Why “fitting in” is not good?

In: insight

28 Jun 2009

When we think about good advices we could give to people to fit in their environments, we always think of things to do when joining a new community for example how to fit in a new school, work place or even a new city. But the truth is that everyone ends up doing something in these new places. If you get a lot of friends or not, time will pass and you will be a part of the students of that new school, a worker in that workplace or a citizen of that city.

The truth is that everyone, giving any situation will blend to be part of a group, and our nature tells us we fit in as fast as possible.

This human nature could be explained as a search for a comfort zone: an ideal situation where we will have enough confidence to actually be ourselves. The problem is that this place doesn’t exist if we are trying to fit in. We have to create this situation ourselves.

There are two ways to be closer to that comfort zone:

  1. Getting enough confidence in a way where any situation is enough.
  2. Meeting a lot of people.

So instead of trying to fit in your environment, we should all(as a community) be searching for other environments while training ourselves to be better communicators and to accept emotional failures.

So, what are you waiting?

Google Wave In a nutshell.

In: io2009| technology

28 May 2009

Today Google announced a brand new product, protocol and platform. It is a very wide concept that will change the Internet as we know it, so lets me explain what it is and why is it important?

They started by thinking: mail is old, there are copies of the mail everywhere so it’s impossible to edit it. So they made a somewhat of a version of Gmail where every message exist in only one place, that allows other people to edit the mail (lets call it now on wave). After that, I guess they realized that was something like a wiki, forum or blog. In that moment they added some killer features like the ability to share that wave (who is able to see, edit, and share the wave). So, if you allow a piece of code to see and edit this content, you can make “robots” that do any kind of crazy stuff with it, from spellchecking to link parsing, image galleries to games!

Finally they allow you to add waves in different places, so you can publish this in your blog or social network!
So what is Google Wave?

  • A open source communication tool that allows centralized (in federations, so you can have your own secure server) content to be shared with a lot of people, with the power of google on the server and social side.
  • An infinite number of robots doing crazy stuff with the content (allowing every developer to create new stuff)
  • A publishing tool to create interactive, syndicated content by using waves.

So why is this SO important?

You can connect google waves to any kind of API (with robots), creating tools to communicate, collaborate and publish information in the same way that RSS works!
This will allow people to access, edit and create content from any platform, site, client or technology that can have a wave client!

So in a nutshell, any place where you see content right now could be changed to a wave, from a bug database to a team management solution, virtually any tool in the Internet could be turn into a wave!

I’ll be in the sessions where they explain how to achieve this in the next couple of hours and I will try to get some tutorials in the site as soon as they release the tools needed to do this! Cheers, there’s a big revolution in content and context just around the corner

Ignite, Kathy Sierra, wow

In: io2009| technology

28 May 2009

I had never been in an Ignite event, but I had heard of the rules and really wanted to live one!
After just a couple of seconds, I knew I was in the right place to be.

The first presentation started very funny… It was a guy trying to give us tips on how to get up every morning beating the snooze button and the warm bed.

So… He’s idea was that we usually have a hard time waking up because we don’t think we are super-heroes, needed to save the earth, and if we sleep a couple of minutes more there will be no problem. He first described some options, like having a little hammer hit you every couple of minutes, and then he decided to show us what he believes is the best method to convince us why we might be one of those needed super-heroes. He explained that a super-hero must wake up to save the world, but being realistic the human kind wont last forever, so why should we save it? What can we do to preserve the most important things? And what are those important things?

So, apparently the most important things are the ideas and morals we have developed over the centuries. But those ideas need a human mind and body to exist, right? Well, how about if we work all day to allow the ideas to exist in robots, while trying to get our conscious being to a more robust hardware, we must wake up every morning and work on it.

The next couple of guys in the ignite sessions were great and funny, deep and life changing. I will post all the videos on another entry as soon as they upload them

Listening to the guy who created the 2014 and 2015 videos was amazing, I was baffled to have the creator of that incredible video in front of me… and he gave a 5 minutes presentation on how to predict the future. The 3 key elements where:

  1. Listen to the wolves (people who attack one problem at the time and usually have a fast reaction)
  2. Read sci-fi (not because its true but because a lot of engineers read it)
  3. Tell a story.

