October 19th, 2009 by Ludovic
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The story of this US balloon boy is quite saddening. There are many more terrible things happening every day in the world but this sort of stories makes you wonder about the society we live in. In order to get some media attention and for the purpose of getting into some reality tv shows, this family pretended one of their sons had been carried away in a helium balloon. Even prompting the autorities to close down an airport for the duration of the “rescue” mission. Which obviously resulted in finding no child in the balloon because he was safely hiding at home.
Besides the obvious what saddens me the most in this are the motivations. Is being in a reality tv show what people want to do in life? I imagine being rich and famous is quite appealing to many people but I think the way you get there is almost as important as getting there. This sort of publicity stunts is certainly not the way to do it and is simply appalling.
October 17th, 2009 by Ludovic
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I’ve been using part of the Atlassian tool suite (JIRA, Confluence, Clover, Crucible, Bamboo) at work for a while now and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It works well. Atlassian is now offering Atlassian Studio, a hosted combination of all their main products in one with a decent pricing model. I think it provides a perfect solution for startups and small organisations looking for great development tools without the maintenance hassle. The main disadvantage is, as with all hosted solutions, the reliance on the provider. For those happy to make this compromise I would greatly recommend this product.
October 4th, 2009 by Ludovic
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A few old and new books I want to read:
I’ve just started reading Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck.
September 27th, 2009 by Ludovic
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Today I received an email from Schmap about the inclusion of one of my pictures from New York. It’s actually not an amazing photo by any means but I like that it can of use to others. And this is possible thanks to the Creative Commons license. I suppose if you try to make a living out of it you may see it in a different light but for any recreational photographer this a nice way to share your pictures.
September 15th, 2009 by Ludovic
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No, that's not me at the center of the table.
Today my ex flatmates and I (a.k.a the Awesome Foursome) will hold our last dinner at the flat I live in. As of next Monday we will all have moved out of this place which contains a lot of memories. For the most part, memories of great times spent with great friends.
The feast will begin with some delicously melted Camembert (receipt compliments of El Juanito). it will be followed by the world famous “Quiche de Ludovic” and accompagnied by the spectacular “Insalata di Gaia”. The dessert (pronounced dezert) will be a specialty from Brittany called Kouign aman. Dinner will of course be served with wine: South African and French (need to manage all egos – though I would still not budge that the latter is better). Saucisson will be offered as appetiser. Live entertainment will be provided by the other members of the cast, known by their stage names as El Gordito and Sleepy Bee…
it should be fun.
August 25th, 2009 by Ludovic
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Cloud computing has become a very fashionable topic in the last 12 to 18 months as Google Trends illustrate:
Everything is going the cloud way they say. I have to admit it is quite interesting an idea, in theory at least. Hardware as service : you only pay for what you need. Plus, you get easy scalability – well, providing that your software stack scales too -. So if you are a small to medium size company with a few online services, Amazon EC2 would most probably be more cost-effective than having your own data-center. If you are a company with heavy online services then I would imagine your CTO would look twice before agreeing to rely on a third-party company for your entire hardware infrastructure.
On the same topic, Spring Source (now part of VMware) recently announced the availability of an Enterprise Java Cloud. It reminded me of an article I read on The Server Side. Apart from the dodgy title, the author makes an interesting point about cloud computing solutions with integrated software stacks which seems to be where Spring Source is positioning itself.
We will see how the technology evolves and whether cloud computing is just another buzzword.
August 9th, 2009 by Ludovic
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This week my landlord told us he had decided the sell the flat I have been living in for almost four years now. He has given us six to eight weeks to find another place. So the flat hunt has started. I’ve decide to look for a 2-bedroom flat to rent. I am visiting a few places on Monday and Tuesday. Although a bit sad to be leaving a flat that has become my home, I am quite excited about the prospect of living in a new and hopefully nice place. With a bit of luck the search will not take too long.
July 21st, 2009 by Ludovic
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The other day one of the team leaders I work with mentioned about the challenges inherent to moving on to a team leading role from a more hands-on development position as he has been experiencing recently. This is something I have come across on quite a few occasions in my relatively short career in the software industry. This is something I experienced first hand a couple of years ago.
The skills required to be a talented developer and those necessary for successful team leading seem to be at the antipodes. Indeed, often software programmers lack basic social skills — remember Garry the IT admin guy you went to talk to the other day because you needed something fixed on your computer and the guy told you off without even looking at you –. After all, we spend most of our time interacting with machines, not humans*. On the other hand, these very social skills are the tools team leaders are required to master in order to be successful.
Another challenge newly appointed team leaders face is that they are forced to stop coding as much as they used to. Most developers I know went into the software industry because they enjoyed writing code so it is a bit hard to take that away.
My personal experience with this transition is that it threw me out of my comfort zone and was challenging at the beginning. However, I quickly realised that although challenging I did enjoy that aspect of my job. And because I wasn’t leading too big a team I also still had time to keep writing code.
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* Kent Beck in “Implementation Patterns” argues that developers should write code for other developers to read, not for compilers. Michael Lopp in “Managing Humans” also has some very interesting things to say about it.
July 19th, 2009 by Ludovic
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It is funny to think that everyone goes through the same thing in life, yet, it is once in a lifetime an event. I imagine it has been talked about countless times but anyway, here’s my experience:
At first, a few months back, I didn’t think it was such a big deal. In fact, I was even looking forward to being 30 years old. Well, now, it’s a different story. Next Sunday I will be 30 and I’m not so cool about it anymore. It’s not so much the age but the expectations I had about my life when I imagined myself turning 30 many years ago. I look at the life I have and I’m not sure I have much to show for myself. I don’t want to sound self-pitying though. I do have a pretty comfortable life. I just struggle to make sense of it sometimes. I live in a flatshare, in a country I don’t belong to, single, doing a job I don’t enjoy so much these days and no real plans for the future. Ok, that sounds a bit like self-pity. I guess it is quite scary not to know what to do with myself.
Maybe I am having mid-life crisis a bit earlier than expected…I hope at least.
