Random Thoughts

I’m jealous of the Norwegians

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:01:55 GMT

You’re probably wondering why I’m jealous of the Norwegians. As you know, I live in Portugal, that beautiful place bathed by the Atlantic ocean. And now you thinking: “He lost it completely. How could he be jealous of the Norwegians? They have snow and cold when he has sun and warm temperatures. He has lovely beaches when they have nice rocks.” Well, all of that is true. But I’m still jealous and the reason is this.

The Norwegians are so luck. They have the opportunity of watching speakers like Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Michael Feathers, Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob), Roy Osherove, Juval Lowy, Ted Neward, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Ayende Rahien, Jeremy D. Miller, Ian Griffiths, Jimmy Nilsson, Scott Bellware and Glenn Block, just to name a few. And all of them are going to be there this year. All together. Oh…I’m so jealous!!!

At some point, in the NDC site, you can find the following:

“The idea behind Norwegian Developers Conference is that it should be able to measure up against any conference in the world. All the speakers are experienced and right at the top of their respective trees.”

I don’t remember in Portugal having this quality in our developer conferences. Until when I have to wait to someone come up with a conference with this quality in Portugal? Until when I have to wait to watch Scott Hanselman or Jeremy D. Miller without having to exit my country?

In Portugal, I estimate that exists, more or less, 10.000 developers. There’s enough audience to support a conference of this quality. I hope that this post enlights someone (aka business-person) to start a similar developer conference able to rival with the best in the world.

Until next time ;)

Where the developer meets the social

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:28:01 GMT

Today, I’ve watched the presentation that Scott Hanselman gave in Devscovery last monday. (if you also want to watch it, check Scott’s post)

His keynote got me thinking, whereas the reason for this post. I’m just going to write about my own experiences and I assume that who reads this later may or may not agree with me.

I’m not social. Period!

You may think that as developers our work needs a very small percentage of social interaction. Basically, meetings. Well, but if we want to succeed as developers and climb the ladder in software engineering you’ll need social interaction. I’m really up for information/knowledge sharing. We, the geeks, know the tools that better help us doing that sort of thing.

Where am I

Blog: This blog has the purpose to share my ideas with others (and getting their reaction, which until now result in just one person) but mainly I’m using it in order to google myself later :) and you can find great developer/blogger out there that have valuable information. I do think that reading blogs is far more important than writing one. There are already great information on how build apps using best practices, a specific technology, how to test our code and so on.
Linkedin: In the past it was usual to exchange business cards. I remember my father having an agenda with all his connection’s business cards. But now, I use Linkedin simply because the people on my network is constantly updating their profile and anyone who wants can check what I’m doing or what I’ve done. Since I created my profile I was contacted more often, for job interviews.
Twitter: Where you’ll find me more often. I really like the way I’m getting information from the people I follow. The Twitter usage is suppose for you to write what you’re doing. But I’m using it mostly to share articles and posts that I find interesting. And that engaged some very interesting discussions.
Stackoverflow: I blame myself for forget to mention that lately you can also find me at Stack Overflow. It’s an incredibly web app that allows a community information exchange. The site is like QA with wiki. Very cool. Way better than this one. [UPDATE]

It’s all about sharing information

I think that is also important some sort of gathering where we all discuss and exchange ideas in software engineering. See one of my latest posts:

…put people talking and sharing experiences with each other.

The bottom line is: developer meeting the social == exchanging information

Until next time ;)

My vision in Portugal

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:16:44 GMT

Last weekend it was held in Seattle the ALT.NET conference. One of the things that grabbed my attention was that they practiced the Open Space Technology. That's an interesting approach on sharing our thoughts with the all the ones attending the conference. Although, at least for me, the real advantage of the ALT.NET conferences (and also the ALT.NET user groups) is that put people talking and sharing experiences with each other.

For the past weeks Bruno and I have been talking about patterns, methodologies, open source apps and alternative tools. I think that's very into the ALT.NET spirit. Unfortunately, our thoughts are being kept just to us. No one is taking advantage of our conclusions.

My vision is: a software discussion user group in Portugal (or one in Lisbon and another in Porto). I'm releasing this thought as my own. I haven't shared it with anyone. But I would like to know if someone else thinks like me and advocates this idea. I know that exists this group that have been engaging a lot of discussion in the subject of software. But I would like to have in Portugal a freely available discussion on software open to everyone. Senior developers mixed with junior and newbies. A real exchange.

Please send me an email with your suggestions\ideas (rodrigo [one dot] guerreiro [a] agilior [another dot] pt). I would like very much this idea to grow. That's my vision.

Let's think about this...

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:05:53 GMT

For some time now I've been following Steve Vinoski's blog. In case you're wondering he's one of the best authorities on distributed computing. (You can read more about him here)

His last post really amused me :) It's entitled Just What We Need: Another RPC Package. He talks about the upcoming release of a new client/server messaging system by Cisco. Simply he asks "Why? Do we really need yet another client/server messaging system?".

