Tagged "business"

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.

I have had the chance to watch live keynotes by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs; their styles couldn’t have been more different.

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.

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.

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.

It’s bad to be stuck on a plane next to a person who snores with a wide open mouth.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes, it’s possible. Even if Objective-C is one of my preferred programming languages, in any case I think it’s worth mentioning that, 2 years after the official iPhone SDK has been announced, the iPhone development landscape has really grown up, and many, many different options are available today.

A lot has been said and done about the iPhone, but there’s much more to Cocoa and Objective-C than our beloved pocket device.

This week I had the opportunity to attend the JAOO Developer Conference 2009 in í…rhus (Denmark), invited by Trifork, the company behind this and other fine events, like QCon and RubyFoo.

Notitas is available at an App Store near you! Notitas means “small notes” in Spanish, and it’s the fourth iPhone application under the akosma brand, and the first based on an original idea of my dear wife!

Let me introduce to you RooiFonts and DeviceDNA, the latest iPhone apps by akosma software on the App Store!

Let’s be frank: it’s not the best time to be an iPhone developer right now.

The first iPhone application under the akosma brand has just been published on the App Store:

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.

Last year I blogged about the upcoming SDK 2.0 for the iPhone 3G, and boy did it change my life.

This is happening right now, at a web agency near you.

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

This is the talk I gave last Friday during the first edition of the iPhone Conference 2008!

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.

Comparing Lausanne to San Francisco is a straightforward experiment: By the way, I'm in SF.

For those attending WWDC, and wanting to have the module complete schedule in iCal (as suggested by TUAW), I’ve created a small script (using Prototype) that will transform the JSON data of the official WWDC schedule into calendar files, which you can save and load into iCal.

I’ve just bought my e-ticket for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2008!

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.

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.

http://www.startupping.com/forums/showthread.php?t=347 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.