Categoría: news

Self-Service Infrastructure Session accepted @ Agile2018

My session «Principles of Self-Service Infrastructure» was accepted at Agile 2018 ;-).

Here is the abstract of the session:

The management of development and test environments is a major concern when trying to optimize the value stream of any software development project. In this context, implementing Self-Service Infrastructure may help your organization to simplify the management of these environments. In this session we will review the foundations and benefits of Self- Service Infrastructure. We will also review the most common challenges and how to overcome them using some patterns. Finally we will see a set of tools to implement this practice and a couple of demos that will provide a better understanding of principles behind the tools.

Given that this is a brand new session I am planning to deliver it in a local meetup before Agile2018, so I can get some feedback.

 

Presenting at XP2018

This year the Extreme Programming Conference will be held the week of May 21 to 25th in Porto (Portugal) and I will be there.

The conference program looks great, with Kent Beck and Laurie Williams as keynote speakers and several social activities.

I will be presenting 2 sessions: a reduced version of my workshop on DevOps Practices and the paper about Technical and Organizational Agile Practices that is the result of the our research work at UNTREF.

In future posts I will share more details of my session.

My notes from IEEE WECIS 2017 @ Tucumán

Last week I traveled to Tucumán to participate in the WESCIS conference. I shared Sunday morning with some of the IEEE Students in charge of the organization. In the afternoon I met my colleague Ivan Hansen at Yerba Buena neighbourhood. Finally, at the end of the day I had dinner in a typical restaurant with Gustavo Juárez (president of the IEEE Argentina) and some students and other speakers: Ivan Ruiz Flores (an electrical engineer from Cuernavaca, México), Roberto Urriza(an engineer specialized in Robotics) and Edmundo Loandos (an engineer and professor specialized in data center virtualization),

On Monday I delivered two talks, the first about Modern Extreme Programming and the second one about Legacy Code and Continuous Delivery. For these two talks I used Google Forms questionnaires to interact with the audience: I prepared a couple of questions (each of them in a different form) and asked the audience to fill them at different points of the talk. I really liked this dynamic, I think it is a great way to interact with large audiences (I think there were 60+ people in the talks). Here and here are the slides I used during the talks. In the evening I met some UTN-FRT professors to share some teaching experiences. It was a very nice surprise to discover that one of them had read my book and she was using it in her course.

On Tuesday’s morning I visited Ivan’s company to meet part of his team and talk about DevOps. In the afternoon I delivered a workshop about Modern XP. There were around 35 people and they evaluated the workshop with 4.5/5.

 

I want to thank Ariana and all the IEEE team @ Tucumán for this great conference, it was an honour for me to be part of it.

More pictures here.

Taller de Continuous Delivery

Por estos días me encuentro trabajando en la preparación de un Taller sobre Continuous Delivery. El taller surgió a partir del pedido concreto de un cliente, pero obviamente armar un curso para dictarlo solo una vez no es negocio, así que seguramente agende para volver a dictarlo en un futuro (interesados contactarme ;-)).

El taller es de índole de práctica, o sea los participantes ponen manos en la masa. Para ello he preparado una imagen de máquina virtual para que los alumnos hagan los ejercicios. Hay algunos ejercicios de carácter más teórico (por ejemplo diseño de ambientes) pero la mayoría son de índole práctica orientados a herramientas (por ejemplo configurar Jenkins para hacer deploy automatizado de una aplicación en diversos ambientes).

Comparto aquí un video con un poco más de información.

Despedida de UNQ

El mes pasado cerré una etapa en mi carrera docente, presente mi renuncia en UNQ. No fue una decisión fácil, en UNQ estuve por primera vez a cargo de una materia lo cual fue un gran paso en mi carrera. Por otro lado tuve la oportunidad de aprender y compartir muchas experiencias tanto con colegas docentes como con alumnos. También tuve la oportunidad de participar de algunos de los debates de armado de la Licenciatura en Desarrollo de Software (que luego debió renombrarse por cuestiones administrativas). Por cinco años forme parte de un equipo docente de excelencia.

En estos cinco años, participé inicialmente del dictado de Objetos 1 y luego estuve a cargo de Ingeniería de Software. En los 9 cuatrimestres que dicté esta última materia tuve un total de 105 alumnos con un porcentaje de aprobación del 89%.

