eBooks

By all means, it is clear that 2010 was the year of the eBook. Maybe it’s because of the iPad, but I’ve been consuming more and more eBooks, even if I still enjoy buying some classics in paper form. Kindle, iPad, iBooks, Nook, GoodReader, PDF, ePub, all of those names have shaped my way of reading last year.

But one of the most visible changes of switching to eBooks was the speed of reading; consuming eBooks is fast, much faster than reading normal books. I can’t say that I prefer one or the other; it’s simply different. But reading eBooks is faster than reading paper books. Probably there’s a warmth factor in paper books, which makes me enjoy them longer, I don’t know, but the fact is, in 2010 my book reading consumption has gone up in an alarming rate.

Reading as a Reviewer

Another big change in 2010 was that, for the first time, I’ve been asked to review a book before it’s published, as a technical reviewer; and boy, what a book: it was iPad Programming by Daniel Steinberg and Eric Freeman. I’ve started reviewing it when the iPad’s iPhone 3.2 SDK was still in beta, and I remember it was the first book I’ve read in iBooks on my iPad. It’s an awesome reference for iPhone developers who want to start developing apps for this (at the time) new device, providing both design and programming techniques.

Actually, I got the great chance to meet Daniel in person later during the DevDay for iPhone in London and Geneva later, and he’s not only a great author but now too a good friend of mine.

Physical Books

But not everything was eBooks in 2010; I’ve been buying paper books as well, which I love and enjoy a lot; my preferred, by all standards, is this gem called Cocoa Design Patterns by Erik Buck and Donald Yacktman, which I think is a mandatory read for any iOS or Mac OS X developer; it is probably one of the most important books ever written about Objective-C.

Buck and Yacktman are also the authors of the 2002 Cocoa Programming absolute reference I’ve talked about in 2005, so I’m not surprised that this new collaboration yields such an impressive volume.

Other gems I’ve read this year:

• REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson;
• Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds;
• HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith (A Book Apart).

More eBooks

Finally, the list of great eBooks I’ve read, in either ePub, PDF, Kindle or just plain websites, in no particular order:

• 17 Rules Successful Companies Use to Attract and Keep Top Talent by David Russo;
• Don’t Make Me Think! by Steve Krug;
• The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook by Erica Sadun, 2nd edition;
• iPhone and iPad Apps Marketing by Jeffrey Hughes;
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, which I adapted to ePub format;
• _why’s poignant guide to Ruby by _why the lucky stiff, also available as ePub and PDF versions;
• 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web by the Google Chrome team.

I hate the way you airlines cram hundreds of people into the smallest of spaces. Do you really think my femur fits the distance between your seats? Do you really think I enjoy being pushed sideways for hours by my seat neighbor because the armrest is too narrow for the both of us? Do you really think I can eat my meal when the seat in front of me is in the horizontal position? Do you really think I can’t avoid numb legs and feet during long flights? Do you really think I can go to the toilets without waking up all the people in the row in front of me or my neighbors?

I hate how long boarding and getting out of the damn plane takes. Haven’t you noticed that airplanes usually have more than one door? Then why the fuck are all 380 passengers of a 747 getting into the plane though the same, unique, small door? Can’t you design airports that take that into account? Can’t you, jetty makers, airport designers, add an extension to boarding gates that goes above the wing or below the tarmac so that we can all get in and out through several doors at once? I hate how you dare selling double tickets to obese people. Wouldn’t it be better to have a couple of special seats in the front of the aircraft for them? You don’t have any trouble overselling tickets and leaving people in the ground wondering what happened and begging you for a hotel voucher, but of course you can’t plan in advance for the 5% of potentially obese passengers that have to endure your fucking shit. And let’s not talk about families with kids, ok?

I hate your in-flight entertainment system. When it works (which, as per Murphy’s Law, most often don’t), your music sucks, your film choice is crappy, the sound is bad, and even worse, I hate how the captain interrupts my movie every 10 minutes to tell me that the outside temperature is about 3° Kelvin or other nonsense that nobody fucking cares about, babbled through speakers that sound like if they were built in the 20s. To begin with, haven’t you heard about that Dolby thing? And most importantly, don’t you think we are already annoyed enough, to just shut the fuck up and fly this thing in time? That’s the only thing we care about, you moron: to get outta here as fast as possible.

I hate your crappy food. I hate how it tastes, I hate the bad manners of the crew members serving it, I hate that I can never have meat instead of pasta because I always happen to sit behind the person who got the last one and that yeah, you’re very sorry about that. I’ll have a Coke, please.