He's right! Think about this: how many messaging systems do we have? How many succeeded? Why are we inventing the wheel over and over? The answer is simple: everyone wants a piece of the pie! And that piece is money! For me this is one of the main reasons why the computer industry is so far behind of other major industries, like construction, aeronautic or even the mechanical:

In the computer industry we don't have an outside impartial entity that monitors the software quality. In construction and aeronautic we do.
In the computer industry everyone who wants to, can write a piece of software (call it the best of the world) and sell it. In the other industries we have to be certified in order to construct a building or an airplane.
In the computer industry there are dozens and dozens of patterns and standards. But, no one monitors if the standard or the pattern is well applied. Do you see this happening in other industries?

I bet that sooner or later our industry will have to follow the other industries. Their behavior is proven to be the right one.

Food for thought...

Until next time ;)

Technorati Tags: cisco, steve vinoski, messaging system

Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:08:20 GMT

When I read this post from Jeff Atwood suddenly came to mind the presentation (video) that Bruno and Tiago gave at TechDays 2005. Basically, the points that they mentioned there are the same that Jeff described in his post (based on the book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, by Robert L. Glass). I'll put them here for everyone read and meditate it.

People

The most important factor in software work is the quality of the programmers.
The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers.
Adding people to a late project makes it later.
The working environment has a profound impact on productivity and quality.

Tools and Techniques

Hype (about tools and technology) is a plague on the house of software.
New tools and techniques cause an initial loss of productivity / quality.
Software developers talk a lot about tools, but seldom use them.

Estimation

One of the two most common causes of runaway projects is poor estimation.
Software estimation usually occurs at the wrong time.
Software estimation is usually done by the wrong people.
Software estimates are rarely corrected as the project proceeds.
It is not surprising that software estimates are bad. But we live and die by them anyway!
There is a disconnect between software management and their programmers.
The answer to a feasability study is almost always "yes".

Reuse

Reuse-in-the-small is a solved problem.
Reuse-in-the-large remains a mostly unsolved problem.
Reuse-in-the-large works best in families of related systems.
Reuseable components are three times as hard to build and should be tried out in three different settings.
Modification of reused code is particularly error-prone.
Design pattern reuse is one solution to the problems of code reuse.

Requirements

One of the two most common causes of runaway projects is unstable requirements.
Requirements errors are the most expensive to fix during production.
Missing requirements are the hardest requirements errors to correct.

Design

Explicit requirements 'explode' as implicit requirements for a solution evolve.
There is seldom one best design solution to a software problem.
Design is a complex, iterative process. Initial design solutions are usually wrong and certainly not optimal.

Coding

Designer 'primitives' rarely match programmer 'primitives'.
COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others are so much worse.

Error removal

Error removal is the most time-consuming phase of the lifecycle.

Testing

Software is usually tested at best to the 55 to 60 percent coverage level.
100 percent test coverage is still far from enough.
Test tools are essential, but rarely used.
Test automation rarely is. Most testing activities cannot be automated.
Programmer-created, built-in debug code is an important supplement to testing tools.

Reviews and Inspections

Rigorous inspections can remove up to 90 percent of errors before the first test case is run.
Rigorous inspections should not replace testing.
Post-delivery reviews, postmortems, and retrospectives are important and seldom performed.
Reviews are both technical and sociological, and both factors must be accommodated.

Maintenance

Maintenance typically consumes 40 to 80 percent of software costs. It is probably the most important software lifecycle phase.
Enhancements represent roughly 60 percent of maintenance costs.
Maintenance is a solution-- not a problem.
Understanding the existing product is the most difficult maintenance task.
Better methods lead to more maintenance, not less.

Quality

Quality is a collection of attributes.
Quality is not user satisfaction, meeting requirements, achieving cost and schedule, or reliability.

Reliability

There are errors that most programmers tend to make.
Errors tend to cluster.
There is no single best approach to software error removal.
Residual errors will always persist. The goal should be to minimize or eliminate severe errors.

Efficiency

Efficiency stems more from good design than good coding.
High-order language code can be about 90 percent as efficient as comparable assembler code.
There are tradeoffs between optimizing for time and optimizing for space.

Research

Many researchers advocate rather than investigate.

Unfortunately most of software developers and software companies don't consider this, at least in Portugal. I say no more!

Until next time ;)

Technorati Tags: fallacies, software

TechDays 2008 - day #3 review...and last

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:53:08 GMT

Final day, final review...finally :)

INT06 - Parallel Extensions para a Plataforma .NET 3.5 (link)

For quite some time I've been following Bart's blog. So I couldn't miss one of his presentations in our TechDays. Basically he talked about the new Parallel Extensions framework released by Microsoft. The namespace is System.Threading.Parallel with two classes for the for cycle and the foreach cycle. Also in this release we can find the PLinq, which is an implementation of Linq for parallel work, using the classes that I've mentioned. It can only be used for XML and objects, because the parallel work has to be local (local resources such as CPUs). Because most of .NET Framework collections aren't thread-safe, then it was also released thread-safe implementations for the most common collections.

What can I say about Bart? Well, is a geek (in the good way) and he goes really deep in his presentations. Nice job.

