Agile Software Addiction

OutSystems job opportunities (in Portugal)

2009-10-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-27T01:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-02-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

Today was a good day:

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

Become a Gourmet Dog and a True Believer

2007-02-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-02T15:51:00.000-08:00

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

The King of Technology Marketing

2007-01-10T19:08:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

#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

2006-12-27T14:40:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-13T15:45:00.000-08:00

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

2006-07-31T13:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-03-26T22:49:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-22T09:03:00.000-08:00

Times Square, New York City

Speed is the unstated requirement

2006-02-16T03:04:00.000-08:00

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...

2006-02-09T22:28:00.000-08:00

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

2006-01-07T19:03:00.000-08:00

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

2006-01-04T02:15:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-06T20:42:00.000-08:00

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

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

2005-11-16T16:22:00.000-08:00

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).

Ajax usability: it's not just the back button

2005-11-01T23:51:00.000-08:00

Why do grandpas feel web applications easier to use than desktop applications?

No dbl-click
No right click
No save/open
No menus
Left click hover feedback (hand cursor)
Back button

So now that we can create more powerful web applications with Ajax let's see if we can remember this and keep them simple.

Little signs of cool

2005-10-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

Often you find them where they are least expected. As in the automated build procedure of a big dull financial corporation. It sends emails using this address: mrbuild@dullcompany.com

Good Marketing

2005-10-09T02:58:00.000-07:00

The New Zealand CanTeen foundation, that helps teenagers with cancer, has a bandanna week where they sell those bandannas in a lot of supermarkets. It's a great idea.

But the best part is that this year they had the approval from Disney to use the muppets manha manha (bandanana) clip in the tv ads.

Brilliant!

Office interface

2005-10-04T00:26:00.000-07:00

Today one of the most recognized UI's with buttons (after the remote control up/down volume and telephone numbers layout) must be MS Office's.

If you change the money making mammoth you will upset a lot of people for sure.

So why do it?

1 - because it's bad and new users don't get it
2 - because someone could do it better and cheaper (as with gmail, StarOffice)
3 - because people are thinking what they have is good enough and they are stopping the upgrade cycle

Despite always being accused of being only a copier, there are actually some good UI tidbits from this company (the spell-checker underline from word6, the smart after paste drop down from XP). They just don't seem enough to justify so much money and mistakes like the office assistant. But probably nothing will ever be.

But it is nice to follow
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx
for some insight on history of the interface and to understand the reasons for the coming changes.

Public property. Keep out!

2005-10-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

We've been taught for years to do this:

private string _name;
public string Name
{
get {

return _name;
}
set {

_name = value;
}
}

But now that we know about agile and refactoring doesn't it sound like over-engineering? Shouldn't we simply say?

public string Name;

It's easier to read, uses less screen real estate and we can always change it to the former when we need.

The return of the hourglass

2005-09-15T03:40:00.000-07:00

One of the best tricks to improve usability in AJAX web applications is to use the hourglass
document.body.style.cursor = "wait";

And this has the side-effect of "fixing" a lot of asynchronous problems.

How to be open without being open-source

2005-08-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Joel has been teaching us how to do that for years. Now he even publishes internal product specs on the web. Interesting read.

Unlike most, this software project does not have a lot of UI, actually it is a kind of simpler Remote Desktop, so it "borrows" all of it from the OS. But in regular projects I think that software specifications should be mostly UI mock screenshots. Images are really worth a thousand words.

The gadget I'm going to buy

2005-08-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

The next gadget I'm going to buy is a cellphone+ipod+blackberry+>3mpx camera. I'm not going to buy anything else that can become obsolete when this arrives. The technology is there, so why is it taking so long? Oh, and make it cheap too, please.

I'm in NY for the first time

2005-08-24T22:04:00.001-07:00

It smells like trash.
The temperature is on the 90F (38o).
It's noisy.
I'm away from Joana and working long hours to keep up with my team back in NZ.

But I can't help it,

It is the most amazing city in the world.

Why the PC platform beat Apple

2005-08-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

There are more theories for this than for the disappearing of dinosaurs. Here's mine: Piracy. Back in the mid, early 90's you could get any software (and games) easily for PC. You needed stupid serial # for Mac. So everyone bought PC because the software was "cheaper".

