. This syndrome is connected too to another basic emotion: fear.

It’s always hard to deal with those situations. The best way I’ve found is to do it in advance: create a no-shaming culture where the errors —although harmful— are moved from the personal domain to the team domain and repurposed as learning opportunities to prevent future mistakes. But it’s easier said than done.

The connection between basic emotions is also mapped in Aguado’s work, clearly showing how two apparently unrelated emotions may often have very close associated neurotransmitters and have a similar biochemical signature. Following this roadmap, we can more easily start to navigate and understand how complex things that defy rational analysis work (e.g. racism -> fear <> rage <> disgust):

We can then start to describe what set of emotions creates a better learning context. Here, Aguado presents two helpful acronyms in Spanish:

CASA (Curiosity, Admiration, Security and Happiness). Emotions we should foster and cultivate. Feeling secure makes it easier to ask questions because you don’t feel vulnerable; curiosity almost inevitably leads to learning, etc.
TRAM (Sadness, Rage, Disgust, Fear) are emotions that should be managed because they make learning much more difficult. It is tough to develop logical thinking, let alone learning, if we are enraged. Sadness can easily distract us from the task at hand.

There are, of course, obvious advantages to putting emotions front and centre in the education system:

If the emotional scaffold is right, the learning becomes more significant. Often, we are confronted with the fact that many of the things we learned in school provided no ground for the development of new interests and capabilities (e.g. I may remember there IS something called the Golgi apparatus in the cells, but I’d be at a loss about how it’s interconnected with other parts or its general interaction with cell’s functions), it is purely rote learning.
Emotional skills and competencies CAN be developed and are a KEY component of many (all?) jobs. Ask a consultant which is the main friction point when trying to redesign a process that has been going on for years in a company or, even worse, try to redirect the company’s culture. All roads lead to Emotions.

But there is also a fundamental, often taken-for-granted goal: to be happy. Simply as that. No amount of learning can fill the void in an unfulfilled, unhappy life. One could easily argue that, without learning, there is simply no possibility for a happy life because intellectual activity and the search for knowledge ARE themselves the Aristotelian definition of a good life.

Although this part of the emotions analysis took a big portion of the session’s time, we still had time to watch a great short video by philosopher Victoria Camps that talks precisely about this idea of learning as happiness:

I kept nodding at every sentence, especially enjoying the reference to the Stoics, who have been an interest of mine for a very long time. There are just so many things we can’t control and a big -but surprisingly hard- part of having a good life is to learn (see? :) to identify them. I’ve learned a lot about stoic philosophy, its practices and ideas, but still to this day, nothing that I’ve read crystallizes its spirit as clearly as the Serenity prayer, a tool used and popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous on how to confront life:

God, give me grace to accept with Serenity the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

I’m looking forward to the next session focusing on the neuroscience basics all teachers need to understand to serve their students better. So exciting!

Osotu - On Key Competences and Skills

2024-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

As I have mentioned before, Atlas didn’t attend formal education for the first three years of his life. He started at school on what the Spanish system called “Infantil” (akin to Pre-K/K in the US), and at that moment, we chose what we thought would be a good school for him. Long story short, after three years, we were firmly convinced that a) what they sold us when we first signed up Atlas in that school was not true and b) the real system and approach they use was 100% traditional and not very fitted for Atlas.

We then decided to change schools -had a few very dramatic hours after telling Atlas we were doing so 😅- and pick a new model that would be a better fit for him. After much research, we found Osotu, a private school near Barakaldo, following a very different learning model.

We instantly liked their educational approach and decided to make a double bet on Osotu: trust Atlas’s education them and do it in a moment when their financial sustainability was in question. He is now close to finishing his first year in Osotu, and we couldn’t be happier with the bet result.

Osotu, another way of learning is possible

Recently, I became aware of an opportunity to attend a training course for teachers that Osotu is running internally to reach new potential candidates. Not being a professional teacher, I first hesitated about whether it would make sense for me, but at the same time, I felt in my guts that there would be many connections and parallelisms with the responsibilities a person who leads technical teams has. Boy, was I right.

During the session, I constantly found points of view and principles that are valuable for any team member, especially if the raw material you work with is knowledge, as it happens in software development and startups. Here are some notes on the first session of the first module of this course.

Three Cs: Capacidades, Competencias, Corazón (Skill, Competences, Heart)

Osotu learning approach is mostly adapted from Mar Romera’s “three Cs” model that succintly could be described as a way to learn that is focused on the students and 3 particular aspects of them:

The innate skills they have.
The competences they develop through the learning process.
The catalyzer, passion, desire and a good disposition, provide to the previous two (the Heart)

There are a few key principles of this model that I found relevant:

It’s a model, not a methodology (translation for the tech readers: do Agile, not Scrum). The reason is the same as we see in technology: you can’t accommodate a diverse team in your very specific context with an off-the-self methodology that details who, how and when is fitted to do what. Eventually, those methodologies will become more constraining than inspiring.
It’s rooted in Social constructivism. Before Atlas was schooled I tried to learn more about the different theories of learning and came in contact with the work of Jean Piaget (most probably by his connection with the popular Montessori system) that basically says that education is not something that is given fully formed to you but on the contrary something you actively build yourself in a unique way by connecting the pieces that are presented to you.

What I didn’t know was that Piaget’s work was extended to something called social constructivism by psychologist Lev Vygotsky that -one can guess significantly influenced by the soviet era- put the focus on how that building process is heavily influenced by your interactions with other students, their culture, and society at large. It sounds logic to me.
Transversal learning. The -seemingly obvious- idea is that the learning process hardly happens in a silo. Not being able to trace the influence of economics in history, philosophy in politics, or maths in music is a disservice to our kids and a byproduct of an industrial approach to education.
Diversity as an opportunity. This idea connects very well with the idea of learning through interactions with others, acknowledging our limitations in most aspects and honouring them with empathy and humility. We all are certainly unique BUT we are definetely not special.

Then the presentation turned into a section on skills and competences, and for a developer like me, two of those core tenants provided immediate parallelisms:

Skills == Hardware
Competences == Software

Both capabilities complement, support and make the other possible and useful.

Hardware is primarily rigid, constrained, and purpose-agnostic. Any hardware, as powerful as it may be, will have limitations, constraints, and characteristics that will make it especially suitable for some uses. Knowing and understanding those limitations and focusing on the characteristics at which it excels is vital to making good use of the hardware.

Sometimes, if we are creative enough, we may find that hardware that was designed with an initial usecase is perfect for another one, as we see now with GPU. Initially intended to compute the simple graphics on your know monitor, they are now incredibly expensive and bought by the tens of thousands to build AI models.

Students’ skills are not different.

We have innate abilities in some areas but hardly in all areas. How good were Einstein, Dirac or Bohr at playing football, making strategies or leading teams? Moreover, how pointless -and unfair- is it to look at students from that perspective? Demanding all the same things to all different people? The idea here is to focus on each person’s natural strengths while helping to improve our weaknesses.

Software is fluid. It is gooey. It devours everything. It’s usually purpose-specific but composed of many different pieces (languages, stacks, libraries, etc.) Developing software is complex and feels like a moving target, but when it works, boy, it’s good.

Good software leverages other tools to acquire new capabilities faster and more efficiently. Good software maximizes the hardware it’s run on (see the connection?). Good software is supported by abstract layers that can be rebuilt, improved, and transformed. Software is transversal by definition: it supports your countless hours in TikTok, the life support of astronauts in the ISS, and the distribution of very words that your inner voice is reading inside your head right now.

Students’ competences are not different.

If we do our work well, competences allow students to perform significant tasks and become a toolbox they can use in daily life to solve problems… and those problems are almost invariably transversal problems, creative problems, teamwork problems, efficiency problems, risk-taking problems.

I was thrilled to learn that one of the techniques that should be promoted in Osotu to develop these competences is the Socratic method because I’m a big fan. I couldn’t stop thinking about the very famous -at least for us developers- example of teaching binary to 9yo students and the natural interestingness it shows in students.

We wrapped up the session by watching this amazing video that shows how a great teacher conducts a class by leveraging the Socratic method and the inherent tendency we humans have to help AND critique:

The next session will be solely focused on the last ‘C’ Corazón (the Heart) and will, I think, deal with one of the more clearly neglected areas in education: passion, emotions, and desires.

Let’s see!

2023 in review

2023-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Another revolution around the sun! I couldn’t be more grateful to life for giving me more time. More time to enjoy my family, more opportunities to become a better father and husband, more mornings where I can be delighted by the blue sky. I’m genuinely grateful. That’s my general feeling with 2023, but let me write down some specifics.

PHYSICAL

The year started pretty badly when a sudden abscess sent me from the ER to the operating room in a matter of hours. In the end, everything was okay, but I had to go to the local hospital once every 2-3 days for a few months to do post-op treatment. The result? I gained A LOT of weight in the first quarter of the year, and I’ve been unable to lose. So much weight, in fact, that almost all my suits and shirts don’t fit anymore, and I have been wearing athleisure for most of 2023. I want to change both things for 2024.

PROFESSIONAL

A very average year when it comes to work. I’ve kept making progress in my ongoing projects and even had a few offsites in Sevilla and Galicia. As it couldn’t be in any other way for someone working with software, AI has monopolized a lot of my attention, and I learned a lot about LLMs by doing the Spanish translation of one of the most popular prompting guides.

I continued my already initiated effort to reconnect with tech conferences with mixed feelings. During the year I attended Bilbostack -that included a fantastic talk by Gloria Langreo-, Tech in finance, TRGCON and Websummit.

I’m planning on trying some new stuff for 2024, but again, I’m pretty happy with the year in this area. More about it in the year kick-off post.

FAMILY

When my father got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer last year, it was a super hard moment for all the family. But the immunotherapy treatment he has been receiving has worked great, and the last scan done just a few days ago shows no inflammation or spreading of the cancer… it stays contained for the moment. I couldn’t have had a better Christmas present.

However, during this year, cancer killed a good friend who just had a baby, and another good friend had a miscarriage when she was 4 months pregnant. Bego’s had complications on severe tonsilitis that required hospitalization. As usual, these moments are a bucket of ice-cold water that makes you realize what is really important in life.

We were super fortunate this year and were able to visit many places: Bierzo, Costa da Morte, Lisbon and Iceland.

Iceland. Oh, Iceland. We returned for the first time since we left after spending most of the 2010s living in the country. I didn’t know how I was going to feel because some years have passed, and sometimes we hold just onto the good memories and forget the rest, but damn, I love this place so much. I immediately reconnected with the land, with the language, with the people, with the rhythm of the days. There is no other country on the planet where I feel so at home. Heima.

We had some ridiculously good weather, felt a big earthquake and saw a new lava eruption happening in our month there. But without a doubt, the trip’s highlight was watching Atlas playing with our Icelandic friends’ children. Life was very good with us.

The other big event for our family was Atlas moving to a new school. We were not very happy with the place where he went for kindergarten/first grade, and we decided to try a new school more aligned with our vision of how education should be. When we told Atlas, he had two tough days trying to process that he would not be seeing his friends of 3 years anymore, but he very quickly understood why we were doing the change, and his reaction made me the prouder father on earth. He is now going to OSOTU, a school where learning by doing, cooperation and critical thinking is at the core of everything they do, and he is supper happy. A super win in this area.

We had time too to do some block coding, play some videogames -he is so into Minecraft-, hike to the mountains and even raise some frogs at home from tadpole to mature individuals!

COMMUNITY

I had planned to do more community stuff, but we ended up participating in some exciting stuff:

Attend another beach clean up.
Learn about fossils on the beach.
Discover the craft of creating cyanotypes.

It’s alright, but there’s definitely a lot of space to improve.

PERSONAL

Before Atlas was born, we watched +250 movies/year (yep, about one per night). But then raising a baby is hard, and then a toddler wants to watch Cars 2 fifty-two times in a row… This year, I have been trying to watch more movies and series because, when they are good, they don’t only provide entertainment, but very often, I find exciting lessons for life and work:

Derry Girls brought some intense memories from my teenage/early childhood in the Basque Country.
Ted Lasso was hilarious and made me think about leadership styles.
The Ranch made me remember how easy it is to fuck up personal relationships, even with the people you love most.

Then, at the very end of the year -all last month- I found a triad of movies that have resonated with me very much: Lobster Soup, Come back anytime and Bittor Arginzoniz. Vivir en el silencio. They all talk about the transformative power that developing a craft can have in us and the power of places to keep a social group together. I have mentioned many times that when I think about software development, I find much more connections with the world of gastronomy than with the world of architecture (that is both implicitly and explicitly the usual reference) I should write about it in 2024 to get it out of my head.

I even found about 60 hours in 2023 to play video games! Jusant, Death Stranding and Dredge come to my mind.

After two years of hard work, our building finally has a working elevator. It took a lot of pushing and supervision on contractors to do it as fast as possible, and even they finished with +9 months of delay! I learned a lot about how primitive project management in small civil construction is -compared to software- and the inefficiencies it provokes where multiple subcontractors must be coordinated.

I finally got forced to ditch my 6-year-old Macbook because I could not properly work with it anymore and replaced it with a fantastic Linux-powered Framework laptop. The vision of the company is such a fresh view on computing: focused on the ease of repair, upgradability, module reuse, refurbishment, recycled materials, etc. During my +20 years as an Apple power user, I accumulated many aluminium blocks over the years. At the very beginning, a few parts were easily repaired (battery, memory). Still, the evolution has been just worse and worse, to the point that today, you can’t hardly repair, expand or upgrade anything on them by yourself. I’m super happy to have the opportunity to test this more sustainable approach and eventually have a never-ending evolutionary laptop.

Finally, I had the opportunity to visit some good restaurants with my wife: Kromatiko for our anniversary and Kuma for her birthday. After many years focused on the perfection and consistency of execution when it comes to restaurants, I have lately surprised myself by being much more moved by the spirit that powers the place than any other thing.

