Startup-Life on Miro's World

History of Faith

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 11:24:48 +0800

The beginnings
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Once upon a time - actually, in late 2017-early 2018 - there was a QA/DevOps engineer named José who liked containers, Docker and worked for a company named Thinkwrap (that soon would become Pivotree) in Valencia, Spain.

José was responsible (among other things) for setting up integration and QA environments for multiple Hybris projects. Such environment, when being built in traditional way (from physical servers or VMs), normally requires quite a few pieces:

Miro Manifesto

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:22:48 +0800

Miro Manifesto
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Original text of the memo, written in February 2012 and shared with limited audience, until it surfaced up as main them of the planning meeting in December 2012.

This is an attempt to come up with better answers to the following questions:

what issues and challenges I see on our way ahead from the technology point of view and what needs to be done to address them
where do I see my professional and personal career go over next 12 to 18 months and in long run
how to best align those two streams

In the spirit of my latest “back to the basics” obsession, it was written in Markdown format and in Vi, copied and pasted into Google Doc, btw.

Here we go again

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:56:40 -0500

This is reloaded version of my previous blog - or continuation of the fork.

First thing to start is to explain why did I do something quite contra-productive as relocate the blog and loose all the audience - however small it could have been.

It would seem that I like restarts and things reloaded. I did pick a new country to become new home for me and my family (if emigration is not a restart, what else is ?). Back in 2004 we have started Thinknostic to be "Montage Reloaded" - a new incarnation of the company I worked for before and liked it a lot. The same story repeats with blogging.

It's alive !

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:26:22 -0500

I was aching to blog about this since December 18th, when our system quietly and gently slipped into public visibility. Marked as Beta (thanks, Google for making this a legitimate way how to go live) it comfortably made it through Christmas shopping season into 2009.

Now when the site has been announced and mentioned few times in the media, I guess it's OK to mention it here too.

What is "it" ? A new, fresh eCommerce site selling music. A lots of really good music. Without any DRM or any other nonsense, as plain good high quality (mostly 320 kps) MP3's. The selection is actually very good - starting from several hundred thousands in December to several few million songs when full catalog is loaded. More great music being added every week.

We are hiring

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:12:00 -0400

After everything-but-quiet summer, things got even busier and we need to add more great people to our teams.

At the moment we're looking for

* Junior Java developers

* Intermediate Java developers

* Intermediate .Net developers

* Senior .Net developers

* Junior Graphics/UI/Multimedia Designer

Sorry - no teleworking, you must be local to apply. If you feel like fitting in - or know somebody in Ottawa that would fit, email Miro at thinknostic dot com ...

Agile development team member mantra

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:24:41 -0400

Introducing code review and pair programming has often an impact on relationships in the team - especially when a critique needs to be delivered. It takes great degree of experience on both sides to communicate defects in the code for both the reviewer as well as for the code author to get something useful out of it.

I found this at http://www.finetix.com/blogs/finetixblogs.html which can be helpful (page is 404-ing now, but I luckily saved it in Google Docs way back) :

Leopard in business environment - week 1

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:11:33 -0500

I have already worked through full week solely on Mac and Leopard platform with excellent results. The productivity in using Java is actually higher, thanks to faster machine and Spaces allowing to have opened few Firefox windows with Spring documentation, terminals for Ant builds, Tomcat, Eclipse and Spype/Adium to keep in touch. Spaces is about as good as having multiple monitors - the ability of switching between both with mouse and keyboard fits well in my working habits.

On hardwood floors and software engineering

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:57:12 -0500

I am in the middle of a non-computer related project. Last week we have decided to get rid of carpeting in my home office and library and to put in the hardwood floor. My wife picked the wood and color, I picked the contractor, with my son's help we moved out the furniture and the renovation started. The most painful thing was shutting down and disconnecting all the computers and servers - only the lonely router is hanging on the wall and suffering the dust and noise of the power tools. As result, my family is now server-less and until we finish and connect them back, we have to survive using the notebooks only. Fortunately, I have at least one notebook available for each household member, except the cat. Even more fortunately, she (the cat) does not mind.

Like Netmeeting - only much better

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:10:30 -0400

My current client is multi-national company, headquartered in Ottawa with offices in USA and Europe. With teams all over the globe, the conference calls and network meetings are part of the game. This usually means Microsoft Netmeeting to share the screen and teleconference bridge for voice. Netmeeting usually works quite OK - except when it does not - for no obvious reason :-).

Thanks to Yugma, there is now better alternative. Yugma is Sanskrit word meaning "the state of being in unified collaboration" and also a name of a startup, offering teleconferencing product that aspires to unify colaboration between platforms. And they mean it, because their product runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and integrates with Skype to take care of the voice portion.