DEV09 - Enterprise Library 4: Construção de Aplicações Extensíveis através de Dependency Injection (link)

If ever heard about the Dependency Injection pattern then I should be happy to know that Microsoft released a Dependency Injection container distributed under the Enterprise Library, called Unity. That was the subject of Hugo's presentation. He talked about the various patterns that Unity has, such as Service Locator, Dependency Injection, Fluent Interface, Abstract Factory and Strategy Design Pattern. Also was good to know that Unity is a standalone assembly, meaning that we can use it wherever we want without having the overload of the entire Enterprise Library. Also it's completely extensible.

Hugo Batista presented this very well, to the point that I bet that almost everyone left the room knowing what Unity is and what we can do with it.

WEB05 - ASP.NET Futures - Dynamic Data Controls and Astoria Services (link)

For some time now I've been away of the ASP.NET world. So I decided to go to at least one presentation about that subject. This was the one I chose, and I didn't regret it. The Dynamic Data basically is a generator of .NET pages for a specific data model. For me, in order to understood it, I tried at home. You can also do that by following Scott's tutorial.

A little word about Matt Gibbs. He really knows how to talk to real world developers. And also what great demos he brought us. I really learned.

VST03 - Hardcore Debuging e Profiling de Aplicações .NET (link)

How do you debug your applications that already are in production? How can you find errors without the Visual Studio? This was explained in this session. I must say this was another boring presentation but yet very useful. It's a little bit complicated explain how to debug applications without Visual Studio. Basically it's all about memory dumps and analyze it. There are a few applications to help in that. So I simply post what applications they recommended and search about it (read: google it), ok?

A little word about Filipe Prezado and João Loureiro. My guess is that they are REALLY GOOD debugging applications and giving support. But in terms of a presentation they have to involve their audience a little bit more.

NOTE: While looking for the links of the above applications I've found this similar presentation.

DEV08 - Criação de Providers LINQ Personalizados (LINQ To Anything) (link)

Last presentation of the event and another Bart's session. And I was to tired to take notes :) But it was.

Conclusions

Best presentation: For me the best presentation was the "Software + Services: The Convergence of SaaS, SOA and Web 2.0".

Worst presentation: Sorry, but I have to say that it was "Construíndo Soluções EDI/AS2 com o Microsoft Biztalk Server 2006 R2".

From 0 to 10, I'm giving 8.5 rate to this year Techdays. It was better than last year's but I think that still has to improve. A little word about Raymond Chen's presentation and the work that Techdays organization had to brought him to us. It was very nice. Something to remember for the future.

Until next time ;)

Technorati Tags: TechdaysPT08

It's always my fault!

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:49:57 GMT

Sometimes (in fact, most of the times) it's hard to say that the fault is mine. Probably the first words out of my mouth will be "It's theirs fault", specially in integration projects. Tiago have banged some considerable times in my head because of this. I know he's right. I should ALWAYS first check if the error is mine and assume that it could be, before blaming on someone else.

This thought came to mind when I read Jeff Atwood's post. In some point of his post says:

...If you're going to subject the world to your software, take full responsibility for its failures. Even if, technically speaking, you don't have to. That's how you earn respect and credibility...If the problem lies in some other bit of code that you don't control, you'll not only have learned essential troubleshooting and diagnostic skills, you'll also have an audit trail of evidence to back up your claims, too. This is certainly a lot more work than shrugging your shoulders and pointing your finger at the OS, the tools, or the framework-- but it also engenders a sense of trust and respect you're unlikely to achieve through fingerpointing and evasion...

I'll certainly struggle to follow this thoughts.

So, young programmers be humble and think that the fault is always yours.

Until next time ;)

One year has passed...

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:12:09 GMT

...since I've started blogging. Now is the time to ask for your help. To anyone that found this blog I ask to send me an email giving his\her opinion about (at least one) of the following subjects:

How did you found my blog?
Are my posts technically useful?
Did you came back after the first time? Are you a frequent reader?
Where do you think I should evolve?

Feel free to send me the email (anyone) to rodrigo [one dot] guerreiro [the letter 'a' with the long tail] agilior [another dot] pt.

Every constructive comment is welcome.

Until next time ;)

I HATE writing documentation!!!

Rodrigo Guerreiro — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:04:05 GMT

These past days I have be doing nothing else then writing documentation for several projects that I'm working in. Conclusion? It's like in the title of this post: I hate writing documentation. Why? Well because I'm a developer and not a writer; because it's boring and most of all because it's giving a all lot of work when probably no one will read it.

Finally I got that out of my chest...

If you are just like me then you may like to know that the pattern & practices team released in the CodePlex site a few documentation tools. For now it only includes a Word 2007 template and tools that you can use to convert Word documents to HTML, Help 1.0 (CHM), and Help 2.0 (HxS). It also includes a tool that helps to manage the table of contents for large documentation sets.

Hopefully, in the future, they will manage to develop some kind of a mind-reader-documentation-generator that will put out of my despair :)

Until next time ;)

Technorati Tags: codeplex, patterns & practices, documentation