Recently, a friend asked me to talk to his son who will soon be a fresh IT graduate. His son received tempting job offers from three companies and he was kind of puzzled as to what company to choose at the start of his career.
After discussing with the young man for about ten minutes, I was a little puzzled myself, because he was not actually looking for advice, but for valid reasons not to join any of those companies.
It is so easy to distinguish an engineer (or an engineer to be) from a non-engineer. When we interview people for a software engineering position, we want to determine how much of an engineer the candidate is. That’s why we ask a fair amount of questions apparently unrelated to software. Real engineers focus on the problem, break it into pieces, and analyze them. They translate the problem into their “own words”, making analogies with common, easy-to-understand processes. Once their solution is challenged, they are able to optimize and explain it.
There is a common perception that collaboration is the universal solution to all issues that software companies encounter. A lot of effort is invested in improving collaboration between tech people, starting from tools that can be easily purchased and ending with programs that encourage collaborative behavior. The idea is quite simple: if people collaborate better, the output of the entire team, both its quality and quantity, will be better.
While I do not want to mitigate against collaboration, there are specific cases where it simply doesn’t work. I will exemplify that and suggest some solutions as well.
According to biographers, in the eighties, Steve Jobs was kind of obsessed about IBM. This is one of the reasons for which he approved the famous commercial below, one that was hardly liked by the rest of the directors. It was a bold move, mostly because Steve believed that stopping IBM was his messianic mission.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_d5R6Il0II[/youtube]
The truth is that, right now, the world is hundreds of miles closer to 1984 than it ever was in the eighties.
There is no apparent connection between these two, but Moonshot is actually in the same trend, even though it uses Intel x86 (Atom). Many people advocate for ARM on servers, mainly because it is low-power, allowing a high CPU count per rack. But no one would mind I guess with a low-power CPU from Intel either.
Unfortunately, not many have a good overall picture on the cloud challenges, not to mention software engineering. And this is pretty complicated.
Several days ago at WHD.global 2013, I gave a presentation on BYOD and I think it is worth sharing it with those of you who did not attend.
What the heck is BYOD, you might ask yourselves. 😀 Before anything else, it’s a pretty complicated name for a process that is quite simple. BOYD allows employees to use their own devices for business purposes.
When I first ask someone this question, I usually get a brutal answer: not a chance!!! This is what I’ve learned the hard way: true innovation is a process. Accidental innovation is not a process, but a fortunate mistake. 😉 In order to innovate, you have to follow a recipe because innovation must be consistent.
Organizing a software company can look like rocket science nowadays. But it shouldn’t be!
Apparently, most startups are unorganized. In other words, when someone who previously worked for a large entity joins the team, they are surprised at the lack of organization. Later on, they are even more surprised to learn that many things actually work better that way.
VoipNow 3 GA is finally here! In fact, even more than this, the first maintenance release is available, as we had a private release for customers. More information in the Release Notes.
While many of you already had some experience with the new VoipNow SPE, I want to share some interesting things about it.
A couple of hours ago we published the repository for VoipNow 3 Service Provider Edition Beta. It has been a long journey – more than 18 months since the first line of code was written, tens of private Scrum iterations and thousands of issues fixed in JIRA.