2009 Balance

Since January 1st, I was trying to write a balance about what was 2009 for me. I’m in middle of my holidays and I stood in silence whilst enjoying a bucolical moment up in mountains in Rio and I can say 2009 became one of the most important year for my career.

Long ago, I was missing people to talk about advanced issue while seeing that most of us don’t have time to really be up to date in some subjects I like. But, I was lucky to be on my team and have all friends who had patience while listing when I wanted to say and while deaf when was busy on my job and dreams. Of course, special thanks to my wife which became smarter in TI industry as I was saying lot things she couldn’t ever dream of before – sometimes boring her.

I was involved in project of one the greatest press company in Brazil – working within the heart of money in there; My Company (commercial, managers and Team) did very well upside down, my boses also contributed to my advancements on commercial behavior (thanks Mr. Allak) and Continuous Integration practical assets (thanks Mr. Tensfeld). Also, my friends Robson Waterkemper and Werther Azevedo which are brazilian perls in Usability and Design.

I have met important industry leaders personally which are changing the way software developments happen in Brazil (thanks to Juan Bernabó an argentine geezer doing well in São Paulo and Rodrigo Toledo from Rio de Janeiro (PUC).

Besides all that, I also have listened to many writes by reading their works and making Amazon.com richer:

• Mme Mary Poppendieck
• Paul C. Clements
• Thomas Erl
• John Goodson
• Joe Duffy
• Sir Robert C. Martin
• Michael T. Nygard
• Sir Andrew S. Tanenbaum
• Jared Richardson
• William Gwaltney
• Paul Dyson
• Andrew Longshaw
• Sir Ted Faison
• Scott W. Ambler
• Pramodkumar J. Sadalage
• Alan Cooper
• William Gwaltney
• Andrew Hunt
• Daniel Pink
• along many others American, European and few Brazilian ones.

Note when I say “Sir” or “Mme” is because I’ve read more than one title they wrote or same book twice. Those authors really did good work and really contributed in way it changed me. The most special was Mary Poppendieck and Ted Faison which I must translate their names in following sentence:

“doing well for the business while avoid complexity by understand what that means”.

Last time I counted my readings it was 25. Some books I tried and stopped because the book cover was saying more than the content. Anyway, next are the subject which was feelingly involved in 2009:

• Product Development
• Lean
• Scrum
• Model Agile Techniques
• Advanced Object oriented programming
• Event-based system
• SOA
• Testing techniques (BBD and TDD)
• Continuous integration environments for applications and databases
• Concurrent techniques for application in multicore computers

In this February I’m pretty sure I’m really different from last one.

SaaS 2.0

Software-as-a-Service provides answer to get speed on deployment, usability and payment process. It increase quality of service allowing user to pay as they go. But it is limited in other respects; it would not be able to deliver on the business process which the company really needed, it couldn’t be easily integrated with the existent infra-structure, it hasn’t liability on performance and security which enterprise customers demanded and finally they only have reporting system and not robots analytics to drive those systems.

Adam May claims that Oracle CRM products transcends Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) 1.0 to SaaS 2.0 in this video.

What’s an Architect?

A stranger is traveling down a road on a hot summer day. As he progresses, he comes upon a man working by the side of the road breaking rocks.

“What are you doing?” he asks the man.

The man looks up at him. “I’m breaking rocks. What does it look like I’m doing? Now get out of my way and let me get back to it.”

The stranger continues down the road and soon comes upon a second man breaking rocks in the hot sun. The man is working hard and sweating freely.

“What are you doing?” asks the stranger.

The man looks up and smiles.

“I’m working for a living,” he says. “But it’s hard work. Maybe you have a better job for me?”

The stranger shakes his head and moves on. Pretty soon he comes on a third man breaking rocks. The sun is at its zenith now, the man is straining, and sweat is pouring off him.

“What are you doing?” asks the stranger. The man pauses, takes a drink of water, smiles, and raises his arms to the sky.

“I’m building a cathedral,” he breathes.

The stranger looks at him for a moment and says, “We’re starting a new company. How would you like to be our chief architect?”

If you’re looking to advanced your architecture thinking style and learn how noble you should be, try this book out but remember, what makes you Architecture the beautiful One is what the other says and how it is easier and faster to learn. Not just what you believe!

Amazon Web Services

Other day I was hiring a dedicated server. In doubt about whether choose between windows 2003 standard or web server. I’ve chosen the standard one. It has message queuing system and I needed it so much. Then stumbled at Amazon Web Services – Then I felt myself stupid. They provide Queuing services and worse – at very cheap price.

That comes as lesson… nowadays we can just architect solutions without take into account the new approach of services in the cloud. Amazon Web Services is just a sample which provides a lots of interesting services like Storage (very cheap), scalable mysql server (not that cheap but considerable if you’re really doing business) and many others.