I hate how airline websites fail big time. I hate how I have to always spend longer than required to find what I’m looking for, that your search engines are useless, that I have to spell correctly the codes of the airports, that your date picker is unusable without Flash or JavaScript, that the back button resets the whole form, that your animated intro annoys me every time I want to fucking spend money on your idiotic company because you happen to be the only idiots flying where I need to go. And airport websites are not better, so here goes a message to those dear airport webmasters: I want to know, right now, fast, without any more required clicks, if my flight is delayed, canceled or in time. I do not, let me repeat, I DO NOT CARE about how nice your first class lounge is; I will most probably never use it. The same goes for any other information. Put it behind a menu and don’t bother me. Thank you.

I hate how I get the same crappy level of service when I pay 25 bucks for a 2 hour trip to Madrid or when I pay 2000 dollars for a roundtrip flight to Argentina that lasts 14 hours. Are you fucking kidding me? What is your problem, you dickhead? Do you really think I do not see how you are fucking filling your pockets with my cash?

I hate how inaccessible, unfriendly, broken and even expensive, airports are. I hate how immigration booths are all closed but one, and you spend more time waiting to show your passport than in the flight. I hate how your tax-free shit shops are more fucking expensive than downtown shops, and how they shamelessly pretend to have the best prices on Earth. Do you really think I was born yesterday?

I hate the mind-boggling algorithms I have to execute in order to know which terminal my flight is leaving from. It goes something like this, starting with the basic questions, domestic or international? Air Exhaust or Air Compression? Oh, then it’s terminal G, door 257. You must enter through terminal N and then take our new air-magnetic-levitation-superconductor-enabled-robot-train and get out at terminal H, then walk through the panoramic gateway above the tarmac, and then you’ll see the checkin booths at your left. Oh, since it’s a code-sharing flight, you must use the booths of Blowjob Airlines to check in, then pay the airport tax in counter 734 and proceed through security and later through passsport control to gate Y35, but hurry up, your flight is boarding right now.

I hate how airport terminals are miles away from each other and how bad they are referenced and how hard it is to understand your information panels. Haven’t you noticed that small airports are usually faster to get in and out, have shorter distances between the plane and the terminal, people board using both doors and even better, are easier to get to from cities? The solution is not having two- or three-stories tall planes carrying 800 people at once; STOP THAT SHIT. That won’t work. If your airports can’t handle 200 people at once per plane, do you really think you can handle more? Really?

I hate how connecting flights are always clutching at straws. A small delay in a flight, a longer queue in the security checks or even the fact of having to recheck-in on the new flight (because some airlines can’t access the computers of each other in order to check you in all legs at once before departure), and your flight is gone. And if you are really unlucky, you will see the door of the gate being closed in front of you as you sweat your way to it, together with the grins of the ground team looking at you. You are then left to pray that you won’t have to pay for a new ticket, that you will get a hotel for that night, and that all the shit printed in the “passenger rights” posters behind the counter is true. By the way, showing those posters implicitly tells me that something has gone really wrong with your industry.

I hate your security controls that don’t protect anyone, that don’t prevent anything, that just annoy and harass everyone. I hate your assaults on my personal sphere. I mean no harm to you. Leave me the fuck alone with your security pricks. I hate listening to the same security information every fucking time we take off, about how to put my oxygen mask or how to fasten my seat belt. The airline industry might have a lower number of accidents than other forms of transportation, but when you are involved in a plane crash, the odds of getting alive are lower than in the highway. No wonder sometimes people applaud when planes land; we just don’t trust you to get us there alive.

I hate the inhuman conditions you airlines make your crews work in. I hate how they have to strike in order to have some attention, while you fucking MBAs running these companies get big bonuses at the end of the year. Because when you treat your employees like shit, they spit on my coffee, you shithead. They work overtime, they try to do a living in the worst of industries, and you treat them like shit. No wonder they get in strike.

I hate how you fucking dare losing my bags. I hate how I have to cross my fingers every time I travel to avoid having them sent to Timbuktu or Novosibirsk. Don’t you see the tags with the airport codes and the barcodes printed in them? And, even after losing them, is it really that difficult to send it faster than 3 days later to their owner? Really? Do you really think I will buy new clothes every time I travel just because baggage is handled by pathetic monkey-like systems unable to read correctly a tag? Oh, but of course, you will tax me for every extra kilo in those same bags like if I was carrying gold bars. Fuck you.

I hate how everything is a good reason to be late, or to not fly at all. Snow. Strikes. Rain. Late connections. UFOs. Other planes. Storms. Winds. Birds. Clouds. Thick air. Thin air. Engines. Flaps. Eyjafjallajökull. Wings. Terrism. Airport facilities. Tires. Oil. Gravity. Mountains. Plains. Seas. Passengers. Bags.

