WFH in 1998The heated “Work from Home” debate of 2024 brought me back memories of my first programming job, when I joined a small “dotcom” startup in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and for the first few months of my employment I quite literally worked from home… in 1998.
Against Open SpacesRegular readers of my ramblings are well aware of my absolute aversion to open spaces, particularly in the context of software engineering.
Five Years of De Programmatica IpsumLast Monday I published the 60th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum, also known as “DPI”, the “unusual magazine about programmers, code, and society, written by humans since 2018.” De Programmatica Ipsum has been published continuously every first Monday of each month since October 2018.
The Great Idea of Async WorkAs 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!
Open SpacesSomewhere 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.
The Various Styles of Standup MeetingsThe most visible star of the Agile galaxy is, without any doubt, the famous, the dreaded, the hyped, the all mighty standup meeting. During the early ages of Agile, from 2005 to 2010, every company I have worked at interpreted the meaning and purpose of the words “standup meeting” according to their own experience, culture, and most importantly, their hierarchy.
OpinionatedProgramming 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.
The Developer Guide to Migrate Across GalaxiesThis is the presentation I gave at the second App Builders Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, April 25th, 2017.
Welcome to the Company!Many people have asked me why, when I was an employee, I used to change jobs so often. The answer stands in between my own curiosity to take on new challenges, and the various assholes I had to deal with through the ages. Just as an example of this last case, here goes a true story, one that stands between being a candidate story for The Daily WTF, or as sample material for The No Asshole Rule book by Bob Sutton. You decide.
Reflexions on the Software BusinessThere are basically two things you can do to earn a living when you write code:
Adding ManpowerPublished in 1975, “The Mythical Man-Month” is considered an all-time classic in the software engineering field. The book author, Frederick P. Brooks Jr., used his experience as the project manager of the IBM System/360 and its software, the Operating System/360, to explain a common set of problem patterns, applicable to other software projects as well.
Factors of Software Project QualityI strongly consider that the following three items are of high relevance for software project quality:
Rethinking the Corporate WorldIn 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. Afterwards, books like Peopleware made me rethink these concepts, particularly when seeing the pityful state of some software development companies here and there.
My Bookshelf Part IIIThis is the third and last part of the article “My Bookshelf”, with the list of the books that I recommend anyone in the software engineering field to read.