Tag "business"

I recently read the 2024 book “Welcome to AI: A Human Guide to Artificial Intelligence” by David L. Shrier and here’s a quick summary of quotes and important points.

I recently finished reading the 2023 book “HBR Guide to AI Basics for Managers” by Harvard Business Review, and this post summarizes some of the most important ideas therein.

I finished reading the 2023 book “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman and it’s been a revelation, and by far, one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while.

My wife is a yarn geek. She knits beautiful garments, but she also dyes and sells her own yarn on her online shop. We often go to trade shows, with a literal truckload of hand-dyed yarns, to sell her products. And in those events I discovered that there are “microcelebrities” in the yarn world, just like there are in the software world.

Business literature is filled with myths and legends about famous entrepreneurs building empires from scratch. What those same books don’t say is that those empires are often built on top of free labor.

At some point in 2023 I asked online for WordPress experts for the remake of a website, and it felt like opening a fire hose.

I finished reading “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” an autobiography of Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, and I can say without hesitation that it’s one of the best business books I’ve read in decades. Here are some notes (quite a few actually!) I took while reading it.

I’ve blogged about Ruby on Rails quite a few times in the past 18 years. I’ve delivered lots of Rails apps, I’ve used it for my own company, and I have been a historic fan of Rails against all odds and against all opinions.

So Amazon Prime Video (of all people!) published a blog post about how they’re returning to monoliths, relayed by DHH, generating lots of noise, to the point that even Dr. Werner Vogels himself, CTO at Amazon, had to pour some thoughts about the subject.

The D programming language lacked a “killer app” to break through. Another brilliant language suffered from this situation, objectively deserving a much better fate than the one it had; Smalltalk.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been in this industry for exactly 25 years. I started my journey as a software developer on Monday, October 6th, 1997. I’ve had the opportunity of sitting down and writing code for a living for a quarter of a century!

Let’s take a somewhat tangential approach to the subject of the Microservices architecture. Most discussions about it are centered around technological aspects; which language to choose, how to create the most RESTful services, which service mesh is the most performant, etc.

Microsoft is a big, big, big name in our industry. No matter what they do, everybody notices. Whether it’s good or bad, useful or ridiculous, big or small, it never goes by unnoticed.

Finding a job as a software engineer is a lottery. You will find lots of contradicting advice online, and what I’m doing here is adding my grain of salt to this big cacophony that is the world of technical recruiting.

There is a lot of discussion online these days about the relative benefits (and drawbacks) of being a generalist software developer.

Although not my preferred genre, there’s a few business books I’ve read that I reread a few times, and I keep recommending them again and again.

Somewhere in the 60’s, something terrible happened. Someone, out of hatred and ignominy, tore down the walls of his or her office, and showed to the corporate world a new way of working.

In this post you will find a collection of interesting book quotes about meetings, and how to make them suck less.

There’s been plenty of technology wars in the software industry. Here’s a list of those that I got to witness in the past 25 years.

Looking at the software industry, it appears that most big companies usually share more traits than they would like to admit.

Dear SaaS app developer, entrepreneur, marketer, CEO, etc; here’s a tip: don’t annoy users, particularly those who have paid accounts.

Here is one of the most blatant lies I’ve heard in my professional career, and sadly, I’ve heard it at quite a few jobs: “We are a family”.

I once had a second interview for a job at a small software engineering company.

My friend Gabriel Garcia Marengo shared a great article by Arthur Brooks a few weeks ago, and it prompted me to reflect on how developers cope with age.

I have had the chance to attend keynotes by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in person; their styles couldn’t have been more different. Here’s some memories from both. Of course I did not meet or talk to them; this is just my experience as another attendee in the room.

When James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors in the world, had the idea for “Honeymoon,” his 2005 novel, he started writing an outline.

Programming is a very opinionated activity. Unfortunately, those opinions are seldom based on facts, and most of them are futile, and lead to stupid arguments on Reddit or Hacker News or the comments section of a blog.

Something very big happened during the last 20 years: The Agile Invasion™®©.

