Creativity

Why do I like software?

This has always been like magic for me. Just get an idea, write some code and get 'something' working from 'nothing' but an idea. I feel it like synchronizing my mind with the code and letting it happen. Are there any boundaries? I don't think so: imagination doesn't have any; maybe computers do, but for the time being my imagination is not that big. ;)

Does software development require creativity?

creative/kriˈeɪtɪv/

▶adjective relating to or involving the use of imagination or original ideas in order to create something.

Yes, I think so! I guess you can do it even if you're not creative, but the question is: will you enjoy it? I don't see the point if you don't enjoy it!
If we describe software development as "the process of writing and maintaining the source code of a software application" doesn't sound really enjoyable, does it?

Does software development require knowledge?

Yep. That translation between the ideas in your mind and the 'real' 'thing' requires some knowledge and it helps if you have a logical thinking given that computers get on well with guys like that. :)
Anyway, go ahead and learn how to code. It's just a mean to get your ideas into working stuff. Then you'll start dealing with things like maintainability, decoupling, refactoring... and so many other things.

What helps a software developer to give real value?

I think creativity is a clear expression of what I'll call mind-freedom here. Make sure your team members feel comfortable and free to express their ideas. BUT! Always remember to pay them a salary and work on the basics first: remember Mr. Maslow.

Anyway... just some ideas I wanted to share :)

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

Students at Work

The Information Technology market in Buenos Aires has been changing for a while and continues to evolve. Many factors have both contributed to and changed the technology environment around
the world including Argentina. Consequently, as the environment changes employers, students,and universities all need to adapt to those changes.

In our country, and especially in the city of Buenos Aires, there's a large variety of options if you want to study any degree related to IT or Information Systems at the university.
There are primarily two educational paths one can choose to get an IT degree. One of the options is to get a degree from a public university. Public universities are free in Argentina, meaning that you don't need to pay a fee to attend the classes. Examples such as UTN 'Universidad Tecnologica Nacional' (officially founded in 1959) and UBA 'Universidad de Buenos Aires' (founded in 1821) both have a very good reputation for companies when hiring new employees.
The second option, private universities, offer more comfortable facilities for students as well as continuously updated study plans that let them develop skills that are part of the current market trends. The cost of this option is of course higher for the students (around $AR 200 - per subject, plus exams fees.) Interestingly, not all of the private universities have a good reputation with
employers in our country.

Today, many IT offices are seeing more full-time employees who also are full-time university students and there are several reasons why we see this growing trend.
First of all, the high need of IT experts in the market makes it hard to find employees who have already received their degree at the university who are not yet part of other companies’ staff. As a result, employers have started adapting the corporate environment to the IT climate by hiring students and giving them support to get their degree and become professionals while working within their company.

With that new context in the IT market, changes also took place in the students’ mindset. It is now more desirable and valuable to be a graduated professional with experience at real work in a company instead of a professional who has his/her degree but no experience. Having this marketability is one of the primary reasons many students nowadays decide to start working before getting their degrees.

This supply and demand context is so strong in our IT market, that universities also have adapted their study plans to ensure the professionals they form not only have high theoretical knowledge, but also real working experience. As an example, since 2006, UTN has a new mandatory subject as part of the study plan that requires students to get access to a real project bigger than 200 hours at any company with a full report due at the end. For those students who already have a job, they can choose to use their company for the project. If the students don’t have a job, the university has developed relationships with other contact companies with an infrastructure in place for students to work as temporary employees.
The consequence of this is that employee starting ages are really low in comparison to other countries, with average ages starting from around 20 years old.
Another key reason why students decide to be both full-time employees and full-time students is because of the economic situation. Private universities in particular, as mentioned before are not cheap and public universities, even though they provide free lessons, students must be able to afford the study materials and living expenses.