I hate how a plane can disappear in the middle of the ocean without a trace. Haven’t you heard about this thing called a satellite? Can’t you have a direct, permanent link with a satellite, so that in case of accident you can be notified milliseconds, not hours, later? We are in 2011, you fucking murderers. Black boxes were a neat idea in 1924, shouldn’t you be upgrading that thing anytime soon?

In other words: WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM? If you are unable to provide a service, well THEN DON’T DO IT. Do I provide healthcare? Am I a lawyer? Do I own a grocery store? No, because I know shit about those professions. BUT I DON’T PRETEND TO EITHER.

I do not trick people with nice advertising showing how big your first class seats are (probably the most useless kind of advertising ever). I do not fill my mouth with useless shit about your commitment to service. I do not lie to people about what I do and how I do it. Be frank: say that your service is as bad as anyone else. Say it. Admit it. Be as much as a failure as you want, but please, don’t be hypocrite.

The airline industry is deeply broken. It must be redesigned from scratch. If you are reading this and you happen to be the CEO of one of those fucking airlines, then please know that I wholeheartedly hate you, that you and your company are worthless, and that you have won the Guiness record for making the most millions of unhappy people per minute. Go to hell.

Prologue

A couple of years ago I found a job as a PHP + JavaScript developer in a small company in Geneva, Switzerland. I remember going to their offices two or three times, and having several interviews with various people there; one of them was the lead PHP developer of the company, the other being the CEO, a relatively well-known person in the tech area in Geneva; both shall remain nameless. The last interview I had was with the CTO, who would be my direct boss, as I was told.

They finally chose me, and very happily I signed the contract. I handed my resignation for my current job at the time, but had a couple of months of work to do before leaving (this is usual practice in Switzerland, one that I despise deeply, but that you are legally forced to follow). All in all, three months passed between me signing the contract and the first day of my new job.

The First Day

So one day, I headed to Geneva to start my new job. I arrive at around 9am to the address where the interviews had taken place, and, oh surprise… there was nothing. Stay with me: there was nothing. Not a sign in the wall indicating that the company used to be there, not a single desk, not a phone plugged on the wall. Nothing. Puzzled (to say the least), I asked the first person I met in the hallway about the company, and she told me that they had left a couple of months ago. I asked if she knew where they went, but she told me that she did not.

I was really, really worried by now. Had I signed a contract with some kind of fake company that had just left the country to the Bahamas or Luxemburg? I called their phone number. The automated voice at the other end told me that the number was not in service.

Oh dear.

After what must have been like 60 minutes of going back and forth in the hallways asking for some kind of information about the company, one guy told me that they had moved not far from there. Finally a clue! He even gave me an address, so I left as quickly as I could. I was one hour late to my new job; you do not do that in Switzerland.

On my way, I could not help thinking things like, “why wouldn’t they call me to tell me that they moved to a new place? What’s going on?”

So around 1030am I arrived to this new address, got into the building, and checked in at a reception desk that was standing there. I asked the names of the people that had interviewed me. The guy told me that nobody with that name worked there. Then I asked, “I’m looking for the company such and such”, and he told me that no, this was a private bank (there are lots of them in Geneva), so I must have been given the wrong address.

Bummer. Back to step one.

The guy, nevertheless, told me one interesting thing; in the warehouses behind the bank there was this new “startup center” with brand new offices, and the company might as well be there. I thanked the guy, and started investigating the area.

The word “investigating” is the correct one. It felt like being Columbo looking for a murderer.

Indeed, behind the bank there was a huge, new complex with many new offices and small companies popping up. The building was an old factory that the city of Geneva had bought a couple of years before, and where you could rent cheap office space. Perfect for startups. But in the main entrance, there was no sign of the one I was looking for.

It was almost 11am, and I was about to give up. My cell phone had not rang, nobody called from their office; my wife told me that nobody had called home either. If they were around, they really did not care about me.

Just when I was about to leave the building, I asked one guy cleaning the hallway about the company name. He told me that he had never heard about it, but that there was a huge sign near the entrance of the parking with company names, and that given that the building was fairly new, not all company names had been set up in every entrance of the building, so I might as well check that one out.

I left the building, went to the entrance of the parking, and finally! I saw the name of my new employer. Together with the indication of how to get there by foot: a 10 minute walk from where I was. I said to myself, well, what the heck. Let’s go.

