Next weekend I’ll be in San Diego for ApacheCON hackathon and conference. If you are there don’t miss the two tutorials and one session about Maven! And say hello if you see me 😉
ApacheCON San Diego
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Category Archives: General
The risks of funny t-shirts
Here in the company I’m currently working as contractor we usually
play soccer once a week. This week I took my t-shirt with the
inscription “Spanish SEX instructor. First lesson free” (sex in very
big letters). So I put it on in the restrooms of the company,
walked
out of the office, and called the elevator. The surprise was when going
out of the elevator was the CEO of the company, but luckily with my
fast reflexes I turned and was able to hide the message. uffff.
That remembers me other great conversations performed by me or coworkers like:
After the buying of the company I was working for:
- what do you guys do?
- we’re contractors, and you, are you in sales team?
- no, I’m the CEO of xxx (the company that just bought ours)
In the elevator
- what do you guys do?
- we are in the xxx project
- cool, how is it going?
- it’s going ok (here I paid the price of my not so good english)
- only ok! here in this company we expect the best!!
- and what do you do? are you in marketing team?
- no, I’m the CEO
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
I can list a lot of people I wish they read this essay: What Business Can Learn from Open Source, by Paul Graham.
Guestmap
I’ve created a guestmap so you can left a mark on the city your reading this weblog from.
Now in Los Angeles
I got a gig in Los Angeles thanks to Rick Hightower,
so I’m staying in Santa Monica for the next 6 months aprox. It’s a
pretty cool place to live and the job is great, working with latest
technology: JSF, Hibernate, Spring, …
So if you live near or have any suggestions about what to see and what to do, please let me know.
I’m starting a weblog in spanish
for my friends and other people who wants to read it about the
differencies between Spain and USA, it’ll be kind of funny.
An evening with Googles Marissa Mayer
Alan Williamson posts a very interesting entry about a presentation from Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google).
- The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
- Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied "We are waiting for the rest of it". To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
- One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the "Did you mean…" feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area.
- The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
- Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.
- Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
- Google has the largest network of translators in the world
- They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.
- They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
- The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’
- Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
- They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a blackhole.
- Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
- This wasn’t a technical talk so no information regarding any infrastructure was presented however they did note that they have a mantra of aiming to give back each page with in 500ms, rendered.
- Quote: Give Users What They Want When They Want It
- Quote: Integrate Sensibly
My new job
As many people lately I have started a new job. The enterprise is working hard with CMS systems as Vignette. I’m starting looking for open source alternatives, I’ve heard about exoPlatform, Jetspeed, LifeRay Portal and OpenCMS. A good resorce is OSCOM, although I don’t know why exoPlatform nor Jetspeed are not in the CMS Matrix, I think it’s because they are focused to developers, not end users. The matrix also lacks the language of the projects (PHP, Phyton, Java,…). I prefer Java solutions but maybe I’m biased.
Any comments are appreciated ;).
I’m oficially a Computer Engineer
After the five years course at the University of A Coru�a (Spain), I’ve just finished my end of course project, ONess, and got the Computer Engineer degree. I’m so happy 😀
Patent madness
Software patents are causing a crazy situation where big companies patent the most stupid things.
Sun is seeking a patent on the company’s per-employee software pricing plan. It’d be interesting knowing who owns the per-company or per-computer princing patents.
Amazon.com has filed suit against Barnesandnoble.com, alleging that the rival book and music e-tailer illegally copied Amazon’s patented 1-Click technology. Has Microsoft patented the double click? Is that the reason why Bill Gates is the richest man all over the world?
The worst thing is that open source can have serious problems with patents.
The meaning of “eXtreme” in “eXtreme Programming”
A real extreme tool is Guantanamo by Aslak Hellesoy, it makes me understand the true meaning of “extreme” 😉
Do you have problems maintaining high test coverage? Send the untested code to Guantanamo!
Guantanamo is a tool that deletes all code lines that are not covered by tests. Guantanamo is part of the Extreme XP Tools family. Some thoughts about why it was created are written down here.
Carlos Sanchez's Weblog 