sergiosantos.info, blog & works

Book: Innovation and Entrepreneurship

2009-10-03T12:28:00Z

Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a famous book by Peter Drucker, known as the father of the management science. Its an essay on how innovation can be a systematic process and entrepreneurship a more predicable activity. All followed with a good number of examples.

Besides describing all the subjects covered in the book, I’ll leave you with important opinions I collected:

Vision on opportunity – On project reports, don’t search only for problems, search also for opportunities, things that worked better than expected.

Expect that everything will be changed or disappear in a 3 years span, to encourage the fact that innovation is necessary.

If you want to have a successful innovative project, start with three ideas at least.

Have a meeting with the junior workers and ask them for new ideas, values and vision. Those who propose new ideas should get to work and develop them.

Measure innovation performance to learn what resources and time are typically needed, and to know when a project is not performing well.

Innovation should be set aside of the other business projects, and have distinct objectives, metrics and rewards.

Entrepreneurship is not so much a personality trait, and more a result of culture, structure and process.

It’s on Google Books so take a look:

October 3, 2009 by Sérgio Santos Website product book

The complete list of reviewed books.

Django vs Rails

2009-09-13T22:13:00Z

Here is the presentation of my talk at BarCampPT.

Repeating the disclaimer: I’m not an expert in any web framework. But I have done projects for clients both in Django and Ruby on Rails. And it’s not a discussion nof which framework should you choose and stick with forever. The purpose is to highlight the best features of each that should be replicated.

Talk at BarCamp PT

2009-09-10T20:37:00Z

I’ll be speaking this weekend at BarCamp PT. The name of the talk is Django vs Rails. It will be a short overview on the main differences between the two web frameworks. Show up :)

Book: A Semantic Web Primer

2009-08-29T22:55:00Z

I’ve been using microformats for some time now. I believe they’re currently the best solution for enriching semantically the web. But I wanted to know more about other developments (specially from the academic side) towards the Semantic Web vision. So I though A Semantic Web Primer would be a good start, by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen.

The book has a good introduction on the main subjects and purposes of the field, and a thorough description of the most used technologies: XML, RDF and OWL. It also has an chapter with some applications of those semantic web technologies.

The only shortcoming is the lack of discussion over tools and more detailed use cases. That kind of information is still scattered across the academic papers world, although it is crucial for the success of these approaches.

Summing up: a good book to learn all about the core technologies of the semantic web, but you’ll need more information to work productively with them.

August 29, 2009 by Sérgio Santos Website product book

The complete list of reviewed books.

Book: Code Complete

2009-08-28T22:24:00Z

This summer I finally had time to read Code Complete from cover to cover. And I didn’t regret it. It’s really one of the best books on programming I’ve ever read. The author is Steve McConnell. For a very passionate review of this book check the Coding Horror blog.

The book discusses the construction phase of software projects: the actual coding. It presents lists of best pratices for every construction detail, along with best/worst examples and research data. It also mentions more briefly subjects such as software design, requirements and testing.

Despite its age (the 1st edition was released in 1993), its advices remain essential for every programmer. A must read.

August 28, 2009 by Sérgio Santos Website product book

The complete list of reviewed books.

Sprint based development

2009-08-25T23:00:00Z

I was impressed to find out that the video feature on Facebook was the result of a 2-days coding stretch (see video). It seems that sprint based development is getting more and more popular. Specially around web development, teams choose smaller working cycles to put an idea to practice and test it.

How this correlates with quality is hard to tell. But true engineering can wait until the concept is proven. And the numerous agile frameworks available shorten the time needed to start a new project and build up a simple working version of a concept.

There are tons of events now around this idea. For example, the known Rails Rumble (just happened, their now voting on the best applications), or Django Dash for the python enthusiasts. Here in Portugal we have Sapo Codebits, a great event for building up prototypes and pitching them to a large audience.

This kind of approaches have also gone out of the programming hub into, for example, building business plans. See the Startup Weekend events as an example.

With this in mind, I’m changing a bit my approach on personal projects/ideas. I’m starting to build an ideas’ book, filled with concepts I would like to implement. Until I have time to actually do it, and feel like it, I’ll iterate over the features, design, user experience on my mind and write it all down. Whenever an event like Codebits arrives (or the internal hackaton at jeKnowledge we’ve been discussing), I want to have all planned and ready to start coding and get it done as quickly as possible.