When I crossed the door, I saw yet another reception desk, this time with a huge sign behind the receptionist with the name of the company. This was finally the good one. That was at around 1115am; I had been touring Geneva for over 2 hours looking for this company by now.

I tell the girl that I am starting today my new job, and she tells me that it was her first day too, so she did not know anyone, so she guided me to an office marked “Human Resources”, which looked quite appropriate for the occasion.

“Welcome to the company!”

The HR guy gets up from his desk, greets me and tells me that he started 2 weeks ago and that he did not know that I was starting that day, but that was OK, welcome to the company anyway! He guides me to the sector of the open space where the technical team works, and I finally see some familiar faces, together with some 30 people I had not seen three months ago.

The company had had an explosive growth in just 3 months.

Anyway, they point me to a crappy chair and table in the open space and they called that a “desk”, and I said, OK, let’s score some more points. Even better, the IT manager comes up to me and says “oh sorry, I don’t have a computer for you, I didn’t know you were coming today”.

I sit down, awkwardly, as everyone resumed their tasks in an awkward silence, a mix of “I don’t know anyone here” and “I hope it’s 5pm soon”. Probably one of the worst feelings I have had in a work environment in a while.

Meet the boss

30 minutes later (it was almost noon, and I was really starving by now), while I was sitting on my chair without having anything to do or anyone to talk to, a guy looking like a hawaiian surfer comes up to me and tells me that he was my boss. Which was strange, because he was not the CTO I mentioned earlier, but given that everything had changed so much, I was not surprised.

The surfer takes me to a meeting office, we sit down for what I think it is going to be my first work meeting, and he tells me that he has been appointed to this boss role last month, that they are dropping PHP altogether, and that they will be doing the new system using Java. The guy tells me that he knows that I despise Java (he read it on this very blog, actually) and that he does not like me not liking Java. But he cannot fire me, because he has not hired me, so my role is undefined and, as a matter of fact, I have nothing to do there.

It was 12am, and by now I know I will not be doing long in this company.

To make a long story short, a few days after that I went to the office of the CEO, I gave them my resignation letter, and they just told me, literally, “OK, bye”.

That was it.

Epilogue

After two years, I was told that the Java system was never finished. The company still exists but has completely changed its business model, and the CEO has left the country and moved his company with him.

I also learnt that the original PHP developer, one of the guys who interviewed me, the one who worked his ass off for 4 years building the only system that was actually bringing cash, was also being dismissed from the new team because he was not a Java guy. He was let go a couple of months after I left. Nobody cared that he actually knew how the original system worked, how the business worked, or that he gave 4 years of his work for a company that greeted him with another “OK, bye”.

My path to independence started that very day. Dealing with that kind of crap (of which I have many more nice anecdotes that I will write about very soon) is what tells me that I do not want to be an employee again. I prefer to starve rather than being treated like shit.

PS: you will not find the company name in my LinkedIn profile, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

Anyway.

I used Pages during the flight to keep track of all those insomniac, bilingual tweets, while the plane was a going through the Atlantic and Canada towards San Francisco. Some are about the flight itself, others about the Argentine film “El Secreto de sus Ojos”, and finally some about the Football World Cup. Project yourself in the situation, and enjoy the rants. I certainly did :)