The main benefit of studying and working at the same time is that IT people here have the chance to start their career very soon after secondary school and everything learned at a university can be easily applied at work and vice-versa. That makes the learning experience much more useful by having theoretical knowledge applied to the real world. Thus, after getting their degrees, many professionals have some years of experience at work.
The main con I see with this work/study trend is that although students are entering the workforce earlier, students are finishing their degrees at the university later. Nowadays, the average age at which students get their Information System and IT degrees is around 26 years old (non-official data) with study plans planned for 5 years long at public universities.

Besides this, doing both of the things at the same time can cause great stress to people who work full time (usually 9 hours at the office and 4 hours at the university everyday), making that a real challenge for individuals at the beginning of their career.

In my opinion, this whole picture is changing every moment and will still keep on changing for a while, with employers, universities, students and people all adding something different to the equation. I guess there will be a lot more to tell in a few years when the new generation of students gets to the point where they can help set or respond to the rules of the new market.

(Thanks MK for helping on the spelling)

Jornada Trabajo IT & Sistemas

On Wednesday May 12th, Thomson Reuters will be presenting its stand at the Jornada de Trabajo IT & Sistemas. I strongly suggest attending the event if you have a moment to get to know the company and participate on the fair!


Este miercoles 12 de Mayo Thomson Reuters va a estar presentando su stand en la Jornada de Trabajo IT & Sistemas. Les propongo a los que tengan un poco de tiempo darse una vuelta para conocer un poco mas sobre la empresa y participar de la jornada!

Copy & Paste Oriented Progamming

It seems that you become more popular if your inventions have a name that matches the following pattern:

/.+\sOriented\sProgramming$/

So I've decided to put a name to something that already exists to test if my previous statement is true: the "Copy & Paste Oriented Programming". You'll obviously call it, CPOP (if the acronym of you invention matches a funny word, you'll get some extra points. This is not the case :P).

Okay, now, a tool I want to recommend for CPOP, or just in case you are constantly using the clipboard.

ClipX
This tool lets you store more than one element copied in the clipboard and paste any of them whenever you want. I find it really useful. Give it a try! :P

Spanish version...

Parece ser que uno se lanza a la popularidad y el cholulaje cuando inventás algo y le ponés un nombre cheto que matchea con:

/.+\sOriented\sProgramming$/

O sea, "LoQueSeTeCante Oriented Programming". Así que para verificar si mi teoría es cierta, le puse un nombre a algo que en realidad existe hace mucho tiempo: La "Copy & Pase Oriented Programming". Obviamente, lo encontrarás mencionado como CPOP (nos gusta ahorrar. Ah, y además si hacés que tu acrónimo coincida con una palabra graciosa, vale doble! No es el caso).

Bueno, en consecuencia, quiero recomendar una herramienta para CPOP que es muy útil para los usuarios habituales del clipboard o portapapeles:

ClipX
Es una herramienta que te permite almacenar más de un contenido en el portapapeles cuando copias, de manera que al momento de pegar, podés seleccionar de una lista cualquiera de los contenidos copiados. A mí me resulta bastante útil. Pruebenlo y me dicen...

Development improvement tools

Let me share with you the links to two tools that have been helping me a lot in my daily development tasks lately.
Both of them are available as Eclipse plugins, are free and they really help to improve the quality and efficiency of our developments.

1.- Enerjy:
This is a code analysis tool (similar to Findbugs, for instance) that helps to find bad practices in our code, improve our code standarization, find common errors, and so on.
It's really easy to use since it doesn't need the user to perform the code analysis operation manually; it just executes the task on every build we make, updating the warnings in our editor so that we can analyze the possible errors found and decide if we want to fix them or ignore them (by adding a special comment).
The tool is also easily configurable and provides help information about each warning it shows, explaining the causes of each possible code error.

2.-TPTP (Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project):
TPTP is basically a profiling tool that helps us improve our applications performance in relation to processing time and resources usage. This tool provides different kind of reports that are configurable so that we can filter the displayed information to our convinience. This helps to find weak points in our application if used correctly.

