Module Lost

Stealing Fire From The Gods

Abner — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:05:19 +0000

After reading books like: “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink and “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds; I realized how useful are stories for professionals and also for presenters. That’s why, I’ve been using Storytelling techniques over the last years in my work presentations, my conferences for user groups and even when I’m teaching something.

So, how did I start? Well, my first step was buying some books. I may have to admit that I followed blindly Daniel Pink’s recommendations buying: “Stealing Fire From Gods” by James Bonnet. It is a great book with a great title that capture your attention, isn’t it?

The target public are writers and filmmakers, so all the examples are about popular movies. That’s really great! Because you may have already seen those movies or even better, you can buy them and also have a good time watching them. You won’t see the movies in the same way after reading this book.

In summary, I learned a lot about stories, for example: why stories are so important, how stories are structured and how to create stories. All of them are important topics that every storyteller should know.

My favorite chapters are:

“Chapter 3: The New Story Model”, the storywheel is an awesome way to analyze stories!
“Chapter 4: The Art of Storymaking”; a very useful set of techniques and tips for creating stories.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in stories!

“So give the world something it desperately needs. Give it great stories” – James Bonnet

[Haz click aquí para leer la versión en español]

10 Years of Eclipse

Abner — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:12:46 +0000

Eclipse Community is celebrating its 10 years releasing Eclipse Timeline. It’s a ten years line where you can register: yourself, when you started to use Eclipse and what are your favorite projects.

It’s a great idea and I think, it will be interesting to see the final statistics! So, if you use Eclipse, please join the Eclipse Timeline!

Happy Hacking!

[Haz click aquí para leer la versión en español]

Video: ¿Quieres ser un profesional sobresaliente? Sumergete en el mundo del software libre!

Abner — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:03:07 +0000

Desde principios de este año tuve la gran oportunidad de compartir con varias comunidades de software libre esta conferencia. En mi opinión es una de las conferencias más motivadoras que he dado y por eso me animo a publicar el video para que más personas puedan verlo.

Datos:

El post original de esta conferencia esta aquí.
El video es de la conferencia que dí en LinuxWeek 2011.
El video fue grabado por la PUCP y esta disponible también aquí.
La lista de comunidades donde dí esta conferencia esta en la sección “Conferences Given” en mi CV.

Project Managers and Their Knowledge About Software Development

Abner — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 04:14:35 +0000

This is a good topic to talk about when you have a lot of time with friends or acquaintances; and some after work drinks close to you!!!

Based on my experience working with project managers and also being a project manager, I’ve found very important that PMs understand and accept: the inner complexity and the inevitability of change in software development projects. Sounds easy, isn’t it? Sadly, there are PMs that don’t understand and accept those concepts, even if they have some background or career in software development.

So, projects managers should have a strong knowledge about software development or not? In my opinion, it doesn’t matter whether they have it or not because PMs should care first of people in their teams, keep them motivated and help them adapting constantly the next steps according to changes. You don’t need to know every detail about software development to do that!

It’s pretty obvious that communication and also other aspects in projects can be simplified if PMs know about software development but if they don’t, it can be solve easy because PMs can request advise from experts like software architects, experienced programmers, etc.

Even if PMs have a strong knowledge in software development, they should always request advise when they have to estimate, take decisions or just don’t understand something.

In conclusion, I think that being a project manager implies more than technical knowledge, it’s about people and how to get the best of them. If they know about software development would be great but if that is not the case, they can always ask experts for help.

[Haz click aquí para leer la versión en español]

Gravatar Hovercards enabled at modlost.net

Abner — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 03:15:13 +0000

I’ve just enabled another Jetpack feature: “Gravatar Hovercards” for comments. It took me a little bit because there was a hidden conflict between theme Jenny and Jetpack but hopefully it’s solved.

Happy hacking!

Adding sharing links at modlost.net

Abner — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:46:53 +0000

Getting up early is not one of my favorites activities but somedays you just get up at 3:00 am and can’t sleep, I could assume that an internal bug in my sleeping program threw an exception! What ever, it’s good to have a list of things to do when it happens (GTD).

The task: “Adding sharing links at modlost.net” was in my someday list for a long time ago, so I decided to hack a little bit about that. It was too early in the morning and I had a lot of time.

I started with a quite simple search in the web and I found Jetpack by WordPress. It’s an interesting project/business idea with some free (sharing, gravatar, short links, etc.) and paid (coming soon) features and I already had it installed because WordPress Stats new updates will be bundle in Jetpack so it was the obvious option to take.

Sadly, Jetpack doesn’t support Google+ out-of-the-box and its “new service” feature didn’t fit very well when you use it in index pages. So I had to check the source code and modify it to allow links to share in Google+, Twitter and Facebook at the bottom of every post, page and index page.

It will need more work to align better all the bottoms so after fixing that I’m going to share the patch.

Happy hacking!!!