December 28, 2012

My father was a professional - part 2

Sequel from My father was a professional - part 1

Things I'm ashamed I didn't learned from him

Even though I knew my father was really skillful in almost any kind of job, I learned very few things from his craftsmanship. He was a great mechanic, but I didn't learn anything related to cars from him (I'm still very ignorant in that subject). He was a great electrician, I learned some stuff of that from him, but I dare to say ...not enough.

Besides the technical skills I could have gotten during my childhood there were other things he did that I just realized were really productive and he did them without having read anything, he just realized it by himself:

  • Pomodoro, my father worked in that style during his entire life, measuring everything while working on it.
  • Design by Components, I'm making an analogy here with the technique used to design components, but he did it. I now see it clearly when he was working in several iron-related jobs, while he worked with other people he always knew what to expect from them and viceversa.
  • Agile, indeed he was agile, he adapted and progressed as soon as changes came, and they were quite a lot during his working hours.
I could list many more but mainly those are the things I can recognize now (a part 3 opening?). There are lots of things my father did write and did wrong, many things that have taught me not to concentrate too much in some things and leave others behind.

Even though my father was a great technician, he wasn't the best salesman. He built wonderful structures and products, but sadly that's not the only thing you need to sell a product. He failed in that for many years and when he finally realized how things should have been done, he ran out of time. 

Sadly for him his work depended on his body, his eyes, and mostly his hands. Health was never in my father's side, during his entire life he fell over and over sick and got involved in several accidents that reduced his capabilities as a craftsman, and the age didn't help neither.

As he became old we all knew he was an expert, but teaching or mentoring was not the best of his skills. He lived to be a great worker and leader, but when the time came and he needed to move to some other thing, he was blocked by his peers because he didn't have a degree or some paper to 'certify' that he really knew what everybody claimed. It's a shame to live in a society where papers and certifications are more valuable than empirical experience, where families and friends can make more than real skills and knowledge. Where it is more valuable to have influences than being the best at your work.

That's what I'm trying to avoid, if some papers and certifications are required, perfect, I'm gonna get them. I can get knowledge, I know that. I like to be an apprentice, to learn, but I also like to apply what I learned, that's why I would never look for a scholarship that bans me from working while studying, if it's not applicable it doesn't have value. Make whatever you do valuable, don't waste too much of your time.

Those are some lessons I learned from my father's life, I hope to be as good as he was, but the trip is long :-)

December 8, 2012

Coding journal - Scala's Hello world

I'm learning Scala as part of my masters thesis and every day I find something new that gets me more and more interested about this language.

As I'm a technical guy I enjoy seeing things working, so hands down on the keyboard. Obviously the first attempt I do for any programming language is the classic Hello World.



They both compile to Java bytecode and work exactly the same, but I have to add some remarks on the few code I wrote:
  • There are no static things in Scala, they've been replaced by Singleton objects.
  • No semicolons, even though they are optional, it's kind of verbose.
  • I'm passing a function as a parameter, wow, that's powerful and much less verbose.
  • Those loops are awesome....
  • Much, but much less verbose.
In summary, with this stupid code I've seen how powerful can Scala be without having to give up all the knowledge I have about Java, its compatible and they can coexist together.

So, give it a try...