During and about the flight

• The iPad is the perfect onboard entertainment system. Pages as an offline Twitter client, Kindle and iBooks as ebook readers, some movies, and lots of music. 57% battery after 12 hours.
• As the stewards would say: “brace, brace”; lots of tweets coming.
• Outlook is a city in Saskatchewan, not far from Saskatoon and Moose Jaw. After this revelation to remember the next time you play Trivial Pursuit, you can resume your normal activities.
• Saskatoon officially gets the 2010 akosma award for the best city name ever.
• As you could imagine, the only interesting thing in this inflight entertainment thingy is the 3D map indicating our current position. #fascinating #boring
• I forgot to mention that my seat’s sound system is broken. I could watch any movie I want but my lip reading skills are not *that* good.
• The names of the cities in northern Canada are just amazing. Can’t remember any of them tho. Are they Innuit names?
• Our vision of the world is as distorted as a map of Novaja Zemlya in Mercator projection after the explosion of the Tsar bomba.
• Why do they still print the “smoke” section in boarding passes? Is there any airline out there still offering smoking seats?
• Given that most airplane tickets are electronic, why aren’t boarding passes? #iphoneappidea
• Let’s calculate the CO2 emissions caused by airlines still printing the word “smoke” in boarding passes. No, let’s better not.
• The keyboard of the iPad has this character: ₩ (tap and hold the dollar sign). What currency is it? Korea’s won? If Korea won, then the pun is intended.
• On the plane with @mediaatelier and @dcondrau, probably even more Swiss devs, but without wifi and Twitter, difficult to know.
• There were fewer devs using Xcode on this Swiss flight than in last year’s Lufthansa flight. I will leave the elaboration of any conclusion thereof to my dear followers.
• Why do flight attendants akways decide to serve beverages at precisely the same moment when planes go through turbulences? #complot #midwest #twister
• Now I understand why Swiss is Lufthansa’s cash cow: pricier tickets and crappier service. Only selling point: the nonstop ZRH -> SFO flight. #swissairwherearethou
• I remember when they added phones to Swissair airplanes, back in 1996; calls used to cost 10 dollars per minute. Now, in 2010, in Swiss… they cost the same. #WTF
• In the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) there was free, fast, open wifi in 2006. Most airports in the northern hemisphere, in 2010, charge a lot for a crappy connection. #WTF
• And still, no wifi in planes. #WTF
• No, I haven’t been involved in Nazi activities during from 1933 to 1945. Thanks for asking. #visawaiver
• Swiss people not traveling often outside of Switzerland are easy to spot. I let you imagine the rest of this tweet.
• The Swiss version of Homer Simpson is sitting beside me, and is kinda fascinated with my iPad. Yeah, I’m talking about you, moron.
• Oh no my dear Homer, the armrest between us is mine for the rest of the flight. See? I don’t push *my* elbow on *your* side. Wasn’t *that* hard, now was it?
• The “Skytrain” in ZRH airport, is a subway, actually. You can hear yodel and cows and other Swiss sounds inside while you go from terminal to terminal. #typisch
• Whoever said that the iPad is a consumption-only device should have stop consuming some substances before writing nonsense.

Sobre la pelicula “El Secreto de sus Ojos”

• El otro día fui a ver “El Secreto de sus Ojos” con Clau, y me quedaron, obviamente, muchas cosas picando, pensaturrias.
• Me imagino la Argentina de mis padres como un lugar con una dosis mayor de inocencia de la actual. Debe haber haber sido un lindo lugar.
• Vivir en la Argentina de los 80 no estuvo mal. Aparte de las hiperinflaciones y crisis crónicas, yo tengo lindos recuerdos de aquella época.

Sobre el mundial

• Si Drogba se fracturo y quedo afuera del mundial, entonces se queda con las Ghana. Y el resto del tweet es superfluo. #mundial
• Si te fracbturas, necesitas una drogba para conbtener el dbolor. #mundial
• Primero Beckham, después Rooney, ahora Drogba… que otros jugadores se quedaron afuera? #mundial
• Atacante norcoreano inscripto como arquero… te imaginas? El técnico lo tendría que probar al arco, por ahí después se lo recordaría como el Higuita coreano. #escorpión #taekwondo #mundial
• El conocido árbitro paraguayo Carlos Amarilla no participará en el mundial. Tampoco asistirán el reconocido juez de línea francés Marcel Orsay ni el legendario hincha de Camerún. #burumbumbúm #mundial
• Burumbumberia, burumbumberia, yo soy el hincha, de Nigeria. #mundial
• Burumbumbana, burumbumbana, yo soy el hincha, de Ghana. #mundial
• Burumbumbafrica, burumbumbumbafrica, yo soy el hincha, de Sudafrica. #mundial
• Burumbumbar, burumbumbar, yo soy el hincha, de Madagascar (las hinchadas de Zanzibar y Escobar cantan similares canciones) #mundial
• Burumbumbique, burumbumbique, yo soy el hincha, de Mozambique. #mundial
• Burumbumipto, burumbumipto, yo soy el hincha, de ………………. (enviar respuesta correcta en un reply) #mundial
• Burumbumbina, burumbumbina, yo soy el hincha, de Argentina (el que diga “efedrina” es boleta). #mundial
• Burumbumbal, burumbumbal, yo soy el hincha, de Codesal (cantito alemán) #mundial
• Burumbumbola, burumbumbola, yo soy el hincha, de Angola. #mundial
• Burumbumbasta, burumbasta, yo creo… que ya basta.
• El otro día dieron en la TV Suiza (en italiano) la película de Kusturica sobre Maradona. Muy buena.

