Bruno Unna

Alistair Cockburn had been a hardware designer and researcher for 16 years when IBM asked him to write a methodology for object-oriented projects. He's spent the last decade studying and writing about software development and learned that some of the most successful projects have the simplest processes. In 2001 he and 16 other software-development heavyweights met to discuss so-called lightweight methodologies, and one result was the Agile Software Development Manifesto, which includes four value statements: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and responding to change over following a plan.

In this insightful interview with IT Conversations' producer Doug Kaye, Alistair explains how he uses games as a model for software projects, and how he discovered that the term "software engineering" was created on a whim in 1968. He also discusses the American and European aversion to copying: the not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome. "If you want to become a senior designer, you don't get there by finding all the components that are free on the web" even though "that's very cost effective, the customer likes it, the boss likes that, but you didn't get promoted."

Alistair explains how Agile is different from XP (eXtreme Programming) and talks about his forthcoming book on Crystal Clear, his answer to XP.

Well, the panel took place. It was all right.

We talked about Web 2.0, the hype and the real stuff. And we talked about the way Ruby on Rails can be used to tackle what we consider the distinguished characteristics of Web 2.0, which we shamelessly stole from the now famous Tim O'Reilly's .

At the end, and not without some technical glitches, a demo took place.

Some guys from lidsol (the organizers) were there, they seemed to be enjoying the presentation. I think they will explore this path.

Well, it's true: my jury have decided that when dealing with informatics and computation I'm competent enough to deserve a professional title. Good!

This is me, waiting for the exam to begin. I was a bit nervous:

This is a photo of the first one of the 290-slides-long presentation, waiting to be presented:

And this is my jury:

Thanks to Sebastian for taking the photographs.

Time to continue the tramit before SEP, in order to obtain the real piece of paper!

If it wasn't for the fact that Mr. Thompson has overseen a quite strong contendent in his words:

... Apple, the company's [Microsoft] only real rival in the creation of operating systems...

he would have got a masterpiece.

The article is about one of the greatest illnesses of our time (at least for people that -like me- work with a computer all of the day): distractors. It talks about the ways several intelligent persons deal with that, and how one can enrich his/her own experience by applying some simple -and admittedly not so simple- techniques.

Very enjoyable reading, indeed.

I've finally got a date to sustain my exam at CENEVAL: October 21st, at 10:00 (MST).

I must convince my jury that I know what I do in the computing field. I'll be defending my thesis: a system to run an on-line flower shop.

If they hadn't taken the long time they took to set a date, I surely would be much happier than I am.

At any rate, I have one week to reread my thesis. I must be very well prepared for whatever my jury has in mind.

I use to read Kathy Sierra's posts very passionately. But today I have to admit I feel a bit dissapointed.

I believe a passionate user distinguishes him/herself from the rest because of his/her very passion, not because of the "hard earned dollars" he/she spends in buying a book/subscription/conference/whatever.

It is the case that I'm going through a difficult time, from a financial point of view. Being deprived from interesting, intellectually provoking material just because of that, makes me remind the times at which I, as a young boy, had to flirt with illegal activities to get access to something of my interest or my need.

Dear Kathy: in my humble opinion, resting on the ability to access the material s a basis to discriminate whether a user is very passionate or not is stealing a primordial value from the very appreciation: authenticity.

Tim O'Reilly, being a respected authority as he is for me nowadays, is wrong: the value of the printed material should be mere convenience (and that is not something to be underestimated). Believe this: frustration is something that arises when passion is not enough to strive for the best stuff.

«flickr» forma parte de una corriente muy moderna llamada «software social». La idea esencial es muy simple: la participación de la gente le añade valor a la información.

En materia de «software social» hay de todo. Tres ejemplos de tipos de sitios:

1. Hay sitios en los que un solo individuo aporta el contenido para que todo el mundo lo vea y -opcionalmente- haga comentarios, observaciones, etc. Así se va estableciendo una red en la que unos citan a otros, que citan a otros más, y así se va enriqueciendo el asunto. Estoy hablando de los famosos «blogs».