If you work in this industry for a certain amount of time you are certainly bound to suffer, at some point or another, the delicious experience of the programmer job interview.

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to contribute to your event with some words that I hope, will trigger some positive thoughts and bring some new ideas to your brain.

Some thoughts around the tensions between technical and business teams. TL;DR: I do not offer a solution in this text for political problems in software organisations; I just want this article to help developers not to feel alone in this struggle.

The Swiss are the best at many, many different domains. Which is a rather surprising and seriously fantastic feat for such a small country with merely eight million people, divided in four quite distinct linguistic groups.

So, dear Founder of a much hyped techno bubble, you want my skills in your company.

All change starts with a “No.” This morning I started my day with a dozen crashes all over the various devices that our technological life has sprinkled around us.

This is the talk I gave at App Builders Switzerland on April 25th, 2016.

They say things come in pairs in this life. Yesterday I closed my company, akosma software, also known by the Swiss government as “akosma software - Adrian Kosmaczewski”, federal number CH-550-1058663-5.

Just like last year, this year too we announce that all of our future projects will only be compatible with iOS 6 from now on.

Every so often I decide to make what could visually be described as “cutting the fat” in my life.

One of the facts I vividly remember of studying physics in university (this was in the mid 90’s in Geneva, Switzerland) was a certain disconnection between Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

We have been in business for quite a few years, and we have found out several things that work and other that don’t in our activities.

Given our strong focus on iOS, and also to be sure to be economically competitive, we are continuously watching the market to know which OS version is used by the many potential users of the apps we make.

akosma software was born with the dual objective of providing world-class software solutions and technical advice to companies, all over the world.

A couple of months ago I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine, who happens to be a close business partner in many different ventures.

akosma software is proud and honored to announce a joint collaboration with Trifork Switzerland GmbH and Trifork A/S in the development of the Danske Bank iPhone Application.

Many people have asked me why, when I was an employee, I used to change jobs so often.

So you flew and bought an iPad, you live outside of the US, and you would like to buy iBooks, Pages, Numbers and Keynote (as well as many other amazing apps) from your own country, huh?

If there’s only one good thing we could take from the global grounding of planes all over Europe, it might as well be the possibility to enjoy traveling again.

There are basically two things you can do to earn a living when you write code:

When you are a kid in Argentina, there are invariably three questions that you’ll always get asked whenever you meet a grown up person:

This is something I should have done much earlier, but hey, better late than never: akosma software has a new website and I’m happy to invite you to take a look at it.

No comments :) Thanks to Brett Terpstra (who interviewed me) and the TUAW guys for publishing the interview!

This is something that does not happen that often to me, so it deserves a blog post of its own: here’s two appearances of yours truly in the Swiss press last week.

One of the most common questions I get when working with clients on iPhone apps is this one:

Those of you who have been following this blog for the past years know that I have somewhat reduced my “writing rhythm” these days, and many factors have caused this.

In 2006 I had the opportunity to work as a “project leader” into a small failing project.

Reg describes 99% of all available programming jobs with incredible sincerity:

Every time I talk with people about Ruby on Rails in Switzerland, I almost always get the same comments, no matter what is the background of the person I’m talking to:

In Buenos Aires I’ve studied corporate management (I did, shame on me), and as part of that, I had to learn about all the different identified types of organizations: matrix-based, pyramidal, military, organic, etc.

It feels soooooo good to :) Let me introduce you to Parking Friend.

Time is the ultimate dictator: “Time is also the one variable that has the least amount of flexibility.

Politics are part of our daily life. Nevertheless, the word has got a bad reputation in the IT world (and elsewhere, too), thanks to famous failures and managed disasters, but the truth is that to succeed, projects need politics - and project managers should know it well.

Read in startupping.com. Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it.

IT offshoring is a highly controversial topic nowadays; organizations from medium to large sizes choose to have their projects developed overseas, usually in countries where the cost of software development is lower than in Western Europe, Japan or North America.

I haven’t blogged for a while; I must admit that this has been a busy month.