OutSystems job opportunities (in Portugal)

26 of them just in the last month!

http://www.centro-emprego.com/emprego/outsystems/

How can you convince your boss to adopt an Agile Methodology

I still find this YouTube video (posted exactly 3 years ago) the best way to convince top managers to adopt an agile methodology:



What about you?

What arguments have you used to convince your managers and clients to adopt an agile methodology?

OLPC

I must admit that when I first heard about Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program a few years ago I was a bit skeptic. But now I'm happy to report that the project seems to be thriving and that the new Give 1 Get 1 idea might boost it even further.


The few screenshots I've seen of the OS seem really weird, but I'll have to investigate that further.

Now you can also use OutSystems for Free

I've been dreaming on this day for years and it finally came - OutSystems is releasing a free edition of its platform.




The Beta Program of OutSystems Express Edition has started and you can register here to get your free download.

• It's an agile application development platform
• It comes with a built-in IT Asset Manager application
• It is Free for up to 5 end users

The R&D team has done a terrific job fitting a full enterprise application platform into a package that runs in regular desktop PC's.

Let me know if you have any problems, comments or suggestions. I am very interested in hearing your feedback, specially if you have never used OutSystems before.

Because life is not just work

Today was a good day:

1. I finished one of the best books I have read in a long time - A Little History of the World.
2. I took my first ocean swim this year.
   
3. I went to vote. I love voting day.

Become a Gourmet Dog and a True Believer

If you are creating a product or providing a service, if you can, make an effort to be your own customer.

At our company we have always been "eating our own dog food" - we take advantage of the products we create to improve our internal processes. Not only we do that, but we also "practice what we preach" and manage all projects with an Agile Methodology.

This has been helping us to constantly improve both the way we work AND the products we provide.

2 new bloggers from my office

After António, Paulo has also started blogging.
The internet will be richer now.

The King of Technology Marketing

Steve Job's last keynote was so good that I actually believe the small glitch with the clicker was rehearsed so that it wouldn't be too perfect. It was just perfect.

The 1st Phrase of an Highly Annoying Programmer

#1 - "It's what Martin Fowler does/says"

I've just read the The 5 Phrases of Highly Annoying Programmers after writing my last post :)

Stereo Vision Improves Developer Productivity

Unlike Martin Fowler, when I am asked how to improve software developers' productivity I show the OutSystems Platform working.

But I have to agree that big screens are also a very good help. Pair programming is a lot easier with 2 huge CRTs than with a single small LCD.

A History of the Future

In July 1997, before the .com bubble, before 9/11, before Bush, Wired was a bible to my belief in the power of technology.

There was this whole issue telling us how bright our futures would be:
The Long Boom: A History of the Future

Althougt most of it has alredy proved to be wrong, I'm still the same optimist I used to be.

back to where I once belong

I'm back at OutSystems.

It was the coolest start-up in the world when I left, and I must confess I was afraid that it had changed.

Well, it has. It's not a start-up anymore, sales have been growing at an incredible rate, and more and more people have been falling in love with the amazing technology.

But the best part for me is feeling that the new guys that have joined the team are at least as good as the people who where working there before - and that is really saying a lot.

Oh, it's good to be home.

push me / pull me

I've read the "The Design of Everyday Things" not a long time ago.

The edition is poor but the contents are still very good.

The coverage of the classic usability problem about push/pull doors made me grin silently.



In Portuguese, my native language, "puxe" (that's read like push) actually means pull.

When I see any door I stand there for 3 seconds thinking before I do anything, and then I'll do exactly the opposite of what I need to :(

World's largest Windows error message

Times Square, New York City

Speed is the unstated requirement

I hate unreadable code. So, whenever I see developers doing things like using StringBuffers instead of plain vanilla strings to make a couple of concatenations and tell me it’s to make the code run faster, I start to get nervous.

And very ugly problems have been caused in the name of speed and scalability. Remember when everyone was high about distributed objects? The fever is back again with xml web services in service oriented architectures. You wouldn’t believe the amount of useless serialization and deserialization I’ve seen in some systems.


But speed is one requirement that users will not state explicitly (like easy of use). If they do, it’s because the problem has already reached scary dimensions. And we need to understand that speed will play a major role in the likeability of our applications.

So optimize often. Optimize well. Be fanatic about speed.

A day in the life...

This morning at work we discussed and sketched a class diagram and an entity diagram on the whiteboard. With hibernate we tend to think just on the class diagram, but some of us still need to think in tables.

After we started implementing it, we remembered that the information would have to be remoted across to the client. We would also need to create the admin interface to manage this and some db script to provision default values.

We used the eraser on the whiteboard and decided that we would implement those collections as hard coded enumerations and let our code generator handle the conversion from Java to ActionScript.

We will only have one early adopter client for the next few months and there were no real requirements to make this easily configurable yet.

A comment from a colleague of mine:


- In uni I would never have imagined that I would have a nice class diagram and entity diagram defined and that then I would want to dumb it down to an hard coded enumeration!


Hard coded values are not bad: hard coded unorganised values are bad.

Also if we had used word or visio to create the diagrams we would have felt that we needed to implement it the way it was first drawn. Whiteboards rule!

BTW all the logic and most of the complex UI has been successfully pair programmed today based on the specs that we had discussed yesterday with the client. Agile methodologies rule!

The "new" Small Business Server 2003

Today I've received an email from Microsoft about the new Small Business Server 2003.

Have they noticed it's 2006 already?

This naming strategy worked when they were a fast company and wanted to make us feel we needed to upgrade.

Now it just shows how slow and bloated they have become.

I've told you so

The most obnoxious posts in blogosphere are the "I've told you so..." kind.

Here's one from me:
Jon Udell talks about the possible advantages of ActionScript (Macromedia's JavaScript 2.0) as a language that is both strongly typed and loosly typed

A good IDE is worth a 1000 praise words

But if good documentation and images are provided I can spare you and just point you to those:

• Java Tips and Tricks
• IDE Tips and Tricks

If you use VS.net 2003 download Eclipse and see what you are missing. Or upgrade to VS.2005 that must have copied most of this stuff.

In the confusion of java web frameworks I think I would miss ASP.net, but with Flex I'm playing with a more powerfull markup language than HTML anyway.

And I miss C# property getters and setters. But hibernate and eclipse are cool.

2 cool tips

These ones are not new, but I've seen far too many people not knowing about them.

1 - With any message box in windows

You can use Ctrl+ C and you'll get this in the clipboard

---------------------------
Save As
---------------------------
C:\test.txt already exists.
Do you want to replace it?
---------------------------
Yes No
---------------------------

Great for support or for gogling catastrophic error messages.

2 - The best blog reader out there is called firefox. Just use the button in the bottom right corner of the browser (In the address bar if you are already using 1.5).