Some interesting things...

During the last seven years I've been working as a software developer, ocasional team leader, weird tester and lazy seller.

The world of software development is so wide and moving that you never get tired of it, I happen to dislike some technology approaches, some practices, and even some programming languages.

But something I come to appreciate from the profession itself, is the self-pacing nature of it. It's possible to have great teams where things move really fast and well, and is also possible to get into a slow-as-a-snail situation in which you can't even see the final outcome.

I've been in many kinds of teams, and I think I know how to create a working environment that helps to understand the problems, react to them and make things better, I have come to that state.

I can't say that I'm the best developer, because I'm not, my role is closer to a problem-solver. That's why I've been investing some time looking for options in software development in which I can learn more, new problems, new challenges, and came across TopTal.

Confession, I have heard of it while listening to TheChangelog, that ringed the bells for me, working from home is a nice incentive, now that I have a family, and the chance to work with people all over the world, is a hook for me. So, I'm looking forward to join it's development group.

I'm currently applying to see: how it is, how it works, what can I do in there, will it suit me?

But only time and practice will say, let's see how it goes...

Update: It didn't go that well :-), but it was a great opportunity to understand how little I know, and to try to learn new things

The mythical man month - the tar pit

Preface

It's been a while since I wrote something, work, university and life in general have kept me busy enough to forget that from time to time it is required for me to spare some words in any kind of medium. Just for the fun of doing it.

Then I just started reading the book The Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks because I found in many places that it is a mandatory reading for software development in general and I started reading it to find out what it has on it.

Initially I was just a little bit skeptic about the fact that a book so old (in software-related terms) could have some content for me to be interested.

But after finishing the first chapter I realized that this is not just only a very interesting book, but an invaluable source of data, techniques, practices and tales about how software engineering has been done in the words of the great Frederick P. Brook.

So as I identify this book as something I want to remember, I'm going to write down my thoughts in a chapter-by-chapter basis, pointing the things I have experienced related to them.

The Tar Pit

In this chapter its author identifies that in many senses large systems development can be compared to a huge tar pit where incredibly strong creatures have found their death. 

It defines in a very interesting way programming systems product as:

• A program, a software product that can be developed by small teams, a simple application (i.e. cat).
• A programming product, a software product that can be extended or used for the programming of other systems, a library component (i.e. SQLite).
• A programming system, collection of interacting programming products, I identify it as a basic operating system (i.e. Minix).
• A programming system product, a collection of interacting programming products that could used and extended by anybody, I identify it as a complete operating system (i.e. Linux)

Based on such classification it describes how systems programming is a craft that has joys and woes inherent of software development, that is impossible to develop something without having limited resources, budget, time and collaboration. But when ones get things done you can express with great honor that you survived the pit. 

Projects worth looking at

For a while I've been reading about the term Software Archeology from different media channels and I find it very valuable. Especially if you are trying to do something interesting with your projects, in those cases is a very good idea to checkout some very well written applications.

Rails
If you want to see what Ruby can do, this is the project I recommend. It has several gems in it, including a very complete documentation.

Guava
Google has released several open source projects with high quality code and lots of functionality, this set of libraries are great tools when dealing with real-life applications.

Guice
A great CDI component that simplifies Spring into fine grained components that are extremely extensible. I use it whenever I can and it's really, but really cool.

Fitnesse
This is perhaps the application with more test coverage I've ever seen, a serious attempt to reduce the gap between user acceptance tests and testers.

You might have noticed that most of them are written in Java, I didn't have time to check some other languages, but for sure Scala and Clojure are my next target.

References

• se-radio: Software Archeology
• Interesting repositories at github