And I think that is mostly it. Let me know about how your year went. On to the next year, 2024!

You can read previous year’s reviews: 2022

LLMs and prompting

2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

I have been interested in AI for quite some years. In 2018 I did a nano-degree in AI programming and learnt many things about ML, neural networks and other AI topics that were all the trend then. But in the last 12 months, the progress on LLMs has been so deafening that I think it would be irresponsible for anyone working on tech not to learn deeply about them. It seems to have devoured the whole AI field, and everything is now about LLMs. This craze will pass too, but I think it is dangerously naive to ignore that they will eradicate, transform and create whole industries.

When I am trying to learn a new field, I try to be as hands-on as possible and start from the very basics, so I spent a few nights this week doing the Spanish translation of one of the best prompt engineering guides out there: https://www.promptingguide.ai/es. I learned a lot about LLMs and how to use them. Here are some insights.

The amount of literature to go through to get hardcore, low-level expertise on the field is mindblowing and growing at hilarious speed (cf. https://www.promptingguide.ai/papers), but the high-level, basic concepts involved in correctly/proficiently dealing with the LLMs can be grasped in a few days.
After translating a few sections like few-shot and CoT prompting, I now have the basic vocabulary to understand and recognise the patterns behind recurrent sentences like “Let’s think step by step”, which I have seen in so many screenshots of jaw-dropping experiments.
Some techniques are so self-referential and naturally described that the fact that they work at all feels almost like Vudu. Are you getting problems trying to make sense of some logic problem with your LLM? Give it some trivia “knowledge” in other fields, make it generate knowledge about your topic and then feed that very knowledge the LLM has generated to itself to make new, better, more correct predictions. Yes, I know it is all data, stats and tokens, but it DOES feel like Vudu.
The number of attacks and abuse these models will suffer in the wild is mindblowing AND much more tricky and challenging to fix than anything I have seen in web security. Just check https://www.promptingguide.ai/risks/adversarial for a quick overview of how twisted and subtle some attacks are. As a complete newbie, my guts are telling me that to prevent this type of attack, some compromise should be made regarding flexibility in the prompt. Some initial thoughts on defending against them resonate with my trad developer self.
Selecting the best model (GPT4, LLaMA, etc.) and technique (ReAct, DIrectional Stimulus) combination for your AI-based service will take much curation and, for lack of a better word, taste on what can work best. As we accept less deterministic results in software, we increase the space based on what we feel works better when confronted with a wrong, inexact prediction. That is probably the most revealing thing I have discovered during the translation. As a person used to getting to a point where the test suite just goes green, and you have “made it”, this whole thing looks more like “arrive at something you think is good enough and move on”.

My next step is to start a port of LangChain to Ruby. First and foremost, because the project’s two main principles (connect the LLMs to other data sources and allow the LLM to interact with its environment) make much sense to me. As a guy who has been creating software applications for a few decades, I firmly believe that just calling an API, however good, will not be enough. You need the glue, you need the local, behind-doors knowledge, you need the versatility to add your business-specific microcosm to the cocktail, and to do that, you need something like LangChain.

Secondly, trying to implement the port will teach me how to programmatically repurpose all the black magic the LLMs can do in a product-oriented way, focusing on creating applications and services and not just “chatting” with the model for fun to do some text-based tasks. I have seen some super interesting things following that path and the ReAct technique.

As a developer, all this generative wave can feel very threatening, but, as usually happens in technology, it will just become more and more prevalent in our society so better get at ease with it and its risks as soon as possible.

Sunsetting a fintech app, some learnings

2023-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

This post is part of a series on the learnings acquired on developing a Fintech native app for some years.

About three years ago, on Dec 28, 2019, the first native app for Devengo was published in the App Store. On launch, we were laser-focused on providing the best salary advance solution in Europe, and our native apps were our most critical user touch point. Next week we will remove our apps from the stores, so what happened?

A mountain of hard work and a river of sweat allowed us to put our service in the hands of some of the largest employers in Spain, companies with thousands -sometimes tens of thousands- of employees. Most loved and cherished our service, and although there are always things to improve in digital service, we got compliments on the quality of our product from both customers and users.

However, as time passed, even with this positive customer feedback, it became clear that we were not in a position to win the market. The main reason was that the sales cycle was very long (the biggest customers took up to 6 months from initial contact to production launch), making raising capital a critical ability that, unfortunately, was not part of our primary skillset. That slowness made the feedback loop on product development take too long, too, and we tried things based purely on intuition due to the lack of evidence.

You can read about the pivot in detail here. However, the main takeaway is that as part of those learnings, we finally decided to pivot the company to focus on what had worked well since day one and had become our strongest skill: fintech infrastructure to make instant payments.

The removal of Devengo native apps from their stores is part of this pivot we started last May, and now that we are closing that chapter, it looks like an excellent moment to retrospect on what we learnt during those years. There were many revealing moments but I think the most important learnings fit in these three ideas:

Automated, tight release pipelines really help
Walled gardens are really bad for almost everyone
Bet on programmers not on tech stacks

Let’s talk today about the first one.

Automated, tight release pipelines really help

In order to accelerate the company launch as much as possible, the app’s development started before the creation of the in-house tech team in Devengo. So the first iterations were built by an app outsourcing studio, and well, they were not very good. There were the too common issues with this kind of contractor (no automated testing, regression bugs, dubious coding practices as hardcoding API keys in the code), a typical result of most of these studios’ clients just looking forward to a turnkey solution and an app in stores.

Nevertheless, one of the things that worried us is that there was no CI setup, much less a release pipeline. When looking at software from an economics point of view (time investments, benefit-cost ratio), one of the main things you should try to avoid as soon as possible are manual, repetitive tasks that occur multiple times a day and throughout the lifespan of the project. The most common one for most projects? The test suite and the deploy/release process.

So, once the core backend team was built, we enrolled a few native mobile developers as the first Devengo mobile team and moved the development in-house. One of the first tasks we embarked on was to design a release pipeline. I personally put a week into the definition of the workflow and the first PoC synthesising the learnings in an internal document:

The pipeline included three main components that build on top of each. Each component provided benefits on its own, so even if we planned to integrate all of them, this could be done progressively and still provide value.

Per environment apps. Each release of the mobile apps should generate a version for each of the available environments. The strategy to define these environments is platform-specific.
Build processes as code. The building process should be defined in code to ensure it is reproducible, consistent and automatable. One Fastlane flow per platform was defined to implement this requirement.
CI integration. The build process was to be run automatically in Devengo’s CI/CD servers to ensure we tested and released consistently.

Per environment apps

All the technical infrastructure in Devengo is isolated in 3 different environments: development, staging, and production. They are multiple reasons for this isolation:

Independent definition of resources and configuration.
Integration of different services.
Increased reliability, preventing staging problems from leaking into production.
Increased security following a zero-sharing policy.

Ultimately, we added an extra environment (store) to separate our production test app from what users would download from the Apple and Google stores (more on that in a future series post).

Build processes as code

Very early in the research process, it was clear that Fastlane was the most mature tool for cross-platform app automation. With Fastlane, we could cover not only the most basic dev-intensive points (code signing, compilations and test suite running) in the pipeline but even the more product-oriented parts (store metadata and screenshots, betas delivery).

So we settled on using it as the foundation for the pipeline both for iOS and Android. Although the build process contained platform-specific steps and actions, we could define them consistently in structure and configuration data and have the same flow in both platforms. The first version looked more or less like this:

┌────────┐    ┌───────────────────────────┐
│        │░░  │                           │       - Git repo based
│        │░░  │  Code Signing Management  │────▶  - iOS: certificate + profiles
│        │░░  │                           │       - Android: Keystores
│        │░░  └───────────────────────────┘
│        │░░                │
│        │░░                │
│        │░░                │
│        │░░                │
│        │░░                ▼
│        │░░  ┌───────────────────────────┐
│        │░░  │                           │       - Build num auto increase
│        │░░  │         Pre-Build         │────▶  - Icon adjustment/ Badging
│        │░░  │                           │       - Changelog generation/integration.
│        │░░  └───────────────────────────┘
│   E    │░░                │
│   n    │░░                │
│   v    │░░                │
│   i    │░░                ▼
│   r    │░░  ┌───────────────────────────┐
│   o    │░░  │                           │       - Compile
│   n    │░░  │           Build           │────▶  - Archive
│   m    │░░  │                           │       - Code sign
│   e    │░░  └───────────────────────────┘       - Version Bump to repo
│   n    │░░                │
│   t    │░░                │
│        │░░                │
│        │░░                ▼
│        │░░  ┌───────────────────────────┐
│        │░░  │                           │
│        │░░  │           Beta            │────▶  - Appcenter
│        │░░  │                           │       - Testers notification
│        │░░  └───────────────────────────┘
│        │░░               **
│        │░░               **
│        │░░               **
│        │░░  ┌───────────────────────────┐
│        │░░  │                           │       - App Store submission
│        │░░  │          Release          │────▶  - Google Play submission
│        │░░  │                           │
└────────┘░░  └───────────────────────────┘
  ░░░░░░░░░░

Code Sign Management

For the first stage, Code Sign Management, both platforms followed the strategy described in https://codesigning.guide by keeping our keys in sync with Git. The general idea was that any sign-related files needed would be stored in two private git repos (one per platform), and the Fastlane processes will create, read, update and destroy these files as needed and push any changes to the repo so it was automatically available for every developer on the company.

The sync actions would ask for a password when they were first to run. This password was stored locally for developers or provided as env var in CI. It would not be stored in the code or the repo and would be used to encrypt/decrypt the files, so everything was encrypted at rest, adding an extra layer of security to the already private repo. This approach required the creation of an ad-hoc Apple ID for iOS that was used for any interactions with the Apple Store and the Developer Portal.

This part involved many tries and some heavy swearing while fiddling with the many little details of digitally signing the apps, especially in iOS, as anyone who has ever gotten to fight with certificate management in XCode can imagine. However, we ended up with a great experience where one could set up a new laptop to release an app in just a few minutes.

Prebuild Operations

Before we could build the apps, there were a few operations we needed to address:

Automatic version numbering. Each new master commit will generate a new app version for each beta release, ensuring we always had a simple way to check what code we were testing.
Icon badging: Since we were going to test apps for multiple environments, it would be nice to let the pipeline stamp the icon with a small marker so we could see which one we are using.

Build

The compilation of the apps was straightforward, but the most platform-specific of the pipeline, as Android and iOS have their own particular compilation stacks. For Android, we kicked off the compilation process via gradle. In iOS, gym took care of all the subtleties of invoking xcodebuild.

Beta

Finally, we distributed iOS and Android apps to testers using a unified platform: Microsoft’s Appcenter. Although both platforms have their distribution channels for betas, we chose a cross-platform solution that will give us just one infrastructure to manage.

Additionally, for Android we were able to build a mobile test lab to run our instrumentation tests on a diverse collection of virtual devices, catching visual bugs before they got to our customers:

Appcenter took care of notifying and provision the betas to the tester and the pipeline will internally alert the teams about the new beta:

Release

The release process involved the steps taken to build a regular beta but pushing it to the corresponding store instead of Appcenter. The particularities of app submission vary greatly between Google and Apple, but thankfully, Fastlane already provided specific tools for it: supply and deliver.

This part of our pipeline involved the product team more heavily than the rest, as we could automatically submit new metadata for the apps. That involved example screenshots and metadata (descriptions, privacy policies, keywords) in multiple languages, so we hooked that step with our i18n system so it would automatically fetch the last version of all those assets and update it in each store accordingly.

CI Integration

Thanks to the abstraction provided by Fastlane, the integration with our CI services were almost identical for both platforms:

iOS

jobs:
  include:
    - stage: "Unit Test suite"
      name: Run Unit Tests
      script: bundle exec fastlane test
    - stage: "🚀 Beta delivery"
      name: Deliver betas to the team
      if: branch == master && type != "pull_request"
      script: bundle exec fastlane beta

Android

jobs:
  include:
    - stage: "Unit Test suite"
      name: Run Android Unit Tests
      script: bundle exec fastlane unit_tests
    - stage: "Instrumentation Test suite"
      name: Run Android Instrumentation Tests
      script: bundle exec fastlane instrumentation_tests
    - stage: "🚀 Beta delivery"
      name: Deliver betas to the team
      if: branch == master && type != "pull_request"
      script: bundle exec fastlane beta

As with our web apps and main core API, this relentless cycle of testing and delivery became the new normal thanks to the app release pipeline. At some point, even some of our backend developers could fix typos and tiny bugs without even having to install any mobile-related stuff. It just worked.

The final system

In the end, we got a 100% automated pipeline that would:

Test the app for each newly created PR.
Create a new env-specific version of the app every time a PR got merged in master.
Deliver the beta automatically to all the testers.
Alert in slack about the new beta availability.
Submit the app and an updated version of its metadata in multiple languages to the corresponding store automatically.

The product team would get a new beta ready for testing in staging as soon as the new features were implemented, and we could get from bug detection to release submission in about 30-60 mins (just the time it took to compile the apps).

This system worked for almost three years with very few changes (primarily updates of Fastlane and its plugins), generating hundreds of betas and saving us hundreds of hours of developer time.

However, more importantly, it provided two things:

It removed the question of how we should ship a beta or a new release. As new developers joined or left the team, not once we had to do special handovers connected with the know-how to publish a beta or release. The system just worked from new laptop configuration to the app being submitted to the store, achieving one of the initial goals of removing any knowledge silo about the release process.
It established the practice of consistent testing and processes while letting developers focus on the product and forgetting about the underlying testing and releasing infrastructure.

So yes, this is one of the main advices I would give to anyone dealing with security-first, cross-platform native apps: design a solid release pipeline. It will not only save a ton of developer time and tight up the beta testing process but more importantly it will help to establish good testing and deliverability practices in the process.

In the next post I’ll talk about how the closed nature and opacity of the app stores creates negative collaterals for almost everyone involved.

Talk to you soon!