Last year’s language was Go, and the books, well, here we go:

• Software Engineering: Barry W. Boehm’s Lifetime Contributions to Software Development, Management, and Research
• The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK
• Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders
• Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces
• Pragmatic Version Control Using Git
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Software Engineering: Barry W. Boehm’s Lifetime Contributions to Software Development, Management, and Research

Barry Boehm is a name that might not strike a chord immediately, but if you work in the software field, it should. He has been working non-stop for the past 50 years (that’s right, 50), discussing all kind of subjects related to the practice of software engineering. This book is a compilation of his most well-known papers, with subjects ranging from project management to components, from iterative techniques to developer productivity. The guy has written about all of it, and when you realize how right he was, you wish you had read those papers earlier in your career.

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK

Erica Sadun is a legend in the iPhone software engineering field. Her involvement with the iPhone developer community from the very beginning (during the dark times of jailbroken iPhones) has increased since the release of the official iPhone SDK in March 2008. Her articles on Ars Technica or The Unofficial Apple Weblog are epic, and her book could not be other than a masterpiece. Make no mistake: this is not a book for beginners (and, by the way, the second edition has recently been published) but it is the perfect companion for all of us who spend a life in Xcode and the SDK. I hope she will continue providing more editions of this book, particularly now that the iPad has been announced, and will be released soon.

Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

O’Reilly has some very successful book series, like the “Head First” and the “Beautiful” ones. The latter, very similar in spirit and nature to the “At Work” series of books by Apress, provides a series of interviews to key industry players, in different fields, highlighting real-world experiences. This book takes this approach and brings an incredible series of war stories from organizations like IBM, Media Molecule or the NASA, told by Grady Booch, Tim O’Reilly, Cory Doctorow, Steve McConnell and, yes, even Barry Boehm. This book reinforced my belief that software is a social process, and I think that you will enjoy these stories about how many well-known products we use and love (or hate) every day have been brought to market, and how their teams struggled to stay together – or how they miserably failed.

Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces

The iPhone OS and Mac OS X both share a legacy of design, attention to detail and awesomeness that can be explained by the sole existence of a single set of APIs: Core Animation. This library allows developers to create stunning visual effects with great performance and with just a few lines of code. The rational use of animations is considered a huge usability win, bringing context awareness to users, helping them understand what’s going on their applications and providing feedback and a “real world” feel to software. Bill Dudney provides here a short yet complete introduction to the concepts behind Core Animation, both for the Mac OS X and iPhone OS; all in all a must have for all Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers.

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

I’ve been a happy Subversion user for years. I’ve kept svn repositories for my Master’s degree work, my personal documents and of course for most of my projects. However, the server-centric nature of Subversion always made me think twice before creating a repository, and not being able to browse repository contents without a specialized client was always a pain in the neck. Not to name the fact that branching in svn is harder than it should be IMHO. Git changed all of that. Creating repositories with Git is not only cheap, it’s easy and fast, and branching could not be easier. This book was the one that showed me that there was a better way, and now with my Github account, I can’t think of any other way to handle any kind of project. This book provided the initial knowledge to get started, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Git.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Tim Ferriss is a strange kind of guy. He comes up with this book and tells you that you are working too much, that having a boss is killing you, and that you should be sipping margaritas in the Caribbean instead. And then he proceeds to show you how to do it. This book is interesting in many aspects, the first of which is the irreverent tone and the complete faith the guy has in his method. I could not agree with everything he said but I have to agree with the fact that he’s really convincing. Tim believes in what he says and the book is a really funny one, and I can’t deny that reading it helped me take the final decision to start my own company. So, in any case, beware! This book is dangerous :)

During a chat session with Stefan Fürst from Media Atelier we put together a quick list of significant Mac applications created in Switzerland (and southern Germany), and indeed the list (in no particular order) is nothing short of impressive; check it out:

• Zattoo, a really great TV player (cross-platform, actually, but the Mac version works really well);
• Cornerstone, one of the best Subversion clients for the Mac OS X operating system (the other being Versions);
• TimeLog and GrandTotal, the two applications used by independent contractors (like me) to keep track of the time spent in projects, and then to generate invoices out of that data – and which I personally prefer and strongly recommend over Billings;
• Distribute by Seven Lakes Software, dubbed the best ERP software available in the Mac, with an impressive feature list and lots of positive reviews;
• Snowtape, an application I’ve become addicted to lately, which allows you not only to listen to internet radio stations… but also to record them as MP3 or AAC files, which are automatically imported into iTunes!
• Waveboard, a Google Wave client for Mac (and iPhone soon, too!);
• Mailplane, a native Gmail clients with awesome capabilities;
• Posterino, Proxymind and Snippet Mind from Zykloid;
• Background Music by infoAtelier, currently in a promising beta test phase;
• iBackup;
• GraphClick, iLocalize, ProVoc, XS and AudioXplorer by Arizona Software (even if they aren’t in Switzerland anymore I think, they are definitely worth including in this list);
• PowerMail and FoxTrot by CTM Development;
• LiquidCD by Maconnect
• Several Mac products by Stephan Burlot’s Coriolis Technologies;
• Don’t forget that most Cocoa apps are unit-tested with Sen:te‘s original OCUnit unit testing framework bundled with Xcode since 2005!
• And last but not least, the diverse suite of Logitech drivers and control panels written by Men in Silicium in Geneva!