2. Hay sitios en los que lo importante no es la aportación individual, sino la participación colectiva para que un conjunto de documentos sea tan rico, preciso, incluyente como sea posible. Todo mundo aporta, todo mundo consume: lo que importa es el documento. Ahora estoy hablando de los wikis (por ejemplo, la wikipedia: www.wikipedia.org/).</li>
   
   
   
3. Hay sitios en los que los individuos hacen trabajo de organización para sí mismos; pero como todos están haciéndolo, y como todos pueden ver el trabajo de los demás y aprovecharlo, la riqueza diversa y organizativa de la información es mucho mayor que si se hiciera individualmente. En esta categoría el ejemplo típico es delicious (http://del.icio.us/), un sitio para la clasificación de «bookmarks».

Hay sitios cuya función no cabe por completo en ninguno de esos tres incisos. El caso de «flickr» yo creo que lo pondría básicamente en el inciso (3), pero con fuerte influencia del (1) y alguna del (2). O sea que quién sabe dónde queda, pero lo importante es que se trata de un sitio para la participación de la comunidad.

Ahora bien: aunque es posible que algunos de estos sitios ofrezcan varios servicios, la especialización es muy notoria. «Flickr» es un sitio para compartir y organizar imágenes por la red. Los demás servicios son auxiliares a ese.

Otra cosa: los servicios de un sitio «social» pueden a veces interactuar con los servicios de otro, en virtud de estándares operativos o en virtud de asimilación de sitios por grandes firmas. Por ejemplo: si se tienen imágenes en «flickr» y el blog en «blogger» (otro sitio), se pueden mostrar las imágenes en los «posts» del blog. La gente que lea el «blog» verá las imágenes como si formaran parte del mensaje, de manera integrada.

Now I am worried about the "social" behaviour of web logs. I read the Jon Udell's post on the future of open blog infrastructure, and I can't help but feel some discomfort:

• weblogs.com is no longer as free as it used to be: it's been acquired by VeriSign. Troblesome, for me.
• There is no cooperation between the diverse blog ping engines: there is war. Information hidding, information exploitation, and so on.
• Dave Sifry (Technorati) told to Wall Street Journal (as reported by BusinessWeek) that "his company gets an edge from exclusive deals in which some blog-hosting companies ping Technorati before anyone else". Wow! That's cynical!

So, what can we expect from the behaviour of the blogs in the future? And how do we feel about providing as individuals the fuel for those huge machineries's fights? For one thing, I don't feel quite right.

Today has been a social software discovery day for me.

On the one hand, I created today my flickr account, and used it to publish some photographs of my incredible family.

On the other hand, I've got acquainted to the last.fm site, which is interfaceable with my amarok music player. I created an account there, as well.

It is amazing how the social networks (although not a difficult to express concept) can have such a broad, rich and surprising applications. Let's see how I feel about this after some days.

Sebas and I have just installed this new version of b2evolution: 0.9.1.

Hopefully, that will render itself a nice and useful investment of time.

I used to believe (whether consciously or not) that since the future history is not accessible, it is irrelevant. In that scenario, all of human history is nothing but a preparation for the present.

On the other hand, at the same time it was easy to think of this as a "priviledged" generation: the one for which all previous ones worked.

Today, all of a sudden, I realized that I myself am not any different from those "preparing" generations. Perhaps they didn't care about future, neither. Perhaps people at 24'th century will look back and wonder "how come those folks at 21'st century burned gas to push their vehicles? How primitive!".

However, I think my feeling of uniqueness is not completely arbitrary, or plainly absurd. It must be admitted that ours is the first generation being able to look face to face at the end of the species. The nuclear danger, the environmental pollution, the new diseases: never before -at least with this degree of realism- a generation has had reasons to believe it could be the last one. And that sets a toll in the otherwise historically objective eye.