Asking together

2023-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

I just used my son blowing a candle as a pretext to spend lunch talking with him and my nephews about them. Why does a candle go out when you blow it out? What is the purpose of the wick? I keep asking them questions without confirming their theories to see how far they can go.

I often do these very basic, fundamental questions with them, partially as a game but more importantly to question their most simple assumptions and develop their reasoning tools and techniques.

This is what usually happens. First, they will feel shocked about the questions themselves “What do you mean by why they blow out? That’s what candles do!” After a few “But why?” they will enter a second phase where they usually get closer to the fundamental reasons but not entirely and fail to weave a solid argument about it.

Without proposing any theory myself, I keep asking: Why do you think that is? What happens then? How is that connected to your argument? I try to carve a logical path out of their answers by following with more questions. Still, I’m cautious of not going too meta or too technical with the questions unless they request it, so “What is the function of the wick?” is ok, but I will avoid “Why is the flame hot?” or “What chemical process makes that?”

As the minutes pass, they will become more interested in the topic that once looked simple and obvious BECAUSE they can’t articulate a solid fundamental reason for an apparently uncomplicated natural phenomenon. Just by themselves (5, 11 and 14yo) will start creating theories, each according to his maturity level, from how air is pushed when you blow to how carbon dioxide extinguishes the flame.

Sometimes -like today- the attention is sustained for just 15/20 minutes; sometimes, we keep going deeper or jump to adjacent topics. Sometimes we will arrive at some great conclusion, and sometimes the questions still need to be addressed and remain inconclusive. And that IS OK! I try to summarize our findings and correct anything substantially wrong about their theories, but I mostly let it sit and go back to the topic another day.

In all the years I was schooled (catholic semi-private school), NOT ONCE did I get a professor that would engage with us students through any kind of Socratic process. They will ask questions to get us to regurgitate their expected answer. Zero interest in the mental process, zero interest in using the discovery process as a teaching method.

I understand that going through this way of teaching is more challenging than the traditional master class approach: it requires more preparation, forces the teacher to be more dynamic, and sometimes you get stuck! But I’ll be damned if this is not a better way to explore learning.

We are moving Atlas to a new place for the school year 2023-2024 because we keep searching for an institution that promotes critical thinking, debate and self-sufficiency in our kid. Let’s hope we get it right this time!

PS: Scientists have been fascinated with candles for centuries. I would recommend anyone interested in the topic (just for curiosity or to teach others) to read the great series of six lectures The Chemical History of a Candle given by no other than Faraday (it’s available in LibGen too as epub ;)

2022 in review

2022-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

A few months ago, I discovered Mike Crittenden blog, and on it, this notion of the 12-week year (see my take on it here), I’ve decided to adopt it as a framework for establishing and reviewing goals and life objectives.

As a first step, I’m using it to review this year, which will die in a few hours.

Physical

This is clearly the area where I have failed most miserably. Not only this year but for the last 4-5 years. I’m obese and hypertense; I must use a CPAP for sleeping, I’ve got a permanent high risk of detached retina (I have had surgery four times in the same eye), and in general, when it comes to physical me I feel like shit.

For months I managed to do an early morning -7 am- one-hour walk that kept me stable and even lost some weight, but I just lost the habit due to work pressure, and I’ve been in free fall for months.

So an epic FAIL in this area.

Business

I’ve kept working with longtime customers (Devengo, Verkami) and doing some consultancy on the side, so I’m pretty happy with that part. However, work keeps stealing an unjustifiable HUGE part of me every day, and I can see how it erodes every other area of my life.

So general evaluation: meh, this must change.

Family

The year started awfully with my dad getting another surgery related to his Gallbladder cancer, and it only got worse when, after the surgery, doctors confirmed the cancer was now Stage 4. He has gone through many cycles of chemo, and now he is getting immunotherapy, and it seems to be working at containing cancer. I couldn’t be more grateful. This is the thing I feel more thankful for in 2022 by far.

This year I started creating an email vault for 5yo son. I write as often as possible -I’ve failed in this topic too- to an address I’ve created for him. I talk to him about how I’m feeling about being a parent, how he is doing, funny things he says, just about anything that comes to my mind that may be helpful in the future. If I’m lucky to be still alive, I’ll give him the account credentials when he turns eighteen. We will see.

We enjoyed some perfect summer holidays visiting Ordesa National Park, A Coruña, Donostia and Iruña. It took a few weeks for Atlas to get “out” of the schooling rhythm, but I think he loved every minute of it.

I attended Digipen Open House with my nephew. They are the only school in Spain that offers a BS in Video Game Development. I doubt my nephew will finally enrol, but the syllabus is so fucking fantastic that I would love to enrol myself.

Evaluation of this area: fuck cancer and glory to science and public healthcare.

Community

This year I have been able to do some communal activities:

Did some beach cleaning (that’s Atlas and me in the photo!)
Attended multiple demostrations to secure the viability of the most innovative school in the Basque Country.
Participated as speaker in the only fintech-focused dev conference in Spain: techin.finance

I’m happy with this area. I want to do more again and already have some ideas for next year.

Personal

We finally repaid our family home mortgage! It was such a delight to see the balance come to zero. It has been the most extended project I’ve been part of. I should have written about it in detail but suffice it to say I signed a 25-years mortgage when I was 20 years old and have repaid it in 22 years. As a worker, I feel stupidly proud of this and furious when reflecting on such a basic need taking so long to fulfil.

We got the visit of many friends from many countries (USA, Iceland, Germany…) this year. I love to get visits and enjoy being a cicerone to the Basque Country for our friends.

April marked one year since I went back to Linux full-time. As a good nerd, this deserves its own post, but here are a few quick takeaways:

I invested in building an overpowered monster and couldn’t be more happy with it. Everything is instant. A refreshing change from the last years as an Apple power user.
No single glitch with the computer since day 1 (just some minor Gnome 3 issues).
It is EXPANDABLE. Not only will this last me a few good 4-5 years. When it runs out of juice, I can change parts, repair myself and upgrade anything inside. Again, another huge difference from my last decade as an Apple user. I’ve fallen in love with PCs again.

Spouse

I’ve to improve as a spouse. Being a preschool child’s parent is a very taxing period for a couple, but there is no excuse. My awesome wife has been one more time infinitely patient with me and has endured my many defects during 2022.

Another area where I’ll focus in 2023.

Aaaand… tha’t wrap!

Hope all the best for the New Year to everybody reading these lines.

A Life Framework

2022-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Enough.

I’ve had this unpleasant feeling feasting at my guts for too long.

The feeling of flying the worse seat of UnhealtyLifestyle Airlines. The feeling of being on autopilot as life passes. The sombre feeling of you are going to regret this. The unsettling feeling of you are going to die (moderately, I’ll admit) young.

I’ve been working too much, too boringly, too fuzzily. In the last few years, I’ve missed too many opportunities to make a better life for myself, my family, and everyone around me. I feel I will benefit from having a system, an explicit set of goals, a framework for life.

I’ve come to learn about this thing called the 12 Week Year. The concept is so simple you don’t even need to read the book: move from setting yearly goals to setting quarterly goals. Shortening the window makes it easier to accommodate changes in your life, correct undesired trends, review fails and wins… it just makes you more agile. Where may I’ve heard of that?

In a way, the “method” reeks of life-productivization, this terrible idea that your life should be managed AS IF it were a company/job. Left to its own mechanisms, productivity will percolate your life edge to edge, find even the tiniest single crevice, and fill it up with “a task”. I’ve fought that dragon before, so I feel confident I can rescue the good things of the method and incorporate them into my life.

One of the good and interesting things about the strategy is that it works backwards from a long-term life vision and shortens the scope in different cycles (10 years, three years, one year, and finally, the 12 weeks/quarter). This flow gives you short-term flexibility while keeping sight of where you want to be in a decade or two.

Additionally, inside each of these cycles, it proposes looking at six different areas of life -Physical, Business, Family, Community, Personal, and Spouse- to establish a broad set of goals for a balanced life.

I think this a framework that can really click with me -and with many technical-minded and process-oriented people- so I’m going to adopt it now, tweak some parts, and see if it sticks and how far I can take.

What is your take on life goals? Do you have a system? A framework? Another thing? Let me know by contacting me in twitter or by email.

Summers

2020-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

‪Atlas becomes 3 today. He has been 24x7 at home for the last 16 days. We couldn’t feel prouder of how well he is managing this situation. His normal day before the lockdown was whole mornings of games at the park, hours playing with his grandparents, visits to his friends in the grocery shops, the butcher, the fishmonger… everything disappeared overnight.

After some persistent requests during the first days, now he seems to have adapted to the situation and just asks if ”people are getting cured and ok” sometimes while casually playing with some toy.

Before Atlas arrived we decided we would use our privilege to spend every second of his first years with him and completely skip play school. Our decision implied countless hours of mind-numbing swing pushing, rethinking what it means to work at home, learning the art of giving 15 mins to get 30 and tears from exhaustion, yes, but oh boy, are we happy with that decision.

It has been a journey of self-discovery where -warning, platitudes ahead- he has been the teacher and we the pupils and not the other way. I’ve personally rediscovered the true meaning of love, patience, and empathy through him. We’ve learned to honor the sweeping overtake of emotions over logic, instead of fighting it. He has given us the present of a smile on a weekday’s morning play and witnessing how his personality and language have developed has been nothing short of a marvel.

Now he is 3 and in September -if everything goes back to normal after the lockdown- he’ll start going to the school. If we were sure that staying with us another year would not delay his necessary journey to self-reliance and independence we would do it on a blink… but that’s not the case. As clearly as all experts say that the main need of the first years of a toddler is to feel loved, safe, connected and supported, with play school being basically a tool for us parents to do our 9-5, it’s increasingly obvious that now he needs to move forward, even if doing it breaks our hearts a little.

I read long time ago that by the time your kid is 18 you’ve spent ~70-80% of the total time you will spend with him in your life and almost all the summers. These first 2 summers have been the time of our lives and we’ve promised ourselves to never forget our time is limited and we must be in the present. We must be in the summer.

Bessemer para el Capital

2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Traza esta Bonilista paralelas entre el acero que se amontonó durante siglo y medio a apenas 500 metros de mi casa y los productos digitales que asoman en el móvil. Y hace bien. Gran parte de nuestro sector vive en un permanente excepcionalismo, convencido de que lo digital vive en un limbo existencial donde lo humano no aplica.

Quizás por ello Ética y Política no son populares en el mundo tecnológico. Tampoco interesa la Historia en este mundo STEM tan eficiente y práctico diseñado para nuestros hijos… Y sin embargo, hoy más que nunca debemos ahondar en esos aspectos.

Dice Gregorio Morán que no hay lugar en el mundo donde el clasismo sea tan geográfico como en Bilbao. Situados en la desembocadura del Nervión vemos el tajo abierto por la siderurgia. La Margen Derecha se quedó los palacetes de corte ingles, el Club Marítimo y los cocineros franceses. En la Margen Izquierda, la mía, se quedaron el hollín y las masas proletarias.

Hasta dos veces menciona Shakespeare el hierro de Bilbao, en una época en la que la explotación de las minas vizcaínas era aún comunal y bastaba con ser vecino del Señorío para extraer mineral. Nueva regulación y tecnología permitieron a unos cuantos avispados sentar las bases para 150 años de beneficios ininterrumpidos.

Un bien público sacrificado en el altar de la eficiencia gracias a innovaciones tecnológicas. Fíjate qué cosas Mariloli. Sería ingenuo pensar que la uberización de la economía es otra cosa que programadores proporcionando al capital los hornos Bessemer del siglo XXI en forma de algoritmos. Aunque no sea ésta precisamente la imagen que más nos guste de nosotros mismos.

Hacinamiento y terribles condiciones laborales eran la bienvenida de cientos de miles de inmigrantes que llegaban de Castilla, Extremadura y Galicia. Imagino que de haber contado con el virtuosismo lingüístico actual algún malintencionado lo habría definido como el milagro del coliving.

Este colectivo fue despectivamente denominado maketo, quizás del vizcaíno makutua, envoltorio, simbolizando la forma en que llegaban con su vida en un hatillo. El tradicionalismo vasco les culpaba de males que, como decía Unamuno, en realidad lleva consigo el mismo proceso económico.

Hoy nuestras calles se llenan de riders, glovers, juicers… a menudo con nuevos envoltorios a la espalda, quizás no muy distintos de aquellos que llegaban a las minas. No le resultaría extraño al bilbaíno universal que sigamos achacando a los inmigrantes los problemas mientras la app economy que programamos disfruta de un halo de modernidad y eficiencia.

La mezcla de sudor trabajador y visión empresarial generó un raudal de dinero que derivó en lo que suele derivar el capital: una plutocracia estupenda. Echevarrieta, Ybarra, Ampuero, Urquijo… los apellidos de estos condes siderúrgicos se forjaron al tiempo que lo hacía el metal. En general intensamente monárquicos y conservadores no les fue difícil formar parte -junto al Madrid centralista y la burguesía catalana- del triunvirato político de siglo XX español.

Esa misma concentración de capital es la que sienta a los CEOs de Google, Amazon, Facebook y Apple en mesas presidenciales. Oligarcas como Bezos poseen una fortuna personal superior a los PIBs de Islandia, Afganistán y Costa Rica… combinados. Los hornos digitales que controlan la producción en 2019 se alimentan de venture capital y millones de dólares generados con código terminan en lobbys de presión para desregularizarlo todo.

Como dice David, la reconversión industrial que tanto sufrimos en su día nos da lecciones importantes para el futuro sobre cómo salir del agujero cuando vienen mal dadas. Ojalá nos dé también la distancia y experiencia para elegir sabiamente como creadores qué queremos potenciar cuando aún estamos en la cresta de la ola.

Fifty years together

2016-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

1966. Vietnam. Race Riots. LSD. Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde”. The Surveyor 1 lands in the moon. Star Trek’s first episode.