Pero como mencioné tiempo atrás, este año decidí dar un nuevo paso en mi carrera y tomé un cargo de mayor dedicación en UNTREF con el objetivo de trabajar en un proyecto de investigación.

A pesar de dejar mi cargo espero poder seguir en contacto con la comunidad UNQ y poder participar de futuras actividades.

Agradezco a toda la comunidad de UNQ  por las experiencias compartidas y muy especialmente a Fidel, quien me abrió las puertas de TPI y confió en mi para el dictado de Ingeniería de Software.

¡Gracias totales!

SoCraTes arrives South America

SoCraTes arrives South America

Next Friday, July 1st, the Software Craftsmanship and Testing Conference will arrive to South America. It will be hosted at Universidad de Chile.

I have just bought my ticket so in the next couple of days I will start preparing a session proposal (the agenda is full open space). I have 2 possible topics in mind:

  • Bringing technical excellent to legacy projects: since I started my freelancer activity the majority of the projects I have been involved were legacy projects. In that contexts my main concern was always remove technical impediments in order to enable the continuous delivery of business value. So the idea of this session is to share some patterns and practices to face this challenges.
  • Continuous Delivery at Scale: setup a Jenkins server and configure a couple jobs to automate integration and deployment is an «easy task», but the situation get complex when you have to manage hundred of projects and at the same time follow several organisational policies. This session is about patterns and recommendations to deal with this stuff.

I don’t have enough time to prepare both sessions, so I have to pick one. What would you prefer?

 

XPConf 2016: Pre-conference (day 0)

Day 0 is DONE. There was a set of pre-conference workshops. I attended to «Software Faster» full-day workshop facilitated by Dan North.  Another workshops I considered before making my mind were: Mob Programming (Woody Zuill) and Exploratory Testing (Elisabeth Hendrickson).

The workshop was useful, the main takeaways points for me were:

  • some techniques to deal with legacy code
  • a set of activities to experiment in my classes at the university
  • a list of reading

After the workshop there was an ice-breaker activity sponsored by Head Resourcing with some drinks & snacks and finally we had the «Dinner with an agile stranger» sponsored by Headforwards.

DSC05743
Software Faster Workshop by Dan North

 

Time to learn Smalltalk: big opportunity

A while ago Stef and his troop started working on a MOOC (massive online open course) about Pharo Smalltalk.

The course is finally live and its formal name is Live Object Programming in Pharo.  The course content is very interesting because it goes far beyond Pharo Smalltalk. Of course it covers Pharo/Smalltalk syntax but it also covers OOP foundations and how OOP mechanisms are implemented in Pharo.

I think this course is a great opportunity for all those programmers who are not familiar with Smalltalk and specially those that are only familiar with static-type languages (like java and c#), believe me: Smalltalk will blow your mind!

The course started last week, but don’t worry it is seven weeks long so you are on time to join, just register here.

pharo_mooc

 

Event: Going Deep with Windows Azure

This past Tuesday and Wednesday Microsoft Argentina hosted the Going Deep with Windows Azure training event. We took care of second day sessions:

  1. Azure Service Bus
  2. Hadoop on Azure
  3. Node.js and Java on Windows Azure
  4. Azure Websites
  5. Azure Virtual Machines

I was in charge of the third session. I started talking about the different technologies supported by Azure and then I focused on just 2 of them: Node.js and Java. In both cases I did a brief explanation and then I run a demo.

For Node.js I deployed to azure the Pictionary sample developed by my colleague David Frassoni (alias Harry). I did it from a machine running Ubuntu and using the new Git Publishing feature offered by Azure.

In the case of Java, I create a Java Web application using Tomcat 7, Eclipse for JEE Developers and the Eclipse Plug-in for Windows Azure. I run the application i the local emulator and then showed how to deploy it to Azure.

Here is the slide deck I used in the session.

Smalltalks 2011, we were there

The 5 th international conference on Smalltalk technologies, Smalltalks 2011 organized by FAST, was held during the first week of November. Among the keynote speakers were Ian Piumarta and Kim Rose (from Viewpoints Research Institute), Markus Denker (from Inria and founder of Pharo project) and a couple of guys from Gemstone (Dale Henricks and James Foster among others).

Out of the sessions I attended, I would have to say that the most interesting were those given by Marcus, Mariano Peck, Hernan Wilkinson and Dale Henrichs.

We held two sessions, Angel gave one on Smalltalk, C# and Javascript and I gave the other on Pharo Customization.