I’m still a bit of afraid of the amount of ideas vs. the opportunities to implement them, but I guess it will help at selecting only the ones I like the most.

MileMarker JavaScript - Managing client expectations

2009-07-26T14:39:00Z

How do you usually tell your clients some parts of their web application aren’t still operational? The folks from ThoughtBot had an idea and built a small project – MileMarker – an helper for Ruby on Rails projects.

The idea is to create an overlay on specific parts of the website, that appears when the mouse moves over it. This way the client may see the whole website cleanly, but can’t interact with certain elements. The overlay may also be used to show information like to which milestone that element belongs (therefore the name of the project).

I liked the idea and wanted to be able to use it in non-rails projects, so I extracted the JavaScript code responsible for the functionality: mile_marker.js. I just added the ability to keep the overlay position correct after a page scroll.

The usage is simple. After including the Prototype library (required) and the file mile_marker.js, just add the property mile to an HTML element, like this:

...
<div mile="IMPORTANT TEXT">
Vel duis consequatvel tation dolore et eu. 
Lobortis nulla consequat accumsan nisl veniam 
illum laoreet volutpat nulla feugait te adipiscing.
</div>
...

Vel duis consequatvel tation dolore et eu. Lobortis nulla consequat accumsan nisl veniam illum laoreet volutpat nulla feugait te adipiscing.

Hope the script can be useful to others.

Web Fonts

2009-07-20T23:01:00Z

Several developments are happening in the typography world. After the @font-face adoption on the latest browsers and the increasing popularity of alternatives like sFIR or cufón, web designers are looking for fonts they can safely (legally) use online.

If you haven’t read a type foundry EULA, I can tell you that they’re not simple or clear (an example). And while the typography market has been a specific group of illuminated designers, new possibilities arise with online text. There’s a change here for a bigger and wider market.

In the meanwhile, type foundries are still waiting for a safe solution to sell fonts for online use. An interesting recent solution is renting fonts, like an online payed service. This is the approach of Typekit and Fontdeck.

However, since I’m no expert on this matter, I point to my usually typography source for further explanation on web fonts.

Startup notes

2009-07-13T10:21:00Z

Just as a personal note, there are two things I’m starting to enjoy very muck about working at a startup alike.

The first is the feeling that you can do anything. Have an idea, share it, receive feedback, put it to practice… Come to think of it, you don’t really need to be in a startup, or in a company for that matter. But when you have a interested group around you, with different skills and interests though the same goals, it makes a difference. Which leads me to the next thing.

Team work in a startup is great. I wasn’t able to figure it out well enough through University projects, where the goal is a single grade and everyone has similar knowledge. Having people around you helping, generating ideas, giving you feedback is great. Specially when they come from different backgrounds but gather around with the same mission.

To sum up, it’s been a wonderful experience and I’m learning a lot (which is also an excuse for not writing here so much).

Book: Outliers

2009-07-10T07:52:00Z

And the last book of my reading spree was Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve read Gladwell’s previous book Blink, which with this talk (mentioned in Rethinking Education), made me interested in reading the new book. Outliers talks about unique people, those who distinguish themselves and become successful and influence many others. It tries to explain what they have in common and what makes them special.

Comparing with the book Tribes by Seth Godin I reviewed last month, this author takes a very different approach. While Seth Godin prefers to deliver straight conclusions backed up by simple arguments, Gladwell dives much deeper into each topic, setting up an environment to deliver all of the details and results. Since they work on different topics and targets, both strategies seem to work well, but I can help to notice the contrast between the two.

In Outliers tells the background stories, more than the successful life, of those called outliers. People such as Bill Gates or the Beatles. How their success seems to be made of a huge number of work hours and being at the right place at the right time. An inspirational book desmistifying some common thoughts about talent and how an environment can shape a person’s life.

July 10, 2009 by Sérgio Santos Website product book

The complete list of reviewed books.

Book: The Ruby Programming Language

2009-06-27T23:02:00Z

Taking advantage of the recent free time, I was able to finish reading the other book I’ve bought at Sapo Codebits (the first was The Myths Of Innovation). The Ruby Programming Language is like one of those reference books, taking you through an overview of all the language features. I had already a good knowledge of the essential aspects of Ruby, but I wanted to have a full view of all it can really do.