It really looks like the Swiss enjoy writing Mac apps (I certainly do and will publish mine soon!). Have I forgotten anyone? Please don’t be upset, and feel free to leave your links in the comments below. I’d love to know who else is creating killer apps for the Mac in a radius of 300 km around Zürich!

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of these companies (I’m just a friend of Stefan). And if you’re more into “enterprisey” stuff, here’s the “Swiss-Made Software” label site that you migth find more interesting ;)

Update, 2009-10-23: Some more applications added after the publication of this post:

• Luscious SMS, the SMS client for the Mac;
• Special mention for Cyberduck, an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X, or “the poor man’s version of Transmit” :)

Update, 2009-10-24: Sophie Teuschler tells me not to forget the multiple Apple Design Award winners SubEthaEdit and BoinxTV by The Coding Monkeys, not far from Switzerland, in Bavaria…!

Update, 2009-10-25: I’ve just received an e-mail from Cyril Pavillard about his company Mnemis and their product Uniboard which looks absolutely awesome by any standards. Be sure to check out this cool Swiss project!

Update, 2009-11-12: Just found out about noidentity and their MoneyBook iPhone application. It seems that this application is just a copy from another one called “pennies”. Shame on you noidentity.

Trifork started organizing JAOO conferences around 1996. At that time, Java was the hottest thing on the programming landscape, and Trifork thought (rightly so) that Java-oriented conferences could be a success. Over the years, JAOO evolved to encompass many other subjects, like Inversion of Control, Design Patterns, Architecture, Open Source, Functional Programming, and of course every possible trend the industry has enjoyed (or suffered) in the past 13 years. In some cases, like the RubyFoo event in London new events have spawned from JAOO to respond to growing new trends.

The first distinctive fact about JAOO is, then, its diversity and agnosticism. You are more likely to find a speaker about your favourite technology or programming language here than in any other conference, except perhaps lately in the StackOverflow DevDays, which share with JAOO the openness and breadth, if not the maturity. The advantage of such “mixed” conferences is the ability to contrast approaches and discuss alternatives, something usually more difficult in conferences like Apple’s WWDC or Microsoft’s TechDays, given the evident bias these have.

Another unique element of JAOO is the list of speakers. Take a peek on the current and past speakers who ever gave a speech in JAOO: Barry Boehm, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Martin Fowler, Charles Simonyi, and I can’t name them all without blinking my eyes and swearing for not having attended JAOO before. The list is simply a “who is who” of software engineering.

There is another element that makes JAOO stand among developer conferences, and it’s the commitment of trying to improve not only our minds, but also our bodies: take a look at the JAOO IT Run, a nice and original response to the (real) problem of overweight in the IT industry. And it sure is a success, even if I’m not sure I would sustain more than a kilometer without a heart transplant.

Finally, JAOO also has an interesting social commitment, trying to bridge the huge gap in the number of men and women working in this industry: at JAOO conferences, every attendee has the right to invite another person of the opposite sex! This initiative is not only great, it’s a positive step to make women join the ranks of software engineers worldwide, and I think it’s an idea that should be emulated elsewhere.

In any case, I was not only surprised by JAOO’s quality, breadth, topics, interestingness, but also by its social and human side, trying to adopt initiatives that make us not only better engineers, but also better human beings, in a better society.

Disclaimer: I’m a speaker on the JAOO iPhone Dev Days Zürich 2009 next Thursday.

1. Contact the most important people in some field.
2. Sit down and ask a similar set of questions to each one of them.
3. Record all the interviews and then write them down.
4. Publish the resulting book, usually with great reviews (such as this one).

This does not constitute, by any means, a new genre; but it’s certainly a fashionable one in your technical bookstore right now. At least Apress and O’Reilly have realized that this simple technique yields epic books.

I have already blogged about Founders at Work, thus it’s worth mentioning that Coders at Work (which I’m reading right now) has just been released. Both books share a similar structure (as well as a similar cover), and both are highly recommendable, with interviews of David Heinemeier Hansson, Steve Wozniak and Paul Buchheit for the first, and Donald Knuth, Joe Armstrong and Brendan Eich for the second.

