leonardoborges.com

the not so usual geek stuff…

So here I am! Alive and kicking!!!

Just got back from vacation. Brazil was awesome and so was xmas in Norway! Lots of food in both places! Need a diet! :p Warming up for new year’s now.

But the reason for this post is the last comment on my Rails 2.0 scaffold post, quoted here:

Hi Leonardo,

I am extremely grateful for your info altruism. I thought maybe I could show my gratitude with a small donation but I don’t see anywhere on your site to do so.
You’ve saved me hours and possibly what little sanity that I claim to have left. Is there a place to do so on your site that I’m missing? If not just tell me where and I’ll send my gesture to any cause that you wish. Thanks very much again, some day I hope to be able to be of service to a needy newbie as you have been to me. Happy New Years!!

I was surprised that someone wanted to make a donation and, since I never thought about it, I wasn’t prepared.

I was talking with the author of the comment, Eric Goodman, and I suggested he could donate to a noble cause. He ageed and just sent me the confirmation that a donation was made to The American Cancer Society.

So here I leave my thank you to Eric and encourage other people that read my blog to do the same in case they feel compelled to contribute in some way. Other societies around the world are gonna be very grateful.

Happy new years!

UPDATE: By next friday I meant this friday, december 5th. Tks Pillip!

This will be a really quiet month on my blog.

The reason? Next friday I’m going to Brazil for vacation and right after, in the end of december, I’m going to extend my trip a bit and spend xmas in Norway.

Just hope to come back alive from Brazil! My friends are promising a real blast!!!!!

C u all soon!

Besides the fact that I am a software developer, I do eat. I even enjoy doing so. Specially when I’m traveling.
That’s why i decided to put up a new weblog only for this kind of stuff - it’s called Travel tips - food & stuff. Basically for friends and whoever else might be interested.

There I plan to share some nice restaurants I’ve been to. At least to start with.

Hope u like it!

It’s been some time since my last post but here I am! Where? In Spain, of course! Having a great time, I must say.

I arrived last week in Madrid and the past 2 weeks before that I spent basically packing my stuff. There is still some paperwork going on but everything is flowing well.

Besides this little feedback, I was reading this week’s issue of the excellent series This Week In Ruby, from my friend Antonio Cangiano. I found something quite interesting, a plugin called HoboFields.

One of the things that bothers me in rails is the fact that by looking at your model classes, you can’t tell the fields you have there. Sure, you can look at the migration script. Yeah, you can also load the development environment and inspect the object. It’s a pain in the @zz! But this is the way ActiveRecord works…

Other ORM solutions like DataMapper, allows you to define the fields directly in the class. It’s a much cleaner and clear way to maintain your models. And you get to know what properties you have just by looking at your classes.

That’s exactly what HoboFields adds to ActiveRecord.

You define your properties and its types straight into your model class, and the plugin creates the migration scripts for you. Coming from a java world my self, I find it rather interesting, useful and it also reminds me of the way Hibernate works. You define your mappings with anotations in your class and hibernate just generate the schemas from there.

It’s worth a try.

Some of you may know. Some of you may not. Some of you may find weird. And most of you probably have no idea of what I’m talking about but the thing is: This is a year of big changes for me.

I’ve been hired by Mirai, a Spanish company located in Madrid, to work as a Software Engineer. Yes, it does mean I’ll be moving there. Sooner than later.

Last Friday I’ve received the great news that my work permit has been approved so I can now request my visa in my hometown and move to Madrid, what will probably happen by the end of this month or the beginning of May.

This post probably explain something to some people. And the bottom line is that this whole story means a great step on my career and for those of you that have been following my posts, that’s probably clear.

Because of that I was able to meet wonderful people , learn a bunch of new stuff and be present in important events such as QCon 2008 in London and Euruko 2008 in Prague.

That’s it for now. I’ll keep you posted about my new endeavor.

I’m really excited about this chance and I invite you all for a beer or two either in Rio  or Madrid - Just let me know your preference…

Next week I’ll be at QCon, in London, so if any of you are going to the conference and would like meet up for a couple of beers and a tech talk, please don’t hesitate to drop a message.

For those of you who have never heard of QCon before, it is a really nice event to play along with some of the most popular names in the software engineering community. This year’s conference features people like Martin Fowler, Neal Ford, Erich Gamma and much more.

So stay tuned, the conference takes place during the whole week and I’ll try and keep you posted about what’s happening over there.

C u in London!

At least, dumb for the companies hiring them. The old dream is still for sale out there: Build a “I do everything framework” and hire a bunch of dumb programmers - monkeys? - and you shall make money easily!

Just put some button pressers and a full featured enterprise system will be waiting on the other side of this “machine”!

C’mon, I thought this dream was over! We’ve had enough proofs that this doesn’t work!

Why? Because a framework, system builder, code generator or what you may want to call this thing just can’t do everything. And if you try to build this “monster” you will get yourself a hell of a problem:

• Your product will never be ready.
  Or you think that “everything” has limits? Someone will always say: Hey, let’s put this new feature right there… it’s so small….
• Your product will not work well.
  Bugs! Bugs! Bugs! I’ve never knew a team that has written enough tests building such a monster. Be prepared! If it’s never ready, you will always be in a rush!

But ok, even if you manage to develop this “framework” and hire a bunch of monkeys to press its buttons, that’s when the worst problem arise. (At least worst in my opinion)

With this “philosophy”, you assume that you want to hire low level programmers that don’t need to learn anything new besides how to use your full-fledged systems generator. And who the hell likes to work in a place like that?

You take from your employees all the joy of development, which is about creativity. All about putting your brain to work. And sooner or later, they will notice that and just quit. You will never be able to stablish a trustworthy relationship within your team as well as to motivate them.

How will you motivate a team by telling them they will learn a new framework that isn’t used anywhere else in the world and that they will not improve their thinking?

They will become bored. And if not, man, I wouldn’t like to have someone like that in my team.

The problem is that managers usually love the idea to build huge enterprise systems at low costs. And some consultants sell this idea quite well.

I prefer to have trustworthy people in my team. Provide an environment that promotes learning. Let their creativity flow. Only with this approach you will have a first class team of developers producing, happily, high quality enterprise systems.

That’s the message for the companies out there: Software development IS a creative process. Promote learning. Let them create.

Well, talking with some friends, I decided that, from now on, I shall only write in english on this blog.

Of course some of you may not like it. But I think it has more advantages than the other way around.  I have some friends around the world, including people from the U.S., Spain, Italy, China, India and Australia. This way, they can also enjoy the content of this blog and help me improve it.

I will keep writing on the same subjects, so feel free to comment, as always. You may comment in the language you like more - hey, I can’t read Japanese! - but english is highly preferable!
Thanks and see you on my next post!

Pois bem, saí do Rio hoje rumo a Madrid, com escala em Lisboa.

A essa hora já estaria por lá…. mas no momento estou no aeroporto de Lisboa esperando o próximo vôo, visto que perdi a conexão! Acontece até na europa! :p

Em teoria o embarque é daqui a 1h:30min…

Os portugueses são muito atenciosos btw!

Até a próxima!