In the recent decades the business model for the IT industry in Portugal was mostly a nearshoring model, much of the industry profits from the difference between IT salaries in Portugal vs central Europe. Knowing that the average salary in Portugal is roughly 50% lower than Germany and it’s just 1h time difference, it’s easy to understand that this can be a very lucrative model. Things start to change during the Portuguese debt crisis during the early 2010’s, due to the dim opportunities at home many Portuguese youngsters moved to other European countries – moving abroad was particularly easy for the “IT crowd” given that their skills were in high demand abroad and usually it’s not a job requirement to know any other language besides English. This together with the fact that Portugal is a member of the EU and people can basically just decide to move other country and work there without much hassle. ...

“There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.” - Edward Abbey MVP stands for minimum viable product, and it is a popular thing between Agile software developers. A MVP is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. Software developers typically deploy the product to a subset of possible customers to get feedback and be able to grasp a proper product vision. Then with the collected feedback they improve the product and create a more evolved MVP, tough several interactions until they get to a kind of “final” release. ...

Trying to make some sense of docker for non-technical people. Do you think it is more expensive to send a container full of goods from Lisbon to China or a plane ticket that allows one of you to go to from Lisbon to China? Actually it is roughly the same, the prices vary but on average the costs are around 1200 €. It is surprising that it is relatively cheap to transport such a huge container full of goods. More surprising to think that despite all our innovations in transport, the item that really enabled globalization and allows to have todays supermarkets full of things from around the world at relatively low prices is a humble standard metal box more or less with 13mx3mx3m which allowed to lower transport costs in such a way that our supermarkets can full of products from all over the world at relatively low prices - to get an idea the cost of transport weighs on average less than 1% in the final cost of a product. ...

I’ve been wondering a lot about the importance of saying no recently: Personally I’ve been trying to focus on important things and say no to other stuff that ends up consuming a lot of energy but is not that relevant. Professionally as a Product Owner I got to say no a lot ! actually I think the art to say no is one of the most important characteristics of a good PO. ...

I really like this article I’ve read in Increment [The epistemology of software quality] ( https://increment.com/teams/the-epistemology-of-software-quality/ ) Say you run a new team. You have carte blanche to implement any policies you want to make the team more productive and the code less buggy. What do you do? You could choose a new programming language, or switch everything to microservices, or follow the hottest trend in process. Or you could do things that matter. You could pace schedules. You could ensure that no one works more than eight hours a day. You could let people off 20 minutes early to avoid rush hour. You could make it as easy as possible for parents to take the day off when their kids are sick. You could make people feel like they’re important, because people are important. No method, tool, or language matters nearly as much as our own minds. ...

While having some training on machine learning, I’ve been thinking in how it could be applied to telco software. There is a huge array of equipment necessary to enable you to use your mobile phone with minimal issues, your operator has lots of radio equipment spread around that enables your phone to communicate with the network and a core network that enables the data to travel around ( this is of course a huge simplification ). Lot’s of equipment spread in larger areas means of course lot’s of problems, there are the obvious equipment malfunctions, there are power breakdowns and even more “unexpected” events like someone stealing a network antenna. Telco operators employ lot’s of people and use sophisticated software to ensure that their systems are functional, this is a growing challenge as more and more equipment is necessary to support newer network standards like 5G. Several functions of the Telco OSS systems, [ OSS meaning Operations Support System ] ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_support_system ) not Open Source Software, involve something like : ...

I’ve found out this week that the famous Joel test reached 19 years of age this month, besides reminding me how old I’m getting it reminded me of the importance of proper CI/CD - [Continuous Integration] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration) / [Continuous Delivery] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery) pipelines in software development. At the time I’ve came across “Joel Test”, found that comply with rule number 2 migth be a good thing and I’ve tried to create a simple build script that would emulate a kind of basic CI pipe – at the time I was working on a application composed of a set of components based on Win32 DLL’s+EXE; my CI script would compile the necessary DLL’s, join them in a directory and check if it run. Seems and it’s quite basic but it was really helpful, you would be surprised by how many times things got messed up, Dependency_hell Someone ? , I was convinced how valuable was this early feedback tool, thus have been a fan of CI/CD for the rest and most part of my professional live. ...

Today I’ve come across a post in Quora about the “end of Java”, kind of funny these doomsday predictions regarding programming languages. I’ve starting to learn programming somewhere around the late 80’s when I was a kid, at the time I’ve learn basic … it was the most common language for kids who owned “PC’s” with 48k of memory. Basic programs tended to be quite difficult to read and one thing that you learn from experience ( sometimes the hard way ) is that it is generally much difficult to maintain and evolve computer software than to initially write it, thus putting effort in to make it clean and adaptable pays off. ...

A recent problem that one of the teams I work with faced, related to a major DB vendor and a set of different incompatible patches remind me of the 90’s. During the late 90’s I’ve worked for a Windows shop that developed a huge DLL based application, taking care of dependencies was a nightmare…early MS win 95 versions didn’t include any good mechanism to track DLL versions, also initially this was not a major concern when developing our application, but we end up creating a lot of DLLs and with additional dependencies from SO and 3rd party DLL’s, so I know fist hand what “DLL hell” means. By the way the term “dependency hell “ is a common software problem that has the honor of it’s own Wikipedia entry. ...