Meanwhile in Spain, a B-52 crashes over Spain releasing 4 hydrogen bombs. The minister for information and tourism —in a visual definition of what it means to be an hidalgo and a demagogue— swims in the area to defuse the alarm of contamination.

Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara are still part of Spain. US-backed Francoist regime is still strong thanks to new economic policies that seem miraculous after the idiotic period of autarky.

But the country is moving. Students have started to associate and protest. Yé-yé is becoming a thing and the “minis” are increasingly popular. There are 500.000 cars and 1.8M TV sets in the country and censoring foreign trends and culture is increasingly difficult.

And in this strange, exciting, difficult world two crazies on their early twenties decide to get married. That’s right. Fifty years ago today my parents got married.

In a world where life-long relationships are increasingly a forgotten fantasy, I admire them more than ever. First, I admire and owe them as parents. You’ve probably heard the cliché “You just won’t understand until you’re a parent”. Well, I think that’s utter bullshit.

Unless you’re a fridge or specially callous cucumber it’s perfectly possible to empathise with the difficulties of two human beings dealing with a smartass teenager. Or waking up at 3 a.m. to a high-pitch crying baby. Watching your 5 years old falling and breaking his arm. Being madly worried in a pre-mobile era until you kid comes back home.

Cooking every meal, every day, three times a day for decades without getting a single thanks. Sacrificing your free time and dreams to kickstart theirs. Fretting about making the right choices. Walking the line between tolerance and discipline when your child stinks to smoke again. Teaching some ethical values to a volatile, foolish youngster.

Restraining yourself when your son breaks his expensive glasses for third time in week. And then… make it all again with another little one. You don’t need to be a parent to understand the burdens when you reflect on your role on them. I just hope to be able to do it half as well as they have done when my time comes.

But I appreciate what they have achieved as couple too. Marriage is complex because it’s a living organism. It’s shifting all the time as its members. One moves from the romantic irrationality of the first moments to —if you’re lucky— a much more important joyful, self-chosen, decades-long partnership. You find external pressures all the time: money, job opportunities –or the lack of them– family, society, ageing.

Any of these factors on its own is more than enough to end a marriage. But as if this would be not enough then you’ve the internal pressures too: bad years, epic arguments, middle-age crises, failing to be yourself, failing to honor your partner as deserves, failing to adapt to a changing person, both you and the other. Overcoming all this requires such strong commitment to embrace the whole personality of another human being that I can’t imagine a more clear display of love. And when it works… it something to behold.

Enduring this voyage for 50 years is mind-blowing and I feel today as the luckiest person on earth from being a part of it.

Mom, Dad: I love you, I admire you and I thank you.

Serendipity, Concert Halls and Public infrastructure

2016-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Eight months ago I was waiting at 3am in downtown Reykjavík for a bus to take me to the Keflavík airport. Streets were unsurprisingly empty and quiet. Standing there, in the wee hours of the mourning, Harpa, the fancy concert hall built during the biggest recession in the history of the country that cost more than 160 million euros to build, caught my eye. I posted this in instagram:

Reykjavík 03:15

Un vídeo publicado por Aitor Garcia (@_aitor) el 24 de Jun de 2015 a la(s) 8:18 PDT

Then a friend in Twitter mention mentioned the playful way the ligths are used in the building’s façade, to which I replied in a series of tweets:

This morning I recorded a small video of Harpa, the fancy Reykjavík Concert Hall. Building’s facade is a massive low-res display.
— Aitor García Rey (@_aitor) June 25, 2015

Then @leptom’s reply made me think how easy would be to bring developers to public institutions & working on the commons. Open the resource!
— Aitor García Rey (@_aitor) June 25, 2015

If authorities are worried on bad devs defacing the building, just create a small website where they can submit their “themes”.
— Aitor García Rey (@_aitor) June 25, 2015

And then let the general public check the themes in an online simulator. The best ones every month get “running time” on the real building.
— Aitor García Rey (@_aitor) June 25, 2015

There is nothing we devs like more than hacking on new stuff & viewing people using/enjoining our work. Why are governments not using this?
— Aitor García Rey (@_aitor) June 25, 2015

Then 5 months later, Studio Ólafur Elíasson (the original author of the façade) and The City of Reykjavík, announced a competition for art works utilising the façade: “Harpa calls for light-based projects”. And then a a few weeks ago the winner, paint.is, was selected and given the opportunity to run the project. It’s an online simulator where colors splatted in the building’s diagram are transmitted to the façade.

Pretty astonishing how The City and Harpa got independently to exactly the same idea I proposed half a year earlier, huh? Anyway, I’m happy to see the public infrastructure used in an open, proactive way and I hope they will be more cities taking small steps in the future with their IoT and digital infrastructure.

Everything changes, it all stays the same.

2015-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

In the afternoon of August 3rd, 2010 my wife and I were standing under the rain, waving as our friends left the driveway of a big house in Mosfellsbær. I remember the moment clearly and the feelings of anxiety and excitement.

After 5 years we are moving back to the Basque Country, our homeland, and I thought it would be good idea to share some insights and revelations gained during this period. So during in the following weeks I’ll be sharing a series of articles about Iceland and its society, with this first one serving as small intro.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that what is collected in these pieces is nothing more –or less– that our particular view of what happened in Iceland in the period 2010-2015, and that as it happens with most human storytelling, our story will be unintentionally biased in a thousand different ways. This happens of course in all media, from the New York Times to your local TV channel… at least the source of our bias is not politically or economically driven.

Additionally, another small disclaimer for the Logic aficionados in the audience: Yes, all the presented opinions are based in anecdotal evidence, our anecdotal evidence, and therefore they may be non-representative samples. Again we don’t claim to be presenting any universal truths. Go to a church for that. Or, if you want empirical experience, I suggest start reading in another place.

To say that the best thing about is Iceland is the people would be accurate… and pointless. Do you know what is the best part of visiting Vietnam? Yes, the people. The greatest feature of Istanbul? The people. Most important reason to live in Buenos Aires? Well, I guess you see where this is going… Of course the best thing is the people! Unfortunately, the worst thing in these places? Exactly the same.

The same species that created global warming, fascism, rape culture and Soylent, is responsible for the printing press, thousands of languages, space exploration, and wine. In our delightful complexity, we humans contain the potential to be bright, kind creatures. In fact, that is probably the only reason why we should not go extinct. But, I digress.

The Icelandic people are the direct descendants of a bunch of stubborn, hard-working people that a thousand years ago made the surprising decision of clinging to a bleak, beautiful, cold rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. One can’t help but admire that level of determination and insanity.

One of the most recurrent thoughts during our trips across the island has always been how, a big, resounding how. How is even possible to survive a winter in this killer wilderness without electricity? How could the farmers endure these terrible conditions? How could a nation lose a quarter of its members to a single eruption and choose to stay in the same place? Each and every Icelander is living testimony of the indomitable, unbreakable will of their forefathers.

A nice collateral of this environmental exceptionalism is a well -resolved identity and a delicious tendency to weirdness and aesthetic bizarrism.

Una foto publicada por Aitor Garcia (@_aitor) el 6 de Sep de 2015 a la(s) 9:50 PDT

In 2010 the country was still in a state of semi-shock. The banks’ collapse had a direct influence in companies and businesses global operations and the trick of foreign currency mortgages put many people in a terrible situation. In November 2008, foreign exchange capital controls were enforced, bringing the isolated geography of the island to the economic landscape.

During these years many things have changed and, as usually happens with History, nothing has changed at all. Political support going back to the same old gangsters, development policies returning to heavy industry and natural resources capitalization, new constitutions never signed because of technicalities… You know the drill. In the next articles, I’ll try to tell you our experience living in this national time-machine, focusing in some key aspects like economy, politics, society, food… Brace yourself, it’s a bumpy road.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

2015-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

A friend of mine is starting Computer Science in college. She is learning to code in Java and is experiencing the transfixing feeling of commanding machines for first time. I remember perfectly the thrill, and even feel it still sometimes, although now it’s indissolubly connected with a cynical perspective on the software industry. But I digress.

Yesterday we were talking about the courses she is taking right now and she mentioned Operating Systems. I mentioned that it’s an amazing topic from a technical point of view but instantly sidetracked the conversation to my favourite angle on this area: the folklore and history of Unix and the creation of the Personal Computer during the 60-70s.

She mentioned that it would be great to read more about it, so I checked my Kindle library and refreshed my memories to share what I’ve read, watched and found interesting on this area. I guess it will interesting to share it here for other people that maybe interested. Without more preamble, the list:

The part 2 of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. You will be introduced to some of the foundational characters on Cybernetics, Networks and Systems theory, in a broad perspective. The whole series is worth watching though.

This is one of the key names in the philosophy behind the Californian ideology that shaped the dawn of the PC and the operating systems. The history of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog.
Markoff is a great witness of this era:

And if you like Markoff he just published a new book I’m reading now on the actual state of AI and automation and how self-driving Teslas can be traced back to the old Augmenting-Humans VS. AIs-should-be-in-charge confrontation:

The mother of all Demos will blow your mind. The name is not gratuitous grandiosity. For many of us this is the foundational moment that defined what is a PC.

Especially when you read about its context and who was the camera operator :).
More on the valley’s society on the 60s and its connection with the creation of the Internet and the clash of Mainframe Crewcuts with the PC hippies:

And finally another key name in this story: Xerox PARC, where they created every modern implementation of Engelbart’s ideas just to fail miserably at selling these ideas to the Corporation:

Stephenson is always great, and this is a good short intro to what happened next: Microsoft, Apple, Linux et al.

And finally –although it should be probably the first on this list– a 30-years-earlier prologue on the minds of those that made everything possible:

On Database Dumps and Ethics

2015-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Last week the Ashley Madison hack has been my main focus of attention in the tech world. Maybe because it involves regular citizens’ privacy on an unprecedented scale, maybe because it involves sex –always a great bait in our our hypocritical and puritanical western society– the hack has sparked conversation on the ethics of using hacked digital information.

Digital Ethics is one of my passions so I couldn’t be happier seeing that this discipline is finally getting some attention. The digital context where we live today presents some unique complexities that sit on top a discipline that has already haunted philosophers for millennia, but I guess the main question most people is making is: Is it ethical to analyze, research or publish the stolen information?

Hacking Ashley Madison

First I’d like to put aside the unescapable irony of talking ethics when the hacked database belongs to a company that fraudulently generated fake profiles and proactively encouraged its users to lie on their partners. As tempting as it’s to justify anything on Robin Hood-esque grounds it deviates the conversation from the facts: the privacy of millions of people has been sacked.

The main justification for the attack was indeed that the site was incurring in the fraudulent activities, something that looking at the databases and source code of their apps seems almost undeniable.

  _______ _____ __  __ ______ _       _    _ _____  _ 
 |__   __|_   _|  \/  |  ____( )     | |  | |  __ \| |
    | |    | | | \  / | |__  |/ ___  | |  | | |__) | |
    | |    | | | |\/| |  __|   / __| | |  | |  ___/| |
    | |   _| |_| |  | | |____  \__ \ | |__| | |    |_|
    |_|  |_____|_|  |_|______| |___/  \____/|_|    (_)

Avid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men. We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data.

If you profit off the pain of others, whatever it takes, we will completely own you.

But as it has accurately pointed out there is a shitty patina of moralism in the README files included in the data dumps:

Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion.

Well, here is the ethical key point to understand: even if they’re are cheating dirtbags, they deserve privacy and discretion. There is a million reasons why a person could legitimately and consensually sign up in a website like this, but even in the most clear scenario of adultery, it’s none of our/your/anyone business.

Actually, my feeling after spending a few hours analyzing the dumped files and the hacking team’s texts is that they were not motivated by a moral rapture to stop the fraud or by a mystical call to stop digital debauchery… They are ex-users of the site or they were hired by an ex-user of the site:

For a company whose main promise is secrecy, it’s like you didn’t even try, like you thought you had never pissed anyone off.

Ashley Madison advertises “Full Delete” to “remove all traces of your usage for only $19.00”

It specifically promises “Removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site”

Other very embarrassing personal information also remains, including sexual fantasies and more.

Aren’t “pissed anyone off”, “promises removal”, “information also remains” the trademarks of a jilted lover? Doesn’t it smell like they were driven by vengeful –not righteous– motivations? Finally, they use the old rapist trick of victim blaming:

It was ALM that failed you and lied to you.

Even if ALM incurred in all the fraud and possible morally wrongs under the sun, making the private information of 36 million people public with devastating, unfair consequences is hacking team’s responsibility, not ALM’s.

Nerds & Gossip

It has been very sad –but not surprising at all– to see how nerds have been focusing on publishing the particular details of the users: their names, emails and physical addresses. This has been done on different aggregation levels, from no-aggregation, put-an-email, get-the-user websites, to maps that aggregate the information at city level trying to somewhat protect their identities.

These approaches range from clearly damaging to potentially harmful but as I’ve mentioned recently most developers feel safer if they engage with tech as if used on a vacuum without any kind of context or consequences. Publishing private details of other people is as wrong as it gets when it comes to web citizenship.

But they are not only destructive approaches… they are clearly misleading. The email addresses were not validated on the sign up process, so basically anyone could use my personal email address to sign up and use the website. Names and identification details did not go through any kind of validation so all this data is as reliable as a chocolate teapot.

This unreliability includes physical addresses. Users have a vested interest on not providing their real addresses. If I were an AM user I’ll provide an address that is only moderately near (10 - 50km) to my real location so all the geo related features and interactions with other users do still work without problem while not providing my real address to the website. So any neighborhood or even city level analysis may be very distorted. For the information that is accurate, the worse case scenario is even worse: town-level aggregation may be not enough to protect the anonymity of some users living on low density areas.

Using the Ashley Madison Database

So is there any legitimate, ethical use of this information? I think so. The reason? I think it’s a historical event.

The data dump contains personal information about more than 36 million users. To give you an idea of the dimensions of this database, and although it contains users from dozens of countries, that number represents about 15% of the US population over 18. If you live in the US, the possibility of having a 1st or 2nd level relationship with a person that has been affected by the leak is very high.