Honestly, it really sounds that simple.
The last ignite, from Kathy Sierra, was the best (with all due respect) not only for its content (“lets be awesome”) but also because of the impact she had on me. She wrote the first book I ever read about programming, and I had a chance to talk to her about that! She was pretty happy to hear that kind of stories!

She gave a 5 minutes speech, where I found every key point interesting, true and radical. Its true: you don’t want your customers in a party with you; you want your customers in a party because of you (and without you).
So, all in all, I learned something from every speech, I had a great time and I plan to do an Ignite Mexico in the next month!

Now, I have a new hobby, apart from listening to TED talks all day. Now, I have TONS of new material to crawl on YouTube.

State of the O3D

In: technology

28 May 2009

I assisted a great session today about O3D at the Google I/O.
This is a plug-in for all “modern” browsers to allow everyone to program 3d applications in the browser.
The big key point here is that Google says that this will be native “someday”, so if you are brave enough to invest a lot of time creating a incredible 3d website and it actually goes native in the same time your wrapping up a beta… you will be rich and girls will follow you like an funny deodorant commercial. But if not, you will end up with a very inaccessible and expensive website.
Anyway, the demo they showed today at the keynote and then in this session was pretty amazing:

Not only that but they show us how to program a very fast application where the user can control a little guy, move around in a beach and jump. The bad thing is that the code is not really simple, they went very fast over the “hard” part and they already had a cool animated object made in maya or something.

So, here are a couple of demos, you’ll need to install the plug-in to use them and I will be posting a tutorial about this on Friday once I get to understand a couple of the lines they didn’t explain today! Also mine will use some kind of data from outside (Google reader + 3d whaaaat?) instead of just showing a “basic” openGL or java3D app in the browser.

Cheers for the 3d web!

The myth of the genius programmer

In: technology

28 May 2009

Ok this is probably the most shocking, useful and controversial talk in the Google I/O this year. We had two of the creators of SVN (very cool guys) telling us (in a very FULL room) that there are no genius and that honestly if we have so much diversity and anonymity in Internet: everyone is a (fake) genius and we are more insecure about criticism than ever. This generates a very bad situation because not only we (all) think our new code will change the world but we are so afraid of failure that we never show our code to anyone, never comment anything about our new projects and end up wasting tons of time.

So they ask, why do we hide our code? And why do we create these mythological heroes like Guido or Torvals, like Woz or Gates?

Their points are very valid; yes this guys where successful, but they are not one-man-armies! They where the leaders of a great team and knew how to use the input from a lot of people to create awesome stuff.

So after a couple of tips they say that if you are a little fish in a big pound then you will learn faster. If you are not afraid of criticism you will be able to do code review. Having code review will lower the amount of people that centralize knowledge and skill in your project and then you will have a fairly equal team.

So their proposition is that if you do all that, you will learn more, have a better live and actually; people will THINK your a genius.

Honestly I felt a lot of people in the room didn’t listen to what they said. They where just cheering their heroes (which is ironic), but the one clear thing I learned here which it’s very important is:
If you fail a lot of times (in different stuff), the fails become cheaper and faster and the success becomes bigger and better; until hopefully you get great success.
img_0076

Google Chrome Extensions

In: code| technology

28 May 2009

The first session today was something I was really waiting for: a tutorial and a state of the art about Google Chrome extensions. The two great news are:
•    You can start making them
•    They are coming for SURE
The 2 bad news are:
•    You can only install extensions on the dev branch, so no deployment yet.
•    Theres no due date for when the api will be ready and in the main branch.

Now… there’s a very interesting detail here that I would like to put in the table right now: this is the holy grail of extensions.
Why? – You ask – Well first of all, you can install and uninstall without resetting the browser. Google Chrome is in charge of having the latest version of your extension installed, so you can make a change and have everyone on the world get the new version instantly (without even knowing; of course there will be some magic security or something). All the code is html + javascript + css and finally the XHTTPRequest can be cross-domain which means fast interaction with API’s and your web services!