I know there are other service providers which in my point view still needs clarify what services they provide and what cost is going to be at end. I’ve seen some services about cloud computing which always appear to be more expensive than it should. They also miss details which makes me unable to calculate exactly what I going to need.
How I would know how much processor cycles my application is going to need in month? Still not comfortable these days, hope it get better!

Code Generation Conference

I found out the Code Generation conference. Happens in Europe and sounds to be nice. They talk about code Generation and Model-Driven Software Development. The community says that the event has a strong practical focus and an emphasis on sharing experiences and knowledge and I hope to be there next year.

Automated Software Design Research Group

Lean software development demands too much automation. Of course, the idea is to make more with less and have higher quality until delivering software functionalities most important for the business. This path is hard, really hard. You’ll probably have to rethink all your gained knowledge and start developed a solid wisdom through research. Constantly looking new ways to do what you do today and improve what you think you need not.

Not every IT company will really benefit of Lean Thinking. Such style demand too much research and intellectual work which results will came along the way. You need to keep traces so to really understand the intangible results. This is expense, and you may give up in the very beginning.

I believe that the worse thing still the daily operation activities along low budget and unprepared managerial staff. People are too involved with day-to-day problems and stop everything aiming rethink their work in such advanced way can be a laborious process that can simply never happen!

Any way… I would like to present the Automated Software Design Research Group. This group explores new ways to develop software. They have a lot of academic papers (Dissertations and Theses) which can simply be applied to your life. Even if you not in Lean or Agile environment.
See ya..

Agile TechDay 2009

I was happy to be among those nice experienced agile guys! That was the second event in Rio about Agile methodologies. These one was special not just because I was invited to give a talk at the end but because the people who talked was really involved with scrum. For my surprise, rather than just agile ways in IT the principals of the Accenda Group gave a talk about Scrum in the marketing industry. They are trying to incise scrum at heart of marketing industry by doing what they call Agile Marketing. Nice approach but also a lot of people to convince!
So.. we are in InfoQ, have some pics.

Toyota side effects

On Jun 18, 2008, Reuters published an article exposing the Toyota’s human rights abuses and aggression to the worker’s rights.
The main subjects are:

• Trafficking of foreign guest workers, mostly from China and Vietnam to Japan
• Assembly line workers in Japan are low-wage temps who have few rights and earn less than 60% of what full time workers do

The auto industry has affected us so far through the Lean Thinking, Scrum and so on. In software industry, many ones are talking about Lean Thinking and how amazing we can be if we learn from other industries.

We are pround of Toyota’s managerial style which facilitate communication, avoid time-waste, spread knowledge across multifunctional teams and rush things to be completed. Now, our software projects has a good style to actually produce good results to our customers. Thus I hope the Toyota style side effect, exposed by Reuters doesn’t happen to us too. I’m really willing for the market get mature to see how this new organising will set.

u-hu-hu-hu-hu….

Read more: Toyota Linked to Human Trafficking and Sweatshop Abuses

IT professionals in Brazil must now be registered

As lawyers, the Brazilian IT professional will need to be registered in a federal counselor. They will possess a number indicating has higher level degree and authorization to work in software development and all other areas. Time experience will be considered in the initial phase.

A lot of people were dreaming about it for more than one decade. Especially for the ones who went to university. It happens that many professionals changed the degree diploma for technical certifications in a day-to-day basis experience due to the market’s steam. And most of those professionals without high level education wages equally or more than the ones whose possess the high level degree.

Apparently for these reason it is common to hear people decreasing the importance of a high level degree in favor of an indubitable “competence” and technical certifications like Microsoft, Sun, CISCO among others.

Of course time and experience rule our professional’s lives but the timeline to be a good professional might be leaned after computer science or other bsc. degree’s course.
The certifications are important too. It demonstrates the professional skills to deal with certain technical product. But that isn’t enough to make you solid through this turbulent and changeable industry.

I have a similar post in portuguese language at Cairo Noleto’s blog.

Legacy applications today

Well… today it’s common to find muticore computer. Obviously much powerful than the ones from past decades.

Business at all levels has powerful muticore computers but I doubt that most transactional business application is prepared to advantage from this architecture and actually make use of all available resource.

Doing parallel system is quite different from doing multithread system. Even the latter one is very scarce. Such models need differents structure algorithms.

Now, imagine a service oriented environment, inside SaaS ecosystem. A little bit further you migth find a candidate main service. These one we’ll be requested from many different requestors. Would you imagine how busy it will be? There’s a lot to take advantage from parellelism and concurrence but most of applications developed at moment are already legacy ones.

If you want some abstract or academically thought, try this wikipedia or microsoft side of the force.
Also, Josh Phillips is doing a very nice job at his blog.