In the last years leaks have become torrents –both figuratively and literally– with private data flooding the public sphere. WikiLeaks, Snowden, The Sony Leak, The Fappening. As relevant as these events are to international relationships, geopolitics and companies interests, most people have been able to look at them as the kind of thing that only happens “to governments and celebrities”.

What Ashley Madison demonstrates in a very unfortunate way is that getting hacked and doxxed, directly and personally, seems to be inevitable not matter if you are a NSA informer in Mosul, Iraq or a blue collar cheating plumber from Minnesota. But, once the information becomes public domain, analyzing its impact and scale in anonymous and not damaging ways is not only possible but it may be useful and positive.

So what are those ways? For example, one quick look at the dump and I was immediately attracted to the idea of exploring it as a world scale, general, non-personal sexual profile of society. Knowing 10% of the users –without looking or caring who those are– desire “A Father Figure” is 1000x times more interesting than knowing there are 10 users in Cohagen, MT. Publishing these kind of analysis is not only more interesting, it does not mess around with those users’ lives.

Unlike identification details, users have every reason to be honest when describing their sexual interests and fetishes. Since public talk and opinions on sex are heavily driven by peer pressure, a space where you can freely describe what turns you one –and find someone that shares the same tastes– is an oasis of self-expression for many people. Removing every ID detail and all geographic information will focus the research on the sex practices people really crave. In a topic where hypocrisy is rampant, an anonymized Ashley Madison database may be the single best survey on sexual desire ever done on history.

Is this the only approach? I don’t know. But I think there is space for some ethical use of this information if we are adamant on one thing: not meddling with other people personal lives. Not moralizing on what they do. Not feeling morally entitled to shared their personal details. Not justifying gossip. Not being assholes.

In journalism ethics there is the principle of “limitation of harm” that involves withholding details which might damage people involved in the report. We, developers, hackers, coders, need to start talking about our own ethics and how they apply to our tools of trade. Algorithms, databases and scripts now run our lives. We should grow up and take responsibility.

Prisionero en la Arcadia

2015-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Vice, The Awl, The Guardian, Jacobin, Aeon, The New Inquiry…

Salvo puntuales y honrosas excepciones es difícil encontrar publicaciones en castellano analizando la cultura del siglo XXI. Hay cientos de sitios y revistas que, pasado el Mediterranean Tech Delay, publican lo que ocurre, pero no es eso a lo que me refiero.

Hablo de los Paul Ford y los Ian Bogost. Robin Sloan, Jess Zimmerman, Kashmir Hill y Quinn Norton. Morozov, Carmody, Standage y Madrigal.

Voces con miradas interesantes y perspectivas relevantes. Ojos prestados que nos dejen ver lo oscuro que está. Rostros pálidos y enjutos, aquellos a los que temía el Cesar, que apunten con el dedo a las sombras y nos digan de donde vienen esos ruidos.

¿Pero es esto siquiera posible? ¿Se puede hablar sobre la Arcadia algorítmica desde el castellano? ¿Perforar el suelo con unas tijeras? ¿Cómo escribir desde la honestidad cuando cada termino es prestado in extremis? Drones, bots, HFT, hack. El diccionario no alcanza.

Por más de una década yo mismo he desistido más veces de las que quiero aceptar de escribir en castellano sobre tecnología y cultura. ¿Desidia? ¿Absorción cultural? No lo sé. Por alguna razón los posts se empiezan a escribir en inglés en mi cerebro.

Sin embargo, de Pascuas a Ramos me encuentro con un símil perfecto que resuena perfectamente en la cabeza del hispanohablante. Y entonces… el desconsuelo. Ese desfase entre audiencia, texto y contexto. ¿Es esa la razón última de este páramo?

No lo sé. Pero a veces me gustaría que alguien demostrase que no es así.

Narcocorridos, Apps and Culture

2015-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

As human beings we go through different stages. We keep realigning our focus as that-thing-called-life develops. What was a logical top priority on high school makes us feel embarrassed in a party just a few years later.

Developers —despite it what might seem looking at HackerNews— are not different, we’re human beings too. We shift from obsessing on every single detail of the last MacBook to read every book on parenting. One funny thing on my personal experience of this evolution is that over time I’ve become more conscious and self-aware of the evolution itself.

During the last 10 years I’ve got more and more obsessed with the political, social and cultural implications and goals of technology. Initially I got really obsessed with the Open Data movement that was having a huge boost in UK. As result I created —one of?— the first Open Data organization in Spain and started talking publicly on how to use technology to hack politics.

In 2010 I moved to Iceland, I got interested on the startup approach used here to redact a new constitution and how technology was used as a catalyst for political transformation. A few years ago I had the opportunity to talk about the historical implications of mobile devices and how HFT and Amazon’s warehouses are just the first examples of automated systems from which complex, unexpected patterns emerge. Last year I talked about the implications of digital tools in the concept of human mortality.

I still care and love researching new technologies and paradigms, but studying them as purely engineering problems can sometimes give us a wrong scale of their relevance. Discussing the political agendas built on top of them, thinking about the cultural objects generated, or analyzing the new social interactions they create, presents far more interesting questions.

Whenever I mention these topics I usually get two reactions.

From people in the tech community and conference organizers I usually get a mix of “But what is the practical use of this?” and “Developers are not interested on this”. For some reason most developers feel safer if they talk about technology as if it’ll be used on a vacuum, without any kind of context or consequences other than retention, traffic, page views or downloads. I guess part of the problem is that today’s tech industry is mostly composed by white male twenty-somethings –like I was once– that simply feel disconnected from politics and social issues… because, well, they don’t have them.

From the non-tech people crowd I often get a shockingly high number of dismissive reactions. Exhibiting a surprising intellectual snobbism, the average middle-age, middle-class partygoer considers every digital tool as ineffective, every new hot app as irrelevant. Any shitty book seems to be more fundamental to humanity’s cultural commonwealth than the interactions of MMORPGs players, every mediocre film more politically influential than Facebook’s UI, used 1.5 billion people every month.

Of course this mentality provokes important problems, like the lack of proper long-term storage strategies on most web services. It’s just teenagers taking selfies. Not worth the effort. If you add the VC-oriented approach followed by most starupts and the way apps profit from being data silos, eventually you end up losing 90% of what was created in the early years of the web and with networks that forget at an increasingly fast pace.

Last week I found a very eloquent example of how Snapchat, Instagram, Beme… YouNameIt are culturally relevant. In July, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug kingpin known as El Chapo, escaped Mexico’s most secure prison. Again. The escape opened the news worldwide and specially shocked Mexican society, that was promised a few years ago, this would be impossible.

Most human groups find their way to encode social realities in cultural artifacts, making them memorable and shareable. From singing farmers on the Euphrates riverside to Gangsta Rap, music is one of the most powerful artifacts we’ve created to this end. In an increasingly violent Mexico, this practice has taken the form of Narcocorridos, folk songs focused on drug smugglers and kingpins. Just a few hours after El Chapo’s escape dozens of new narcocorridos were posted on Youtube and other social networks.

These songs reflect on the lives and stories of the criminals, sometimes praising them, but very often openly criticizing the corruption and uselessness of a Mexican government that can’t and won’t deal with them. Both approaches are enough reason to ban the narcocorridos from all mainstream media. And, therefore, the reason why spread like fire on the digital realm.

Recorded with phones, shared on Snapchat and Instagram, these videos connect with the suffering and daily reality of millions. You can hear their creators asking the audience to like and follow. Uniquely suited for the network, the narcocorridos are folk history, formed in real time in front of your eyes, created exclusively in these irrelevant, good-for-nothing apps.

As it’s well known these days software is eating the World. The World, in exchange, seems to be covering every last corner of our servers with politics and culture.

Nice state

2015-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

There is an ongoing attack on common sense. Move fast and break things then move fast and fix things. Profit. Repeat. Price has replaced cost so completely that you don’t clean your clothes anymore. You ship new dirt-cheap ones from China and give old dirt-dirt ones to charity. Moral gratifying consumerism. It’s Slavoj Žižek all over the place.

Everything that is honest, good and worthy of being called human is predicated as inefficient. Not doing anything is the most sinful of the states. Being bored is sacrilege. Wandering is unholy. NERDS MUST AUTOMATE. Food as bland, gooey fuel. Calendar as a gap to fill. Infinite scrolling as the final free time killer.

Old, stagnant sectors are destroyed and replaced by unstable part-time low-paying jobs and sold as a victory of the “Sharing Economy”, your new utopy for just 9.99$/month. Socialist terminology is eaten alive by the VC Politburo and it tastes great. Don’t buy the propaganda.

Hum, nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

Same questions

2015-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

We watched Ex Machina yesterday. Good movie. I like most of it, except the last 10-15 mins. But, as with most Sci-Fi movies lately, the thing I find most valuable on them is the ethical, moral and philosophical questions it raises.

In the same way that good developers eventually understand that making software is all about people, not languages or frameworks, but people, I think most well developed near-future scenarios confront us with technology’s ultimate consequence: a deep questioning of what it means to be human.

If the Singularity demonstrates that consciousness is something we can build, and the foundation for identity and for well… existence, what purpose does this existence serve?. If final automation of mining, farming, transportation and retail make almost every human unemployable (and don’t fool yourself, this will happen), what will we do with our -constantly extended- time? How will we be able to have a meaningful life? If science and technology enable humans to be born in another galaxy and never experience life on Earth, how will that affect our self-image? When no one can argue we are all in the same boat anymore, how will human identity be fragmented?

And this train of thought brings us to old, familiar stations we have visited for millennia, because they all revolve about the essence of being human. Because technology, both figuratively and literally, is our collective effort to throw a tiny probe into deep space hoping to get something other than selfies of our vital ignorance. Because software is our gift to machines, the language, the interior voice they will eventually use to interrogate themselves. To make the same questions we have been making with the hope that maybe together we’ll find answers.

The shape of your notes

2013-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

I suffer a compulsion for note taking that forces me to carry small notebooks all the time. I found this simple technique a great stress reliever; it allows me to keep my mind clear and focused, delegating all the popping thoughts to a simple analog buffer.

There are lot of things to love about notebooks. They are fast, flexible and responsive. Infinite battery, über-cheap, valid for longterm storage by default. No unlock/slide/micro-delay/tap/tap/micro-delay/write/tap/lock process. As good as tablets and phones are getting these days, the time to record a few words on them is still longer and more complex than scribbling in a piece of paper. Yes, paper is still awesome in many, many, many, many, many ways.

And I’m not the only person that suffers from this disease. A few months ago my friend Brian Suda showed me a few prototypes for custom notebooks he had been developing. The prototypes used different icelandic landforms and animals as design for the cover. Some of them displayed the intriguing shape created by landscape’s isolines. As they were early prototypes, Brian had traced all the isolines by hand, using a real map as guide in Illustrator.

During the following months I fall in love with the idea of creating a series of notebooks using real, nice maps for its design. I wanted to keep the abstract beauty of the contour lines but, at the same time, respect the old tradition for accuracy that cartography has, without incurring in an incredibly time-consuming process.

Creating maps

I started investigating tools and libraries. First discovery was the concept of Digital Elevation Models (or DEMs). They’re digital raster representations of the terrain’s elevation through the surface of the Earth. There are a lot of different types of DEMs but one the most commons is a black and white heightmap:

So I started looking for DEMs suitable of use for the maps and found the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (or SRTM). For eleven days in February 2000 the Space Shuttle “Endeavour” and its seven brave astronauts executed the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, mapping most of the world’s topography at a resolution of three arc seconds.¹ Unfortunately the mission worked only in the area between 60°N and 56°S leaving most of Northern Europe (and places like Iceland) without elevation models:

But many people in the GIS community supports open source and open data, and I was able to find a grid of DEMs for Iceland in the same resolution and with very good quality thanks to Yashin Aleksander.

Once you’ve the raw data is time to find the tools to act on it. Very soon after I started searching the web and GitHub for libraries I found GDAL. GDAL is an amazing toolkit for geospatial data transformation that comes with a variety of great command line utilities. Using them I was able to create the isolines of each part of Iceland, initially testing by hand on a few tiles and later with help of a few scripts processing the whole country.

Working with Isolines

At this point I had 48 1°×1° blocks, each one containing the contour lines of a part of the country in Shapefile format, a geospatial vector data format perfect for editing.

I had no idea of how were these lines going to look so I needed a simple, fast and interactive way to check it out. The first thing that came to my mind was CartoDB, a great service created by my friends of Vizzuality that provides a way to create dynamic maps and geo visualizations with ease.

I started uploading the shapefiles to CartoDB and almost instantly bumped into some limitations with the size quota assigned to my free account but even with a few tiles uploaded it was clear what to expect of the data and the result was very promising.

Thanks to one of the core developers of the service, Javier Santana, that taught me a few PostGIS tricks to optimize the data and fit it in my account, you can now enjoy the contour lines of Iceland in all its glory:

The exploration continued then in QGIS, an amazing piece of -open source- software for geo data manipulation: raster, vectorial, multiple projections, layers… Don’t let the ugly Qt interface fool you, this thing is really amazing, you can do all kind of crazy stuff like hairy city maps:

At this point, it was easy to explore specific points like glaciers, mountains, etc. and see which ones had nice shapes. The attention focused then in Eyjafjallajökull, the glacier sitting on top of the volcano that spread chaos in airports around the World during its 2010 eruptions.

But how to isolate accurately the contour lines of a glacier? Open Data to the rescue again. The Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (or GLIMS) is a project designed to monitor the world’s glaciers primarily using data from satellites, maintained by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Thanks to this project, it was easy to overlay the glacier’s shape in top of the contour lines and find the proper limits.

With the glacier contour lines outlined by its limits it was only a matter of exporting all this information to something usable in vector graphics software like SVG and the Eyjafjallajökull was ready for the final step.