I recommend you to take a look at these tools since they're not hard to use and are really helpful.


Spanish version...

Aquí les dejo dos links de herramientas que ultimamente me han resultado de gran utilidad en mis tareas diarias de desarrollo.
Ambas herramientas están disponibles como plugins para Eclipse, son free y realmente ayudan mucho a mejorar la calidad y eficiencia de nuestro código.

1.- Enerjy:
Es una herramienta de análisis de código (similar a Findbugs por ejemplo) que nos ayudará a encontrar malas prácticas en nuestro código, mejorar la estandarización del mismo, encontrar errores comunes, etc.
Es muy facil de usar ya que la herramienta no necesita que ejecutemos el analisis de codigo manualmente, sino que realiza esta tarea ante cada build que hacemos y actualiza los warnings en el editor del Eclipse. En funcion a los warning mostrados, podemos decidir si queremos arreglarlos o bien ignorarlos; esto ultimo se realiza agregando un comment especial en el codigo que evita que se muestre el warning.
Esta herramienta es facilmente configurable y brinda info de ayuda para cada warning que muestra, explicando las causas del posible error.

2.- TPTP (Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project):
Basicamente es un profiler que nos ayudará a mejorar la performance de nuestras aplicaciones en cuestiones de procesamiento y uso de recursos.
Esta herremienta provee distintos tipos de reportes que podemos filtrar de la manera que mas nos convenga. Asi podremos encontrar debilidades a nuestras aplicaciones analizando correctamente la informacion de los reportes.

Les recomiendo que le peguen un vistazo a estas herramientas ya que no son difíciles de utilizar y son de mucha ayuda.

The distanced paper theory

During my attendance to Maths II course in college, proffesor Liliana Gallego (an excelent teacher by the way) taught us a good practice at an informal level for the analysis of problems or situations which she used to call "the distanced paper theory". Basicaly she observed that a very common behaviour amongst her pupils is to start solving a problem and lock up so much in them and it's numbers that end up losing the whole vision or the main global objective of the solution to be found. That's why, the practice consisted in stopping for a while with the resolution, take some distance from the paper where we're writting our equations and numbers and think if we're following the right steps to reach the solution of the problem.

Of course this practice is applicable in any situation, besides the resolution of mathematic problems. To stop and look where we're at and to verify that we're doing what's expected should be a constant in our tasks in any environment; however many times we let ourselves carried away by the inertia of our routine without stepping on the break.

This introduction came because, many times, we may want to apply the "distanced paper theory", and start thinking about our current position, but needs to establish certain criteria for this analysis.

What I want to describe in this post, is the set of parameters to be considered to analize the conformity situation in a job (always in an IT context) and, in that way, make easier or at least establish an order in this task.

1.- Projects

I believe that analizing the projects that are managed in the company where we work will let us establish, at least, two important things: First, decide if the project where we're working at is really intresting. Second, to analize the posibilities of changing projects keeping our current job if any other project seems intresting for our plans.

2.- Wages

Analize our wage in comparison with our job position in the market. High wages, or at least, at the market level could be motivating, but we should analize this considering the rest of our variables. In some cases, wages a little lower could be compensated with intresting projects or with promising job carreers.

3.- Environment

The job environment is of great importance to find ourselves satisfied with our job. If we're going to spend a third of our day at the office, at least we should look for feeling as comfortable as possible in that place.

4.- Carreer plan

I find of great reelavence to have a projection for the future of our proffesional growth. This vision will allow us to plan our future in an ordered way. The more vision we have, the better we'll be able to orginize our objectives and try to reach them. In this case we should take into account two factors: In the first place, to have a clear picture of where we want to go (or to start looking for it) and, second, analize if our current job gives us the posibility of getting through that path.

I think that this four items related are vital when making decisions related to our conformity with our current job, change possibilities or even possibilities of changing ourselves.