On the other side, O’Reilly is very well aware of the force conveyed by this kind of books: their “/Theory/In/Practice” series of books has some gems which, I think, are really worth reading:

“Beautiful Code” features interviews with Brian Kernighan, Charles Petzold and Yukihiro Matsumoto; “Beautiful Teams” (already my preferred book for 2009!) features Tim O’Reilly, Barry Boehm and Grady Booch; finally, “Masterminds” has great interviews with Bertrand Meyer, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling, Brad Cox and Anders Hejlsberg.

I think that the names of the interviewees, in each of the five books, speak for themselves. In all of them, I have found inspiration, advice, tips, humour, awe and enlightenment. The good thing being that, in most cases, you don’t need a Computer Science degree to read these books; it’s just a matter of empathy and sociology. Our world is driven by software, and the stories behind its construction are not only interesting, they are also important to understand the cost, the difficulty and the wonder that constitutes a piece of working software. These books are a way to approach the immense complexity of our society.

I really look forward to read more books of this kind! If I forgot to mention any other similar book, just leave the reference in the comments section below. I’d love to read your suggestions.

I’ve been fortunate enough to earn a pretty decent living doing basically what I consider a hobby for the past 13 years, which is typing code on a computer and see if it works. Which most of the time doesn’t, but that’s part of the game.

I strongly believe in what Elizabeth says in this talk, and I have believed in this for years. I deeply believe that we, software developers, software engineers, both self-taught and those coming out of college, are just creators, just as Elizabeth describes them. Simple creators, being able to provide new ways to information to be shown, to flow, to entertain, to move. Simple channels through which ideas are transformed into tools, behaviours, images and sound.

There’s been a huge debate in this matter. Knuth named his masterpiece “The Art of Computer Programming”, and the single choice of this title has sparkled a longlasting debate in the software community, one that this essay is unfortunately going to feed, too.

Interestingly enough, Knuth developed his own typesetting system for his book, TeX, which is named after the Greek word meaning “art or craft”. His work not only had to be the most important book ever written on programming, but also, it had to be beautiful.

It had to be an object of art.

And I think that programming itself is art. And I think that programmers are artists. And this is maybe the single reason why so much has been written about programmer productivity, why software project management is so hard, why discussions around programming languages distort into trolls and heated arguments, and why you feel this anger against this words on my blog and you call me names.

This is why writing opinionated software is key to success, that’s why the best software companies take time into creating great software development environments that stand out, that’s why Peopleware is so important, even 20 years after being published for the first time.

It is all about letting the flow of art come through the person whose hands are on the keyboard. It’s all about letting this happen. It is not us who write, it is the writing that comes to us.

Software is art, and as such, it needs time, patience, iterations, silence, passion, coffee, naps, pizza, books, compilers, laughs, Nintendo Wiis and unit testing suites.

The creation of good software is embodied in the creative process itself. The best engineers I know suffer from this process as much as they enjoy it, using an iterative process of trial and error which, even after all these years, still applies. The best software developers release sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes with quality, sometimes not, but they release. They refactor. They document. They teach others about all of this. They always think that they can do better.

They always think, as Elizabeth says in her talk, that their current work is the worst in the history of programming: “Not just bad, but the worst”. They suffer about it. But they release, and they fight against the fear of being critisized because of their choice of programming languages, operating systems, tools, processes, insufficient testing or design patterns.

Real artists ship. The making of this industry is full of examples of why software is an art: the first Macintosh, Smalltalk, NeXTstep, the Internet, Erlang, Apache, Ruby on Rails, UNIX & C, Lisp; just glimpses of wisdom, brilliantly crafted, that struck as obvious yet incredible, and which prompt a huge crowd to cheer up and applause.

Anyway, I’m not as famous or well-known as Elizabeth or Duncan. I have not yet done anything such as Ant or Tomcat (originally written by Duncan, by the way), even if I release software and projects with an increasingly high rate lately, and with many projects in the pipeline these days. I hope that my best successes are still ahead of me. And I hope you’ll enjoy them one day, too.

Do I think that a little “genie” is besides me? Yes I do. And given the extremely rational background of most engineers out there, stating such an argument will raise more chuckles than anything else. Heck, who cares.

If you ask me, there is something magic out there.

PS: there’s this quote attributed to Jorge Luis Borges which says that “publishing is a way to stop editing”… and I thought about it just after publishing this post. I don’t know if he really said that, but in any case I agree. The difference being that, in our case, we refer to publishing as “releasing”. But the feeling is the same.

PS (2): I’ve already written about the importance of delivering working software. I just forget about all I’ve written or linked to.