Millions of points

Why a manual editing? Well, because geographical data is too accurate for a format as constrained as the cover of a small notebook. When we imported the SVG file in Illustrator it was clear that there were far too many points for what we needed:

They were so many almost identical points in fact that, as you can see in the previous screenshot, even a simplification keeping 99% of the original precision removed millions of them. After the filtering, the process morphed into a carefully revision of all the contour lines to remove all the possible artifacts (strange right angles, outliers, etc.) generated by the GDAL transformation or the simplification.

With all the lines nice and tidy after hours of tweaking, the notebooks’ creation entered the last stage: composition. We included the name of the glacier and the year of all major eruptions recorded. Finally we had our design and it was even better than we expected:

The notebooks

With design finished, it was a matter of find the right printer for the task and we went with Reykjavík Letterpress a small local studio specialized in… well… letterpress. Two years ago they printed the Jositajosi’s XMas and the result was quite good.

After a few conversations, estimates and decisions we sent the final PDF with printer marks et al. finishing the first cycle of this peculiar stationery flip-flop, with a limited edition of 1.000 units. A few days later they were in front of us:

First use of these notebooks was to serve as 2012 xmas present to jositajosi’s customers. The feedback has been so amazing -everybody loves them- that we’re putting the remaining copies up for sale. You can get them for as low as 11$ or, even better, in a pack of 3 for just 25$ (and free shipping worldwide!):

http://etsy.me/14EWLiO

Another idea we’ve been thinking about is to transform this one-off project in a series of notebooks. Would you like to see more of these notebooks? Maybe your city or favorite mountain? Your company’s location? Let us know your ideas and we’ll send you a free notebook to wherever you are.

http://viewfinderpanoramas.org/topog.html ↩

Tremors, earthquakes & tectonic shifts

2012-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Coder, informatician, software artisan, digital craftsman, hacker… maybe we can’t agree about the denomination of our work as we like to invent countless number of ways to call it but we don’t -used to- have problems explaining what is its nature.

For that last 40 years we and the developers before us, have being struggling to discover how to make better, more flexible, more resilient software. But in all this time it was pretty clear that the product we were creating was made by lines of code, that the context for using it was that screen in front of us, the personal computer, and that the users of our work were very much other human beings. Even the biggest tipping point in the software industry -the creation of the Internet- to a large extent didn’t change this.

Now look around you. Software is the mythological hydra turned digital, turned invisible, turned ubiquitous, turned anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere. The way software is constantly permeating through our society, our culture, our civilization is much deeper that what we often think. Is not only that hundreds of millions of persons have a computer on their pockets today; mobile computing is just the iceberg tip on this tectonic shift.

Your TV, your washing & coffee machine, your credit cards… all are becoming more software than atoms. Our stock markets -the ones that made the headlines of the newspapers everyday- are basically run by machines talking to machines, deciding by themselves when to buy, when to sell.

You can see every corner of the most important cities in the world while walking in a street on the other side of the world. Our textbooks -what we use to tell students how is the world- have started the long migration from the printed, static text plateau through the real time, interactive mountains to reach the XXI century education’s pastures -or deserts-.

Regular people is constructing DIY drones able to fly to a location, face-recognize a person and track her wherever she goes. We’ve cheap 3D printing machines that can phisically replicate any digital object we can create… or even themselves.

And all this, and an unlimited myriad of other things to come, is basically software. Software we must create.

Software is now a plastic goo stretching in all directions with accelerating speed. More contexts, more expressions, more hybridization. Less distance between digital and physical, less structure, less final versions…

What is our role in this new paradigm? Is our job still about writing code? With the gap between us and users getting thinner everyday, how isolated can our work be from other disclipines as design, anthropology, architecture, politics? What are the ethical implications of a software-based civilization for us as creators?

In short… What is to be a developer? I’d like to talk with you about it.

How to write a micro-story in 30 minutes

2011-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

0 min. Wake up early. If you are not a morning person, just free yourself from the bed, and try by all means to get to the shower. Once there, the water will do the rest in 5 minutes.

5 min. Go to the kitchen. Ignore any mess that is -pretty certainly- around. Your task is make a cup of coffee. Focus. No matter if it tastes horrible, but it should be pitch black. Remember: only half of the coffee is for your mouth, the other half is for your eyes. Wait.

15 min. Go to the street. No matter what don’t take the elevator. Sometimes they have this really catchy jingles. If you hear one the rest of the day will be spent humming it. Use the staircase.

16 min. Start to walk in the opposite way you usually does. Instead of left, turn right today; change walking fast for slow moving; start greeting strangers if you are usually afraid of them.

19 min. Suddenly something will happen. It always happens. Maybe the last greenlandic inuit want to tell you the story of Utkusik, his alcoholic caribou. Maybe you come across a group of men and women that races each other nearly naked through the main square.

20 min. Pick your notebook and write. It’s utterly important that you don’t think. Don’t let yourself think about the story. Just write.

28 min. After a few scrawls the story will flash before your eyes: We are running down the street in our underwear because nothing ever happens here.

30 min. Relax.

Happy Birthday Eva, We love you.

This is a micro-story written (with the inspiration of my adorable wife) as present for our friend Eva. Kudos to @dr_guapo, Bernardo Atxaga and FM Belfast for being an inspiration.

The Cursed Year

2011-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Today is the last day of the Year.

Yes, it is. At least is the last day of my year. The worst year I’ve probably had in my life. The year I’ve come to refer as The Cursed Year. Mainly because of working problems, that derives on financial problems, that derives in personal problems.

365 days ago I started working on a beautiful project. Good idea, hugely profitable, great design team… project looked good, maybe too good.

I was the development-only force of the project. Usually we don’t accept to delegate management of the project to other parties if we’ve not worked with them before, in order to ensure everything happens smoothly.

This time we made an exception, based on the reputation of the project manager. Bad move. Never trust reputation; nothing can replace the evaluation quality of first hand experience. I’ve learned to just trust a few things on this world:

My wife.
My family.
My partner, Alberto.

Initially the project gave its first steps without problems. First internal release of the site was done in a few weeks, customer was happy and I spotted a few unicorns on the green pastures of my beloved Basque Country.

A few weeks later, after my 31st birthday, when project was mainly finished -or that was what I thought at that moment- I moved to Iceland. Moving is always a stressful process but what came after the moving was the more stressful period in my whole life.

Project manager just dissapeared and was replaced by another person that instead of focus on finishing functionality first, started to fill hundreds of support tickets with copywriting details and misunderstadings about how certain interactions should work (obviously because was absent in the previous project’s phases).

The management of the tickets took me literally hours every day. Big fails in basic interactions of the site like the signup process appeared and suddenly there were more features to implement. Just to make it worst, features that were supposed to be simple, keep growing and growing out of control.

In a normal project, as the project manager I’d have been able to take control of this featuritis, but this time I was only the “developer”. Frustated, tired, working every single day for 3 months… I got depressed.

The worst project in my professional career almost ate my alive, but after months of delay and after becoming project manager de facto, we were able to launch the project publicly… and in Monty Python’s words… there was much rejoicing.

I don’t know why but this project was the starting point of a terrible chain of problems in my small company Linking Paths. In the last 12 months:

Prospective customers declined our estimations, in favor of other companies that were owned by friends or family members of the customer.
Prospective customers used us as dummy providers in projects that were agreed to be conceded to another company without our knowledge.
Almost signed contracts went down the drain by reasons not related to us or the customer.
Customers paid us late and sometimes only after many attempts.
We sent dozens of estimations, but we were unable to convert most of them on sales.

Just to make everything more funny I personally wasted thousands of euros due to different reasons: resources I financed hoping it will be used for good by my friends, greedy renters that refuse to give me the deposit back without reason, stupid conference organizers that force me to buy planes tickets in the last moment…

So right now I’m utterly broke, depressed and angry.

I don’t know if all this poison that have been brewing within me has left an imprint that can’t be removed or if possible to just forget all these bad moments and start again… but we’re going to try it.

Today, even without knowing if we’re going to have money to stay in Iceland for another week, my beautiful, always supportive wife and me have decided to end all this shit and allow ourselves a new start. A new start where hope is more important that the deep, frustrating hole we’re into.

Because today is the last day of the Year.

Y asi un dia y otro y otro...

2005-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Algunos dias pienso que llevo con la crisis de los treinta desde los dieciocho.

microISV incoming

2005-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Algunos días deberíamos coger nuestro portátil, montarnos en el coche, conducir hasta la costa y tomarnos un café mirando al mar mientras llueve lentamente. Entonces haríamos el mejor software de nuestra vida. Un día como hoy.

Día como hoy.

Como hoy.

Hoy.

En fin.

Lidia de Canal Euskadi tuvo el detallazo de acercarme al bar una copia en CD del programa del otro día. Desgraciadamente se fue antes de que pudiera invitarla a algo, pero le reservo la consumición sine die :-D. En otro orden de desgracias el vídeo esta en .wmv y no he encontrado manera de pasarlo en Mac a .mpg o .mov para poder editarlo y recortarlo unicamente a los 20 minutos en los que se habla de blogs. En Windows existe TMPGEnc y otros encoders, pero no dispongo de ningun SO de este tipo a mano, I’m a happy linux powered bastard at work / bloody fucking BSD-Darwin powered man at home . Agradecería cualquier indicación sobre la conversión en Mac o en Linux, sino habrá que esperar hasta que algún windowsero me haga el favor…

Después de 8-9 años de uso de internet, por fin pagare por mi ancho de banda!. Ayer abrí una cuenta de hosting en Textdrive. Para empezar me ha asombrado bastante la cantidad de actividad que se genera en sus foros, y más aun que casi todos los comentarios sean positivos. La creación de la cuenta no es automática porque en palabras del propio equipo de Textdrive :

In the interest of getting to know our clients right from the start, we have deliberately not automated the account creation process.

Lo cual también es un detalle que pinta muy bien -sobre todo porque el mail con toda la información de alta me llego en apenas tres horas incluso con este tratamiento personalizado. Al darte de alta te dan la posibilidad de que dones el 50% de los beneficios que generes a diferentes proyectos OS, entre ellos algunos como RoR -my choice-, Wordpress, Textpattern,etc… En los servidores esta instalado RoR y mucho mas software para la creación de aplicaciones puesto que Textdrive es un hosting un tanto orientado…:

TextDrive is the right choice for those who use and wish to support free, open-source publishing applications such as Textpattern, WordPress, Instiki and frameworks such as Ruby On Rails. We provide excellent support for the open-source scripting languages PHP, Ruby, Perl and Python, and databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Como apunta el punto anterior Java IS OVER FOR ME. Si amigos, después de más de 6 años dedicados en cuerpo y alma profesional y ociosamente a esta plataforma simplemente estoy hastiado. Varios puntos contribuyen:

Por una parte estar tan enfocado a una única plataforma acaba creando una ceguera selectiva hacia el mundo del desarrollo de software. ¿Por qué participar en Javahispano y no en CocoaHispano o en RubyHispano o en HaskellHispano?.
Quitando casos realmente dignos de admiración como Spring, Webwork, Appfuse, etc., estoy hasta los huevos del snobismo y la sobre-arquitecturización (si es que algo así puede existir) que se destila en gran parte de la comunidad java.
Java no es capaz de hacer algo como RoR. Simplemente no puede. Por definición. No, no me olvido de Trails. Pero no olvidemos que poner cuernos y manchas a un perro no hace que este sea una vaca, solo hace que parezca una vaca.. Y creo que RoR y Ruby es el camino en el que quiero estar - por lo menos en el desarrollo web-.
Quiero sentir de nuevo la sensación de aprender y de ver las cosas con un nuevo enfoque. Un enfoque más simple, donde la cosas funcionen sin tener que estar dos años en un templo tibetano.

Por lo tanto a partir de ahora, los nuevos proyectos personales irán destinados principalmente a Cocoa en el escritorio y a Ruby y RoR en la web. Los proyectos a los que actualmente ya pertenezco - y a los que apenas puedo dedicar tiempo - seguirán adelante pero no tengo intención de participar en ninguno nuevo.

En la linea de lo anterior con casi toda seguridad el 10 y 11 de Junio estaré en Copenhagen, en el reboot de ideas que se celebra allí por estos días. Después de leer algunas cosas y ver la gente que va estoy casi convencido de mi asistencia, aunque muy a pesar mio no me acompañen ninguno de mis compadres. Sea como fuere estoy seguro de que escuchare cosas que compensen el -EMMO- módico precio de 175 euros y si ademas tenemos en cuenta que aprovechando que el Pisuerga pasa por Valladolid aprovechare para hacer 7 - 10 días de turismo con Bego por Dinamarca, la diversión esta asegurada.

PS: Si lo de microISV va en serio. O eso espero…

PS II: Todos aquellos que tengáis alguna objeción o insulto por lo de Java IS OVER FOR ME poner [zealot] al principio del comentario. Así no pierdo el tiempo. Gracias :-D.

Me rilo con lo de los domingos...

2005-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Cada vez oigo hablar a alguien de globalización me rilo. La gente se llena el buche de MacBasura y lo llama globalización. En mi pueblo (bueno cuando tenia pueblo, ahora creo que tengo un centro de revitalizacion de la margen izquierda) eso se llama gilipollez. El tema es que en este gran engaño que entre 5 o 6 caciques (básicamente americanos) nos quieren vender, la gente se empieza a liar (¡incluso los que antes lo tenian claro!) y la cosa se va poniendo fea. Estos (y otro mas ofensivos) eran los pensamientos que me carcomian el pasado domingo cuando fui a comer a esa bella ciudad que es Bilbao. ¿Por qué?. Pues básicamente porque las octavillas gualdas que habían lanzado varios miles de manifestantes horas antes yacían por doquier, aun frescas e intactas en el suelo. En ellas aparecía una frase que me toco particularmente las narices al principio y me irrito generalmente la ingle al final: “Mi ocio no es negocio.”