Author: Daniel Zuazaga
Translation (into english): tete (Thank you very much)

Spanish version....

Durante la cursada de la materia "Análisis matemático II" en la universidad, la profesora Liliana Gallego (excelente profesora por cierto) nos enseñó una buena práctica a nivel informal para el análisis de problemas o de situaciones a la cual ella misma llamaba la "Teoría del papel alejado". Básicamente ella había observado que un comportamiento muy reiterado entre sus alumnos es el de comenzar a resolver los problemas y encerrarse tanto en ellos y sus cálculos que se pierde la visión o el objetivo a nivel global de la solución que se busca. Por esto, la práctica consisitía en hacer un alto en la resolución, alejarse del papel donde escribimos nuestras ecuaciones y cálculos y pensar si estamos realizando los pasos correctos para llegar a la solución del problema.
Claro que esta práctica es aplicable a cualquier situación, más allá de resoluciones matemáticas de problemas. Detener nuestra marcha para mirar dónde estamos parados y verificar que estamos haciendo lo esperado debería ser parte constante de nuestras tareas en cualquier ámbito; sin embargo muchas veces nos dejamos llevar por la "inercia" de nuestra rutina sin poner el pié sobre el freno.

Esta introducción venía en relación a que, muchas veces, uno quiere aplicar la "Teoría del papel alejado", y comienza a analizar su situación actual, pero necesita establecer criterios para ese análisis. Lo que quiero describir en éste post, es el conjunto de parámetros que tomaría en cuenta para analizar la situación conformismo en un empleo (siempre en el contexto de IT) y así facilitar o al menos establecer un orden en esta tarea.

1.- Proyectos
Creo que analizar los proyectos que se manejan en la empresa donde se trabaja nos permitirá al menos dos cosas importantes: Primero, decidir si el proyecto donde estamos trabajando nos resulta realmente interesante. En segundo lugar, analizar las posibilidades de cambio de proyecto manteniendo el empleo actual si algún otro proyecto tiene un atractivo para nuestros planes.

2.- Salario
Analizar nuestro salario en comparación con nuestro puesto laboral en el mercado actual. Salarios altos o al menos al nivel del mercado pueden resultar motivadores, pero esto debemos analizarlo conjuntamente con el resto de nuestras variables. En casos, salarios un poco más bajos pueden ser compensados por proyectos interesantes o bien planes de carrera prometedores.

3.- Ambiente
El clima laboral resulta importantísimo para encontrarse satisfecho con nuestro trabajo. Si vamos a estar un tercio del día en la oficina, al menos busquemos sentirnos lo más cómodos posible en ese lugar.

4.- Plan de carrera
Me parece importante tener una proyección a futuro sobre nuestro crecimiento. Esta visión nos permitirá planificar nuestro futuro de una manera ordenada. Mientras más visión tengamos, mejor nos podremos organizar para establecer nuestros objetivos e intentar alcanzarlos. En este caso debemos tener en cuenta dos factores: Primero, tener claro a dónde queremos llegar (o comenzar la búsqueda de ello) y segundo, analizar si nuestro empleo actual nos brinda la posibilidad de transitar un camino hacia ello.

Creo que estos cuatro factores interrelacionados son vitales a la hora de tomar decisiones relacionadas con nuestro conformismo con el empleo actual, posibilidades de cambios de empleo o bie n posibilidades de cambios internos.

Photo award (?!)

There has been a pictures competition this year where I work and I got the first place in it. :P How is this possible? No one can understand it, so can't I. But the prize is mine!

Spanish version...

Este año hubo un concurso de fotografía en mi trabajo. La verdad que no tengo idea cómo gané. De hecho, nadie entiende, pero bueno, tengo el primer puesto y el voucher para canjear en Garbarino jeje. La próxima voy a buscar otra disciplina así nadie se dá cuenta que esto no fué por talento sino por azar....