The book was written by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto and has what you should expect, especially when the creator of a language is one of the authors (Matz, as he is commonly known). It covers methodically each feature, even some relatively unknown like fibers and some hooks. It’s not as boring as it may sound, since the concepts are well spread across all the book, and ruby code is of fairly light reading.

I enjoyed most the functional and metaprogramming chapters. They give a good insight on all the coding possibilities. A special note to the always great why comics that illustrate each chapter cover.

It’s a good book for anyone trying to gain a big knowledge of the programming language. Not one to be read from cover to cover, but to be picked up occasional and dive in a particular topic.

June 27, 2009 by Sérgio Santos Website product book

The complete list of reviewed books.

Book: Tribes

2009-06-19T22:15:00Z

Tribes is the latest book by the well known marketing author Seth Godin. I had already read one of his books, Small Is The New Big. However, Tribes is about leadership and communities. For the author, the world is composed of groups of people sharing a common interest, the tribes. And each of these tribes needs a leader.

The book follows the Seth Godin’s usual format. It’s a collection of small rants, examples and advices, written in an active and motivational style. More than the encouragement, it’s worth for the short stories. And the book is indeed short which it’s actually not a bad thing, since the vision it’s simple to understand.

An entertaining book with an important message.

June 19, 2009 by Sérgio Santos Website product book

The complete list of reviewed books.

Perch - On demand CMS

2009-06-06T13:20:00Z

Most of the websites, specially those which represent companies or institutions have simple technology needs: just a layout/design and content that needs to be updated occasionally. The most common solutions for this are: static HTML pages (and when the client wants to change something, it calls the web developer) or a CMS (whether we’re talking about WordPress on a in-house framework).

Perch offers a solution somewhere in the middle. It creates a content management interface for a static website simply by adding a PHP tag to a block of content. Mark a text as editable, and you can start managing it at the Perch administration page. The video on their website demonstrates the process very well.

This kind of systems are specially helpful for web designers. It’s getting harder for them to keep up with all the latest programming languages and frameworks, while a platform like this fulfils the basic needs of most clients. It’s not free (£35 for each domain), but I believe many designers are willing to pay the cost for not having to worry about programming.

Rapid Prototyping Framework

2009-05-29T18:45:00Z

Most of you probably know the game World of Goo. It turned itself into one of the most famous independent games of the last years and the winner of two IGF awards.

One of the members of 2D Boy, the team behind World of Goo, Kyle Gabler, is also behind the experimental gameplay project, a “research” project focused on the rapid prototyping of simple but innovative games.

Recently they released the Rapid Prototyping Framework they been working with. Since I’m working on a computer graphics project this semester, I got curious and decided to take a peak to see how it was like.

It’s made on C++ and comes with project files for Visual Studio, but I had to set up some things before I was able to run the demos on Visual Studio Express Edition 2008. The irrKlang libray is required, so I had to download and extract it to the framework libs folder. Then I had to collect a few missing dlls to the executable folder, and that was all. The second demo that ships with the platform is the nice asteroids remake you can see here.

I still have to search a little more to know more about its insides, but some tasks like image loading or sound playing seem easy enough, as it was supposed. A good platform for simple games.

Grid based webdesign with Boks and Blueprint

2009-04-18T19:56:00Z

I’ve been researching for a while now on web design grids. Specially on CSS frameworks who do all the grid work for me. I’ve found out that the design of this blog uses the YUI Grids CSS. And after having tested a couple of them, I’ve settled on Blueprint, though I still hadn’t done any real work using it.

Then some weeks ago I’ve found Boks, an AIR application that works as a visual editor for websites interfaces, using Blueprint. And above that, I got an excuse to play with it: the new website for jeKnowledge. It ended up something like this on Boks:

Then Boks exports the CSS files and a simple HTML file with the base structure. Of course this is not the end of it if you really want to work with a grid based web design. Boks also lets you configure a baseline rhythm, the “horizontal lines” of the grid. Then you have to spend some time making sure the all elements fit neatly in the grid, to get something like this:

Of course the overall effect will be more effective in websites full of content and images, like newspapers, but it is still important to maintain consistency in simpler pages. And all the constrains grid based design impose may be seen as inspirational aids. For me, this is surely a design process to repeat.

You can find the final result at http://jeknowledge.com (I was helped with the design elements by members of the company. Not really my strong suit).