This is virtually everything I asked for in a browser extension API. They will even have a tool to create your Chrome Extension deployment file(.cre) and host it for you.
So basically the only thing you have to do is write a manifesto, create a couple of html files with whatever javascript framework you like; get some Ajax interaction and deploy a killer extensions in the worlds faster browser. Don’t believe me? Check this out
1.-Get your browser ready
2.-Create a manifesto with the next code:

{
"name": "My First Extension",
"version": "1.0",
"description": "The first extension that I made.",
"toolstrips": [
"my_toolstrip.html"
]
}

3.-Create a HTML with the next code:
<div class="toolstrip-button">
<span>Hello, World!</span>
</div>
4.-Tell the browser to load it up with:
chrome.exe --enable-extensions --load-extension="c:\myextension"
5.- Profit with a Hello World extension

There’s also a couple of examples of more complex extensions here

I will be posting a tutorial about this on Friday trying to make something with Twirex. And I’ll start praying that this gets beta faster than the speed of light.

Androids for everyone (on the Google I/O 2009)

In: technology

27 May 2009

I’m just settling in for the first session in the Google I/O after one of the best practical keynotes I’ve heard in technology conferences. Vic Gundotra talked about the new things available in html 5 and how Google is really betting on it. From canvas and video to location and offline storage they pointed out a great deal of demos showing the importance of this technologies.

After that they talked a little bit about GWT and their hosting services. Then they showed where android is and what they are doing to really penetrate the user and developers market. Not only that but they announced they will hand out a free android(with 1 month of 3g and unlimited calls) to everyone here.

Everyone is exited to really start hacking stuff with it. There are enough sessions to learn and have applications working in the night. Talk about great PR and awesome dev communities happy because of that. I’m sure I’ve never seen apple do anything like that.

img_0065

 

A very big Torta

In: food

16 May 2009

I don’t know why but there’s a tendency to celebrate my birthday by creating innovative, interesting, delicious and very very nutritious meals. By that I mean getting a lot of food together and eat it all like vikings.
This year could not be an exception and here is what happened.
First we started by buying the next components:
•    1 Kg of “carnitas”
•    3 very big breads
•    500 g of fried potatos
•    300 g of beans
•    300 g of chesse
•    3 lettuces(fried)
•    “green” salsa
A “Torta” is like a Mexican sandwich or sub that usually have beans and salsa.
Then we did what we had to do with these items:

img_0134


Indeed it was a very good birthday meal =)

Geek habits everyone should have: What is the next step?

In: GHESH

12 May 2009

Having enough control and perspective of a situation will enable you to ponder the next move; but in most situations that’s just not possible. No wonder, therefore,  there’s such a huge need for leaders and visionaries in this world. But you don’t need to be a genius, tycoon or high mandatoryto ask one simple question: “What is the next step?”

After any meeting, chit-chat, conversation or even after chatting online you can take control of the situation and add value just by making everyone answer what are the tasks that resulted from the information exchange that just took place.

It’s quite simple and productive to understand the answers that people will give you. Sometimes a boss can end up researching more about the topic or even changing their time estimates because – believe it or not – most people think of the tasks required for a project BEFORE delegating or brainstorming about it. So by clearly stating that you need everyone’s input to plan ahead will actually make them RE-THINK their assumptions on time, quality and scope of the project at hand (be that any kind of project).

So, after reading this blog-post, what are the next steps you will take in your life?

Geek habits everyone should have: The power of crappiness.

In: GHESH

11 May 2009

This is probably one of the best lessons a geek can teach other people and one of the easiest to apply, too! The concept is very clear: if something is meant to do just one thing, make sure it does that and nothing more.

This can apply to all sorts of situations but the most important thing to remember is that even if it doesn’t look professional (heck, or finished even!) but does the job, people are going to think you’re pragmatic; if you try to make it look half-way professional, people are going to believe you did a bad job.

For example; if you need to do an informal invitation to a meeting or event and the people who will receive it are all friends and family; keep it very simple. Just write a simple email with the information, don’t try to design a photoshop image with stock pictures and a lot of creativity: even if you’re good at photoshop.

Another example would be this article; Clear enough? I guess it is!

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