Pero vamos a ver ignorante-editor-de-octavillas-que-irrita-el-colón-mas-que-fotocopiarse-el-culo-durante-una-hora, el ocio lleva siendo negocio básicamente desde el neolítico, es decir, cuando el ser humano lo creó. Y esto se ponga como se ponga nadie es inherente y al menos básicamente bueno, lo cual no se puede decir de muchas otras actividades mercantiles que en vez de en el ocio están basadas en, ummm… déjame pensar… por ejemplo la industria contaminante de metales pesados.

Si un griego quería disfrutar de una comedia de Aristofanes, para ello debía representarse, para lo cual se necesitaba básicamente un coro (y mas tardíamente unos actores), al cual había que remunerar convenientemente, montante este ultimo que por increíble que parezca a estas alturas de la feria apoquinaba el rico o el gobierno de turno. Los griegos se reían, los del coro trabajaban y cobraban, Aristofanes tenia mas dinero para vino y en general todo el mundo feliz y contento. Y esto ha sido así (y gracias) desde que el hombre tiene tiempo para perderlo. Y digo gracias porque si no todo ese negocio simplemente no existiría y tampoco los respectivos trabajos e ingresos.

Y tiene gracia que todo este despropósito haya encontrado apoyo y hombro donde llorar en algunos abnegados propietarios autónomos de pequeños negocios. Tiene una grandísima y putísima gracia. Esas personas que tan fácilmente se apresuran a poner en sus escaparates consignas como “No a la apertura de comercios en Domingo” deberían fumarse un poco de opio, a ver si el sueño del dragón de jade les ilumina un poco. No se dan cuenta de que mientras ellos se rasgan las vestiduras por trabajar en Domingo, a la vez que se toman unos apetecibles txakolises, hay personas que lo llevan haciendo (trabajar) durante siglos, como los hosteleros, y a todo el mundo le ha parecido fantástico y maravilloso. Y fíjate que casualidad, estos señores también son propietarios autónomos de pequeños negocios que van a perecer vilmente victimas de una globalización brutal y frenética. Y mira tu que cosas, yo soy uno de ellos.

Todos los días me encuentro con comerciantes de mi propio barrio que se quejan airadamente del asunto. Que si centros comerciales por aquí, que si grandes superficies por allá, y toda clase de lloriqueos. Pero esto se va a acabar. Creo que la próxima vez que alguien se me acerque con la misma cantinela le voy a decir:

Oye, tú, lerdo.
¿Si?
Abres a las 10 de la mañana, cierras para comer, por la tarde a las 20:00 ya estas cerrado y hace apenas un año que has empezado a abrir los sábados por la mañana de 10 a 14. Tu ropa es mas cara y fea que la del Zara de aquí al lado. Tus productos son de calidad media y a veces baja. No hay nada en tu tienda que te distinga a ti o al local que posees. Tu tienda esta mas desvaída que un prostíbulo en cuaresma. Lo mas parecido que tengo a un saludo acogedor al entrar en tu tienda es un bufido que se cae de tu boca, como tu papada. La ultima vez que decoraste tu local todavía se llevaba el papel pintado de flores. Y aunque llevo mas de 10 años entrando en tu tienda jamas has tenido un detalle de ningún tipo conmigo. ¿Me quieres decir por qué cojones debería seguir comprándote nada?.
Es que soy una tienda de barrio.
Pues métete tu tienda donde te quepa.

Y así me iré mas tranquilo que unas pascuas.

Seamos realistas. Las asociaciones comerciales de barrio son pura pantomima que se supone deben funcionar per se y que en la mayoría de ocasiones no realizan ni una sola actividad en todo el año. La mayoría de locales no favorecen una imagen de calidad (y hablo de todos los sectores: carnicerías, tiendas de ropa, peluquerías, bares, etc…) y modernidad sino que una vez puestos en marcha se sitúan en una posición de aletargamiento indefinido. Nadie hace nada -a parte de quejarse- por atraer a nuevos clientes a su local. ¿Y luego queremos ocultar nuestro miedo bajo la manta de la tradición?, ¿y después queremos tapar la xenofobia hacia inmigrantes chinos e hindus bajo el velo del comercio regulado?, ¿pretendemos ocultar el hecho de que detrás de personas inmigrantes que trabajan por sueldos ínfimos esta un explotador no inmigrante que las contrata?, ¿y que un poco mas allá esta el pais desolado y hambriento del que escapan que nuestro feroz capitalismo ha creado?. Que verguenza.

Parar la globalización, la de verdad, la cultural, social y económica pasa primero por admitir nuestro papel en ella y en un mundo capitalista, después por rebajarlo progresivamente proporcionando alternativas buenas y de calidad (en los tres niveles que he citado: haciendo películas europeas de calidad, entendiendo que todos hemos sido inmigrantes alguna vez o condonando deudas y dando herramientas), tercero por dar un vuelco definitivo a este sistema corrupto que no funciona y tornarlo mas humano y comunista y finalmente por admitir que hagamos lo que hagamos toda sociedad alberga un numero inherente de imbéciles que al fin y al cabo seguirán pensando, vistiendo y sintiendo lo que otros les digan que piensen, vistan y sientan.

El que quiera peces que se moje el culo. El que quiera explotar un sistema capitalista en su beneficio, que no se asuste cuando otros lo hagan mejor, incluso si es en su detrimento. Y el que quiera al fin y al cabo ganarse la vida mejorando en la medida de sus capacidades la de otros (especialmente los momentos de ocio de otros) que lo haga. Lo demás son pataletas histéricas del que después de ignorar los gritos de sufrimiento de otros le ve las orejas al lobo.

Flickr

2004-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

No creo que haya mucha gente que no lo conozca aun, pero como agradecer es de pobres pues lo comento.

Hace algún tiempo se ha creado un servicio de almacenamiento de fotos llamado flickr. La verdad es que llamarlo “servicio de almacenamiento de fotos” hace flaco favor a verdadero servicio de esta herramienta pero bueno por algo hay que empezar.

A mi entender la herramienta da un paso cualitativo en la usabilidad de herramientas web. Mediante una integración invisible para el usuario de componentes flash, CSS y un diseño grandiosamente simple, permite que el usuario prácticamente se olvide de formularios, campos requeridos, mensajitos de sobre no se que datos POST, etc…

Por otro lado están los servicios que presta. Esta entrada por ejemplo esta publicada desde el interfaz XMLRPC que tiene flickr. Así mismo permite ir creando una colección de fotos favoritas (tanto de tus fotos como de las de otros usuarios). Se pueden crear “sets” de fotos, esto es, agrupaciones temáticas de las mismas (think “Vacaciones 2004”). Tiene una magnifica herramienta en Flash llamada Organizr (si por lo visto la dislexia sacude fuertemente a sus empleados) que permite manejar de manera bastante intuitiva toda tu colección de fotos. Existente clientes descargables para subir fotos desde tu maquina (PC o Mac), un plug-in para iPhoto, y por si eres freak como yo tienes una magnifica documentación de las APIs para que te hagas un cliente flickr tu mismo.

Existe también la posibilidad de crear “pools” de fotos de usuarios, o sea, una especie de “set” o conjunto que englobe las fotos de varias personas.

Yo estoy utilizándolo ya para manejar mis fotos publicas. Tiene un limitación de ancho de banda de 10 Mb/usuario/mes (algo más que lógico para ser un servicio gratuito), y por ahora no tienen limitación en el volumen de fotos que puedes subir.

Yo he creado ya un grupo de fotos que se llama “Weblogs javahispano” con la idea de montar un grupo de fotos de todos nosotros. El que se quiera montar en el carro (Vitxo :-) ?) que me avise. Cuando haya un par de personas y hayamos montado en Roller 1.0 en esta pagina de Dios, intentare incluir un banner de fotos aleatorias de ese grupo en la pagina principal. ¿Mola o no :-)?.

Mis fotos en flickr (También en el link del menú).

Acabamos de ser tíos

2003-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Pues si. Mi hermano y su esposa nos acaban de hacer tíos a Bego y a mi. Se llama Miriam, ha pesado 3.460 gramos y medido 51 cm. Se ha demorado un poco más de la cuenta pero al final ya esta aquí.

¡Feliz nacimiento Miriam!

Utopia

2003-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Hace muchos dias un tal Rafael hablaba de la perdida de la magia. Y no. No hablaba de su novia precisamente (ni yo :-):

Nowadays I still have a LOT of things to learn, to improve, but… is no longer fun, at least not like those days… When you learn more programming languages than you can count using your hand, when you try things thousands of times just to see how it works or how will ocurr if you change “this” and “those” components, they lose the magic…

Personalmente tambien siento esta perdida. Yo como todo el que pase -+12 horas al dia trabajando delante de un ordenador. Sí, descubres cosas nuevas, cientos de cosas nuevas, miles de cosas nuevas, millones de cosas nuevas… pero no hay magia, no hay chispa. Es precisamente de lo que hablaba en el post anterior. Segun te haces mayor todo tiende a ser aplastantemente logico, pateticamente predecible y mediocremente realizado. Y la alegria desbordante con la que los niños descubren y asimilan todo deja paso a este mundo de mierda construido por automatas que se dedican a hacer lo mismo con las mismas formas y sin un ápice de originalidad en ello.

Y con la programación pasa lo mismo. Sí, por supuesto. Hay veces que te levantas de la silla, le das un codazo a tu compañero (o le clavas un destornillador ;-) y le dices, oye tio, ¿has visto esto?, ¿a que es cojonudo?. Pero poco a poco estas ocasiones son las menos y la mayoria de las veces no justifican el resto del tiempo.

Uno que es bastante cortito en cuanto a inteligencia aunque bastante aplicado en lo que se propone intenta aplicar ciertas estrategias que dan resultado (durante un tiempo) para evitar la monotonia y reinventarse un poco a si mismo. Estudias, lees, aprendes, posteas, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla y programas. Y hombre, que te diria yo, es mejor que nada. Pero cada vez te da más la sensacion de que es algo parecido al intento romantico de detener el tiempo: bello pero futil.

Asi que no te queda mas remedio (de hecho muchas veces no te quedan mas cojones) que asumir la realidad como es, intentar arrancarle lo provechoso que haya a tu alrededor, terminar un post de manera nada cordial y leer un par de paginas de “La insoportable levedad del ser” antes de dormir.

En fin.

Adiós tío, descansa en paz

2003-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Se ha muerto mi tío.

Era algo que no nos ha pillado de imprevisto pues llevaba casi tres semanas en el hospital y el propio medico se asombraba de su aguante y fortaleza. Ser excesivamente benévolo con los muertos traspasa la propia definición de hipocresía. Por ello solo diré de él que nunca oí nada malo por parte de sus hermanos y hermanas (entre ellas mi madre), y con mis escasos 24 años ya he aprendido que eso es más que suficiente. Sin embargo si que ha habido algo de sus últimos días que me ha dejado un huella profundísima. En los últimos 2-3 años sufría de esa pesadilla de nombre terrorífico que los médicos han dado en llamar Alzheimer. No sé.

Algunas veces meditando sobre ello creo que entiendo mejor la enfermedad si la literalizo. No soporto la idea de pensar que un jodido proceso químico en mi cerebro sea capaz de hacerme olvidar a las personas que quiero, a las personas que odio, lo que he hecho por la mañana, si tengo que ir al servicio o si hoy es el cumpleaños de mi hijo. Lo juro. No soporto esa idea. Prefiero diluirla en un cuento, en una historia, de buenos y malos, como lo son todas las grandes historias. Y entonces me imagino que nuestros abuelos, abuelas, padres, mi tío, en fin toda la gente que amamos, fue guardando en una cajita todos los momentos buenos y felices de su vida para que nadie, por mucho que lo intentase, se los pudiera quitar nunca. Y dejaron fuera la atrocidad de la Guerra Civil y el hambre de la posguerra, la tristeza de la emigración y todas la penurias que en algún momento pasaron.

Sin embargo en algún momento y mientras Dios se iba mear un hijo de la gran puta llamado Alzheimer que vivía en un sitio muy frío, solo y sin el amor de nadie, fue por todas las casa del mundo y fue robando una a una todas las cajitas que con tanto recelo habían ido guardando nuestros familiares y se las fue quedando todas, tanta era la envidia y el odio que le consumía. Y un día alguien se encontrara de cara a cara con este cabrón y le dirá: ni una más. No pienso dejar que te lleves ni una cajita más. Ya has hecho demasiado daño. Y el gran bastardo, el que tantos recuerdos truncó, se tendrá que ir a terminar sus días al rincón sucio y frío del que nunca debió salir. Solo. Y sin ningún recuerdo que añorar.

Así lo asimilo mejor. De alguna manera me permite digerirlo.

Y precisamente ha sido eso lo que me ha enseñado mi tío. Él, desconfiado dejo fuera de la cajita una cosa que el hijo de la gran puta no pudo robar. Lo guardó muy dentro, tanto como pudo. Y en sus últimos días, cuando no recordaba ni su propio nombre, ni el de sus hijos, había una cosa que no había olvidado: el nombre de su mujer. Hasta el ultimo de sus alientos recordó siempre como llamar a la mujer con la que tantos disgustos y alegrías había pasado: Abelina.

Te jodes. Pedazo de hijo de la gran puta. Eso no te lo pudiste llevar cabrón. No te llevaste el amor. No pudiste con todo. No lo robaste todo. Púdrete en algún rincón olvidado bastardo.

Ese recuerdo me llevo de ti tío. Un recuerdo magnifico que te juro no me arrancará nadie. Lo juro. Descansa en paz.

Groovy

2003-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Parece ser que en la comunidad OS (aunque quizas debiera hablar de comunidad Weblogera, ya comentare esto…) se esta cociendo un nuevo lenguaje de script. Si ya se que algunos estareis pensando : Eramos pocos y… Bueno en realidad podriamos decir que teneis y que no teneis razon a la vez. Groovy, que es el nombre que estan dando al pequeño embrión, es un lenguaje dinamico que combina cosas de lenguajes como Python, Ruby y Smalltalk pero que al contrario que estos permite al desarrollador escribir con una sintaxis 100% Java.