Hardcore User Interface expert

2005-08-24T22:03:00.001-07:00

Today I was called an "Hardcore UI Expert". I liked the sound of that, maybe I'll make a t-shirt. But it also kind of reminds me of the joke about architects, not man enough to be civil engineers, not gay enough to be interior decorators.

Gmail invitations are the best anti-spam technology

2005-08-24T22:03:00.000-07:00

If you're on gmail someone knows that you are not a dog.

Functional Test First

2005-08-24T22:02:00.000-07:00

Developers should only interact with their applications in 2 modes:
Record Mode & Playback Mode
This would speed up development and provide valuable functional tests.
As every rule there is an exception: There is also the Flawless Demo Mode when you are showing it to the client.
Functional tests are stronger, provide more code coverage, and are more refactoring-proof than unit tests. But it should be the role of developers to do them, not of a different QA team that sits on the 2nd floor.
They are also recorded in a language you should understand: the end user language (write text, click button, assert result...).

How I learned about Software

2005-08-24T22:00:00.001-07:00

Back in the nineties I had an addiction: MSFT Software. I would download every demo, read each press release. I would read the "What's New" in the product help religiously. I don't know why. I'm just a sucker for new features. Most of the apps I would never have to use anyway. Oh my, this is sad. Sometimes I should just keep things to myself.

Super Zoom cameras

2005-08-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

There is a category of digital cameras out there that is really great: Super-Zooms. After using an image-stabilized super zoom you will wonder why would you need to change lenses at all. They are just a thrill to use. When I use SLR I think they are too much trouble. When I use compacts I feel claustrophobic. I just wish they could make them fit in a pocket.

The art of software

2005-08-24T21:55:00.000-07:00

What makes a good Program Managers is not what they select to implement but what they have the guts not to (gmail: no folders, no sorting). It's the 80-20 rule. Just try to nail down the right 20% in a smart way.

Keeping it simple is the hardest part.

The client is always right

2005-08-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about other businesses, but in software the client is always right when he is complaining about something. He may not be right about the solution, but if he complains usually there is a problem that needs to be acknowledged. It is the developer's task to find the right solution with the client.
"But the client is not using it the right way!"
It should be more intuitive.
"But I told my client that we should have not implemented that way, and now he is complaining!!!!"
Totally your fault. You could not convince him properly. Try to learn to communicate better.

How to be a complete man

2005-08-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

Write a book
Plant a tree
Have a child

How to be a complete geek

2005-08-24T21:52:00.000-07:00

Write a blog
Contribute to open source
Teach someone to program

I Love Microsoft

2005-08-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

Still a little. They were the first ones to understand that software could be packaged as complete Products.

But now I love Google and Apple more. Simplicity and looks have always turned me on.

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." Buckminster Fuller

The Flash Platform

2005-08-24T21:45:00.000-07:00

There is an underdog software platform out there that might just surprise Java and .net world. It's called Flash. Reasons:

One of the architects of the next generation was ASP.Net father (Mark Anders) and Tim O'Reilly is a board member
They will start using Eclipse (That in some ways is a lot better than Visual Studio)
They have a good relationship with Open Source communities (swf format is open source, Eclipse, ActionScript = ECMA-262 JavaScript 2.0)
ActionScript (JavaScript 2.0) language has the beneficts of strongly typed languages (auto-complete, strong checking) and of loosely typed languages (not so much conversion code)
It has the cross-browser, cross-platform most pervasive runtime environment
Writing applications in a fat client way is a lot easier and designs remain a lot simpler
After Gmail and Google Maps everybody wants more interactive interfaces. Just check this (mouse wheel supported) to compare with AJAX.
Very good streaming format
Every Nokia cell phones will have flash player built-in

SAP enables the usage of Flex in NetWeaver

Adobe has load of $$$

They have crossed the cultural blog chasm better than other companies

High price for Flex but the long-term strategy is more abranging. The long term might just be to long... Ajax is growing and Avalon will start soon.

Hello World

2005-08-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit