Carlos Michael Gabaldon

1. Developers, product management, and customers brainstorm ideas.
   

   What problem are we trying to solve?
   What market opportunity are we trying to meet?

2. Developers & product management write the core user stories.
3. Developers build an end-to-end web site skeleton with mocks to any external systems.
4. Developers spec out the core web site API.
5. Developers and product management iterate over the web site skeleton adding the core user stories.
6. Partnering with the customer; developers and product management push the product to market as quickly as possible.
7. From customer feedback developers and product management enhance, rewrite, or create new user stories and apply those stories back into the web site.
8. Repeat 1-7

It seems that in all my years of software development every company I work at seems to feel the need to pull developers off of real work to have a meeting. Where they want to discuss some useless topic that just makes us managers feel like the team is being productive by communicating status or issues. So what are good guidelines for meetings? Should we be having meetings? Here are my 3 golden rules:

1. Meetings should never be scheduled; you should strive to create an environment where meetings just happen. How do you do this? Create open development environments where there are no offices or cubicles just groups of desks with lots of couches and whiteboards. In this environments meetings become organic and happen only when people need to talk.
2. You should never have meetings to communicate status; that is why you use wiki’s and bug tracking tools. People who want status should just pull the status from those tools. It does not matter if you are standing up while you are giving status in a meeting or you call it agile. Status or issues should be an asynchronous activity where the people who need to know should be pulling those from the team, not slowing them down with a synchronous meeting. If there is an issue that needs to be escalated or help resolving then the team needs to get their butts out of their seats and pull everyone together, you should not spend time in Outlook trying to schedule a meeting!
3. You should only have meetings for productive things like brainstorming new ideas, doing use cases, group design, discussing code, or getting the team together for drinking beer.

I added another articles section for my other love language Erlang.

The first article is just a quick intro into this cool and powerful language, I will be sharing more soon..

http://carlosgabaldon.com/erlang/hello-erlang/

The following quote from Paul Graham illustrates how in some large software development organizations the leadership team loses focus on the main goal of software development; which is to deliver the business value with reduced costs.

..we can get a portrait of the “normal” world. It’s populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy.

http://www.paulgraham.com/kate.html

I recently did another interview by Dmitry Belitsky on “How to become successful rubyist”. Dmitry is an up an coming web developer who put together a great set of interviews with several top Ruby hackers.

http://belitsky.info/freelance/carlos-gabaldon/

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Satish Talim for his RubyLearning Blog on his mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra.

The interview series provides insight and commentary from notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Satish Talim is a programmer, author, trainer, and speaker. A recognized expert in the field of software development with over 30+ years of I.T. experience, Satish has consulted and trained teams at various companies in India and the US.

http://rubylearning.com/blog/2009/07/21/carlos-gabaldon-how-do-i-learn-and-master-sinatra/

Since I have been playing around with Sinatra again, I decided that what Sinatra needs is some automation for some of the boring day to day tasks. So I created a GitHub bucket to dump my Rake tasks. I only have 1 task, to create a new project, but I have a lot new projects that I will be doing in Sinatra in the coming months, so I know there will be a cornucopia of tasks.

Sinatra-rake-tasks

I wrote another article on the cool Ruby web framework DSL Sinatra.

In my last article I wrote about the cool Ruby DSL web framework called Sinatra which is taking the Ruby world by storm. I decided that another “How to” article on some of Sintra’s other kick ass features was just what Frank would expect.
..

Read More..

I have always felt that every software leader should from time to time get back to the basics and do some deep dives into focused technical tasks. Such as writing automation code for any tedious task that you have one of your high paid developers doing manually.

So what do I do? I need to get back to the basics and do some hard core hacking. What does that mean? I have been actively contributing to several open source projects over the past few years. Open source is very rewarding, but I think doing a large project in my first language (C) will remind me why I love programming.  Maybe write an operating system; my own BSD distro? Or maybe a new language?

This year I said that I was going to tweet more. With just 1 month into this year I have to say that I love tweeting, so much that I find it harder to want to blog. There is something so powerful about the informality of sending out a tweet. I know blogging can be just as informal, but every time I sit down to blog I feel like I am getting prepared to write a college term paper or a presentation for work. I feel like I have some type of quota of words to meet to even be worth posting. This is where the 140 character limit of Twitter is so powerful, because whenever you want to say something you have to be as concise as possible with your words.

So let’s see how the year goes, but for those that follow my blog you will probably find more activity following me on Twitter.