Fresh cup of Java

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 22:28:40 -0400

Hi, all Java gurus inside and outside of Thinknostic - I have a very interesting problem. Imagine the following situation: we have three existing Java Web applications, written back in 2000/2001, based on open source libraries of that time: Struts 0.9/1.0 and JSP 1.x (no JSTL) with Tiles for Web layer, Apache Torque for ORM, early version of Quartz for job scheduling, Jasper Reports for PDF reports and Freemarker as template engine for email creation. The application has been (and still is) in production for almost 7 years and works great. Now the customer is expanding the functionality and wants add several Ajax features - in short, version 2.0 is on the table.

Fixing broken ASP.NET development environment

Thu, 03 May 2007 22:18:19 -0400

I had again the not-so infrequent pleasure of setting up fresh copy of Windows development stack. We were moving few machines between projects and to make sure that no forgotten source files are left on the harddisk, we reformatted and reinstalled Windows from scratch. It is usually good idea anyway, because developers like to install strange tools and utilities and generally customize machines to their own taste, which tend to be unique and is seldom shared.

Four quadrants of uncertainty

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:54:58 -0400

(a followup to discussion last week)

In every outsourced software project you have four large areas: your customer, the business vertical you are writing software for, your implementation team and the technology foundation or platform you are using.

Two of these areas are on "internal" side of your organization (team and technology), two of them are on external - your customer side (business domain and customer organization). Two are more micro level in the sense that they have strong human interaction aspect (customer and team) and two are more macrolevel and less personal (business domain and technology). For that reason, you can represent these areas as quadrants using two axis micro/macro and internal/external: micro+internal = team, micro+external = customer, macro+internal = platform, macro+external = business domain.The degree of risk in the project is proportional to how many of these quadrants are actually unknown or new. Why is that ?

On Myers-Briggs, Spaghetti Sauce and Getting Things Done

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:33:21 -0500

Connie, our HR director came few weeks ago with interesting idea: give the team a chance to get better understanding of "implementation details" of their very own "inner software" - the personality type evaluation using Myers-Briggs approach. Connie holds certification for this type of classification.

The classification in a nutshell, assigns to everybody four letters, one from each pair: E or I, N or S, T or F, J or P. The first letter indicates preference for Extraversion or Introversion, the second characterizes the main source of information input: Sensation or iNtuition, the third the way how the information is processed - by Thinking or Feeling and the last one characterizes the degree of "structure" and organization in all the previous: more organized and structured (Judging) or less organized and more ad-hoc (Perceiving). Now all this is terrible oversimplification (sorry Connie), so if you really want to get more information try this - or if you are in Ottawa, call Connie Deschamps at Thinknostic dot com and schedule a session :-).

Looking back on 2006

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:46:33 -0500

The 2006 was truly amazing year. We have accomplished so much - we have created the West end development centre, brought in and started several projects, completed phase 1 of employee conversion, started benefits program, ESOP program, redefined the company visual presence, grew the business and the company size considerably and created foundation for future growth.

Most important achievemnt is the fun factor - I am again looking forward to go to work - and again since the Montage days the synergy is coming back. Thanks so much to all of you who helped it happen.

Party time

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 23:55:50 -0500

It is this time of year - Christmas parties. It looks like the number of parties we go to every year increases - did not figure out yet which function it is, let's hope it is not exponential. This year, the number was four. First was traditional Christmas party at Peter's place. Second one - which I unfortunately missed - was a gettogether of Montage/Allstream alumni. I was sick and in bed - sorry I missed this one. Hope that there will be more opportunities for meeting during the long winter that is still ahead of us. Third party - "the party" - is Thinknostic Christmas Party, this year happening at Steve's place. And the party marathon will be closed by tomorrow's Tirestamp party at Sean's.

Wiki's are everywhere ...

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 21:05:25 -0500

Since the beginning of the biometric security project, we are using an excellent enterprise-level Wiki Confluence as knowledge repository and main team communication tool. I was not sure at the beginning, how will the Wiki approach work for all the people on the team, mostly because once before I already tried it and had not much success of introducing the idea. It was few years ago and the Wiki engine I used were nowhere in the same league as Confluence, but main problem at that time was probably the users' mindset. I am happy to report that this time it worked really really well. I am not sure whether it was because of the fantastic user friendly features and capabilities of Confluence, or because the general awareness shifted thanks to sites like Wikipedia and people got used to the idea of user created content ... The truth is that Wiki's are mainstream now - inside or outside of the enterprise space.

Moved in ...

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:08:30 -0400

I have been pretty quiet in last few days. The reason why was hinted here - we have finally a space. The project started on Monday and we were running around like crazy since Sunday. Started with moving in looots of boxes - 9 workstations, each with two 19" LCD monitors plus three servers, network gears, cables etc - three full cars. Then came the unpacking and setting up, which took much longer time that I would ever have expected. But it went well - modulo few glitches - like missing DVI cables and only one disk in server that should have been RAID-ed ...