En un principio la intención del lenguaje es permitir que los desarrolladores Java podamos escribir tests y scripts de manera muy rapida sin tener que conocer una sintaxis o lenguaje especial y con una ventaja añadida: que se ejecuta sobre la JVM, igual que cualquier otra clase que pudiéramos imaginar.

A modo de ejemplo en la pagina del proyecto encontramos un ejemplo bastante grafico de las ventajas de utilizar lenguajes de scripting como este:

class Foo {
  doSomething() {
    data = ["name": "James", "location": "London"];
    for e in data {
      println("property ${e.key} is ${e.value}");
    }
  }

  closureExample(collection) {
    collection.each { i :
      println("value ${i}");
    };
  }

  static main(args) {
    values = [1, 2, 3, "abc"];
    closureExample(values);
  }
}

Como podeis ver no existen declaraciones de tipo, las iteraciones son transparentes, etc… Vamos lo que se espera de un lenguaje dinamico.Detrás del proyecto esta la gente de codehaus (los de aspectwerkz y drools) y parece que como cabeza visible se encuentra James Strachan.

Como reseña os dire que se esta utilizando groovy para testar el desarrollo de groovy ;-). Podeis estar seguros que si sigue el proyecto a la marcha actual el primer lenguaje de script que soportara InformaMe (o creiais que me habia olvidado) será Groovy.

Aristóteles y los metodos ágiles

2003-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Enciendo mi cerebro con un poco de café, mantengo mi conciencia a medio gas disfrutando del placer de no pensar. De existir sin el desarrollo de una conciencia. De poder vivir unos minutos sin ninguna obligación. Desperdiciando el tiempo como un insano placer, dándole una palmadita en la espalda para que sepa que por un momento soy yo el que manda, aun cuando me doy cuenta de que al darse la vuelta se parte de risa. Que se le va hacer. Me inyecto mas café. Y de repente algo me conecta de nuevo con un rumor lejano, con una historia antigua, una historia que me gusta. La historia de un hombre: Aristóteles.

Entonces, solo entonces, leo. Y entonces, justo entonces, ni un segundo antes, lo juro, pienso.

Leo acerca de Aristóteles y su explicación de la naturaleza y de la astronomía, y sobre los elementos. Los cuatro corruptos y finitos tierra, agua, aire y fuego- y el infinito e inmutable: el Éter. Y leo como dentro de su perfecta retórica, sus increíblemente plausibles argumentos, la lógica aplastante de sus explicaciones, Aristóteles no estaba en lo cierto. Estaba equivocado. Maldita sea, estaba jodidamente equivocado.

¿Por qué? ¿Cómo?. No estaba infectado aún por el virus del empirismo. No necesitaba demostrar que sus argumentos eran ciertos. No lo necesitaba. ¿Por qué demostrar algo que es obviamente cierto?. Había convertido sus teorías, sus argumentos, en meta reglas. El tío mamón consiguió que durante mas de dos mil años todo el mundo admitiese sus teorías sin tener siquiera que demostrar que estas eran ciertas. ¿Quién podía ser tan estúpido como para pensar que las cosas podían ser de otra manera?. ¿Quién siquiera se atrevería a insinuarlo?. Bueno, pues Galileo lo hizo. Pero eso es otra historia.

De la misma manera que Aristóteles consiguió generar esas meta reglas, también nosotros los jodidos informáticos nos hemos agarrado durante décadas a magníficos errores, prostituidos para satisfacernos, sacrificados en el altar del mercantilismo, convertidos en piedra filosofal de los nuevos alquimistas, de los nuevos locos…

Eso es lo que hicimos con la programación estructurada. Algo que surgió como método para eliminar el error de Aristóteles, la constatación empírica del correcto funcionamiento de los programas, se convirtió muy a pesar de su creador, Edsger Dijkstra, en otro error Aristotélico, en una nueva meta regla que aceptar sin mas. Y así llegaron el análisis estructurado, el diseño estructurado, la estulticia estructurada.

Sin embargo ¿cómo estar contentos de nuestra labor habiéndonos equivocado solo una vez?. No por supuesto, necesitábamos coger otro nuevo paradigma y convertirlo en nuestro ídolo. Y así fue como decidimos coger la orientación a objetos, un experimento sobre como manejar óptimamente estructuras de datos, y convertirlo en nuestra nueva meta verdad.

¿Y el siguiente paso?. Todo el mundo sabe que no hay dos sin tres. Todo el mundo tiene ese maldito meta conocimiento. Pues el siguiente paso por lo visto esta sin dar. ¿Convertiremos la palabra Agile o Agile methods en nuestra nueva meta verdad, al igual que hicimos con POO, o con Programación estructurada?. Esperemos que no. Espero que no. Espero que no sea la próxima piedra en el bolsillo de un comercial o en el bolsillo de un consultor.

Y entonces, justo entonces, ni un segundo antes, lo juro, dejo de pensar y me inyecto de nuevo café…

Royal Mile

2003-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

Ya estoy en Scotland!!!. Sin putos acentos, signos de puntuación y eines pero ya estoy aqui :-). Llegamos ayer y la verdad hemos tenido una llegada un poco estresante.

Nos levantamos el miércoles a las 4:15 AM para coger el vuelo de Dublin a Edimburgo a las 6:50 AM. Mi cuerpo todavía se esta recuperando. Sin comentarios.

Llegamos a Edimburgo a las 7:50 AM y al hotel a las 9:15 AM (cosas de estar en una ciudad nueva). Los dueños, Thrish y Richard, unas personas encantadoras, nos dieron la mala noticia de que hasta las 3:00 PM no podíamos entrar a la habitación. Bueno, cansadas y sin podernos dar una ducha relajante, dejamos nuestro bultos y nos vamos hacia el centro (de nuevo a pie :-).

Llegamos a la Royal Mile (el centro neurálgico del viejo Edimburgo) y nos encontramos con el fringe. Esta es la versión “alternativa” del mundialmente conocido Festival Internacional de Edimburgo. Entrecomillo alternativa por dos razones:

Es uno de los pocos signos de puntuación que puedo seguir poniendo correctamente en este puto teclado ingles :-)
Alternativo se suele asociar con amateur, bajo presupuesto, minoritario, etc… Nada mas lejos de la realidad.

Yo sabia perfectamente (y de hecho busque provocarlo) que el fringe (que tiene un fama extraordinaria) se celebraba estos días y que proporciona una cantidad abrumadora de espectáculos. Arrrrrnnnnn!. Error. Tiene una cantidad BRUTAL de espectáculos. Para que os hagáis una idea hay unas 450 representaciones distintas cada día. Editan un periódico (The Metro) que contiene comentarios sobre obras y sugerencias, así como la cartelera del día. Esta cartelera ocupa 6 paginas de periódico a 5 columnas!.

Bueno, que me voy por las ramas, llegamos el fringe y a los 10 minutos de estar viendo a un -luego supe portugués- cómico nos sacan a la palestra a mi y a Bego. La cosa acabo conmigo en el suelo con una espada, vaina, corona y flor, hecho todo ello con globos, como príncipe valiente al que mata el típico dragón, Bego llorando desconsolada como la típica princesa cuyo amado ha caído en combate y “hado madrino” que con unos cuantos toques de varita (hecha con globos :-) lo soluciona todo. Muchas risas, aplausos del respetable para el cómico y para nosotros - pobres extras - y un agradable recuerdo.

Después visita obligada al Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre:

Opinión: Genial y caro. Vamos como casi todo por aquí. Por cierto incluye una degustación de whisky de 8 años - en mi caso destilado en la isla de Skye-.
Compra: En mi caso un botella de Whisky de las isla de Jura de 12 años, difícil de conseguir en el País Vasco a un precio de risa : 28.99

Y como me aburría ya de pasear por la Royal Mile - una maravilloso lugar Edimburgo, os invito a que lo veáis algún día - pues se me ocurre que puedo hacer un gesto torpe al ponerme la mochila y romper mis únicas gafas aquí. Joder perra suerte!.

Si alguna vez creéis que tenéis un dominio del ingles aceptable (como me pasaba a mi), y nunca lo habéis podido contrastar, os invito a que tratéis de VIVIR en ingles durante un mes para que salgáis del espejismo. Pero si lo que queréis es una experiencia fuerte os recomiendo que intentéis preguntar a un policía donde esta la óptica mas cercana, que llegada a esta le expliquéis al dependiente que no queréis arreglar las gafas, si no que queréis unas nuevas y que no tenéis los papeles de la ultima graduación y que por lo tanto te tienen que hacer un test, en el que por cierto le tienes que explicar a la doctora que tiene miopía, astigmatismo y una suerte penosa!. Y que todo esto lo hagáis en Dublin, ni en Londres, ni en Manchester, sino que lo hagáis en Edimburgo en el que la mayoría de la gente… !habla en escoces (no en gaélico)!. Que chorrada estaréis pensando algunos, en escocia hablan ingles aunque tengan algo de acento. De eso nada muchachos, cualquier parecido entre lo que hablan los escoces y el ingles que todos conocemos es pura coincidencia. Bueno, que se le va hacer. Tengo mis gafas nuevas (en un día!) y encima por el precio de estas me han dado otras de sol graduadas. Si al final hasta me va a salir bien…

Y nada hoy después de la odisea de las gafas (y con unas de Bego puestas hasta que me han dado las nuevas :-) nos hemos dirigido al castillo de Edimburgo. Si tengo que reducir a dos palabras : fantástico y extenuante.

Opinión : El museo aunque caro es genial y presenta en un solo conjunto arquitectónico varios museos. Es gigante y tiene muchas cosas que ver (a nosotros hoy verlo rápido nos ha costado 5 horas) así que armaros de agua y energías si queréis verlo.
Compra : En mi caso (je,je, se que a algunos os va a hacer gracia esto) una caja de postales de diseñador Mackintosh y un reproducción enmarcable de un viejo mapa de escocia

Pues nada que el tiempo no me da para mas (esto del easyInternetCafe es la bomba) y que el sábado salimos para las Highlands así que no creo que me conecte hasta la próxima semana.

Escoces saludos.

Core Developer Network

2003-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

De todos es sabido lo ocurrido en los dos últimos días en el centro de JBoss Group LLC. Y creo que a nadie se le escapa que no es un evento mas dentro del mundo OpenSource. En pocas palabras: Los desarrolladores favoritos de Rickard (que merece toda mi credibilidad ;-) se han cansado del modo de trabajo del grupo comandado por el subcomandante Marc Fleury, y han dicho “hasta aqui hemos llegado”. En algunos foros se ha hablado sobre la continuidad de estos desarrolladores en el proyecto de JBoss, algo que EMHO me parece fuera de toda duda, ¿podría ser de otra manera?, ¿puede Marc impedirlo moralmente?, ¿puede impedirlo legalmente?: sinceramente NO.

Lo que se le presenta ahora a Marc no es un problema técnico, ni de desarrollo, lo que se le presenta es un problema COMERCIAL. Me equivoco o ¿no es la primera vez que dos compañías se presenta como competencia directa por un proyecto opensource?. No, lo de las distribuciones linux no es lo mismo; los productos que cada compañía (SuSe, RedHat,etc…) vendía/distribuía eran claramente diferentes y poseían enfoques y configuraciones que las revelaban como productos bastante distintos.

Pero ahora tenemos a dos compañías ofreciendo consultoría (un nicho de negocio que se rige casi única y exclusivamente por el prestigio de las compañías que lo intentan cubrir) sobre el servidor de aplicaciones OPENSOURCE mas importante del mundo. Y todos sabemos de la calidad y el prestigio de los que se han ido del JBoss Group. Y es más: Marc también lo sabe. Y tiene miedo. Al menos yo lo tendría. Ese aire entrañable de familiaridad, de confraternización, de buen rollo, de hermandad casi masónica, de al fin al cabo grupo, al que tanto tiempo se ha agarrado para tirar del carro del proyecto JBoss, se ha desecho, perdón, lo han desecho en 48 horas. El OpenSource madura, aunque sea por las malas relaciones Marc-Resto del Mundo.

En mi opinión Marc tiene varias alternativas abiertas a partir de hoy:

Aprovecharse de la ruptura. Reconocer que efectivamente había diferencias dentro del JBoss Group sobre como orientarse en su mercado (y también sobre como orientarse en la vida opensource, pero bueno mejor eso que se lo calle), y sobre que modelo de negocio trabajar, y que como en todas las empresas llegado este punto, un grupo se ha decido escindir. Marc tiene una oportunidad perfecta para dar más bombo y platillo que nunca a JBoss. Es un servidor maduro que ahora no solo tiene un equipo de desarrollo brillante sino algo igual de importante : dos compañías de software que se PEGAN por ofrecer mejores servicios sobre él, que son al fin y al cabo, COMPETENCIA.
Hacerse el loco. Seguir adelante con la idea feliz de que las nubes son de algodón y las pone Dios, y de que en JBoss Group todos viven en un estado de permanente alegría y camaradería. De igual manera estos chicos del CDN no pretenden sino pasar un ratito divertido probando lo que se siente montando una PYME.
Iniciar una caza de brujas. A estos chicos prácticamente les he echado yo. Por rojos, comunistas y masonazos. Pretendían destruir la integridad de España, esto perdón, de JBoss Group. Y de eso nada, aquí estoy yo fiel baluarte de Occidente para defenderla. Así que ya sabéis: el que no piense como yo, puerta.
Reconocer su fracaso en JBoss y abandonar el puesto que ocupa. Sin comentarios. Así que no me gustaría estar en el pellejo de Marc porque sinceramente lo que haga a partir de ahora va a marcar la evolución de JBoss Group (no de JBoss) de hoy en adelante. ¿Qué vas a hacer Marc?.

¿Roja o Azul?

P.S.: Por cierto el logo de CDN es mucho mejor que el de JBoss Group ;-).