Posted by F
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 04:31:00 GMT
Old news: BEA Systems acquired Fuego Inc..
Starting March 1st, virtually all Fuego employees (including myself)
became BEA employees. There are few organizational changes, which
helps minimize disruptions on our productivity and service.
I’ve been with Fuego since its early days. I started working for
Fuego’s ancestor company, InterSoft, as a Java/C++ developer in
1997.
I have different feelings about the acquisition. On the one side I
feel a bit nostalgic: the company I somehow helped build is no
more. But on the other side I’m proud to say Fuego was no “bubble”,
and I’m very positive that BEA’s infrastructure and steering will
provide the power to support the crazy growth we are experiencing, and
bring the product to the next level.
All analysts are talking about BPM systems these days. BPM became a
buzzword in the Enterprise software market. This is nothing but a
proof of how far ahead the founders of Fuego were (and probably how
clueless some analysts are?): the product itself was started in 1997,
and it was called jBPM (yes, the same name later taken by the now
JBoss-sponsored jBPM project).
Read more...
Posted in Personal, Software Products, BPM | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by F
Tue, 14 Feb 2006 23:53:00 GMT
I’m at the Saint Louis International airport (STL), waiting to board
on my flight back to Dallas. I have just experienced another
stupidity of the airport (in)security procedures. This post is not about software, but software security
and “physical” security depend on each other.
It’s an American Airlines flight. You can usually do the check-in
procedure online, and print the boarding-pass yourself before heading
to airport. This is a welcomed service, but this time it gave me an
error, something like: “Sorry, you cannot check-in online, please see
an agent at the airport”.
No big deal. At the airport I used one of the automated kiosks to
print my boarding pass. And it worked, without the need of an
agent.
I proceeded to security screening. The TSA
officer highlighted a “SSSS” imprint on the lower-right corner of my
boarding-pass and said: “you’ve been randomly selected for additional
screening, please come this way…”.
I couldn’t believe it!. They randomly selected me for
screening, but they warned me about it in advance!… I mean, now I
(and you) know that if a passenger gets a quadruple-“S” code it means
he/she will get additional screening!
I asked the TSA guy how could the process be so flawed. He replied that he
understood my concern, but he was not responsible for defining the
process and couldn’t give me his opinion. Later, I asked one of the
American Airlines agents:
Read more...
Posted in Security | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by F
Tue, 27 Dec 2005 03:19:00 GMT
After nearly two years of procrastination, I finally decided to spend
some time on wrapping things up and putting
AntDoclet online for public
consumption.
AntDoclet is a little tool for documenting
Ant Tasks. It automatically generates HTML and LaTeX documentation from the source code of your Tasks.
I wrote it initially in January 2004, for documenting the Ant tasks
provided with the FuegoBPM product. Recently, I
needed to improve it a bit, and decided to make it public.
Thanks to Fuego Inc. –my employer– who allowed
me to release AntDoclet.
Posted in Java, Developer Toolbox | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by F
Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:02:00 GMT
If you work as a software developer for a living, I recommend you get a copy of “My Job Went to India”
. Ignore the curious title and funny cover. It’s about planning your career and making yourself a more valuable developer.
I read it right after “The World is Flat” (by the way, a fascinating description of today’s globalized economics), and it was a good 1-2 punch.
Full of great advice. Stimulating and motivating little book. It
helped me find the energy to go back to work after taking a week off
:-).
The book is divided in 52 concrete pieces of advice. You’ll get ideas
for improving your technical abilities, as well as business-related
knowledge and inter-personal skills.
A couple of paragraphs I liked, from the Introduction:
For some not-insignificant percentage of IT workers, the safest bet
is to start looking for an alternate line of work. […] If you
don’t have passion and a drive that would force you to create
software […] you’re not going to be able to continue to compete
with those who do.
… Software is a business […] To stay employed, you’re going to
have to understand how you fit into the business’s plan to make
money.
And this one below made me laugh, from advice #6 “Be a specialist”:
“Too many of us seem to believe that specializing in something
simply means not knowing about other things.”
I would have titled it something like “The Mature Pragmatic Programmer”, as it is a perfect second volume for “The Pragmatic Programmer” (What? you haven’t read it? Stop reading this stupid blog and go get TPP now!).
Posted in Books, Career | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by F
Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:11:00 GMT
I’m surely stating the obvious here (I hope!), but what seems obvious for some people is not so for others.
Work Experience should not be expressed in years. There’s a quality component to it that is more important than quantity. Some people learn very little over several years of “experience”, while others learn and grow a lot in a fraction of the time.
The amount of experience is still important. And the quality of someone’s experience is lot harder to measure, since it may depend on many interrelated factors: type of work done, intelligence, interest, motivation, attitude, the environment, and people (s)he worked with.
But please, don’t measure experience in time units alone.
Unfortunately, if you need to hire someone, recruiters do little (if any) to find quality workers. They just care about keywords (like: java, web, manager) and the years of experience associated with each of them.
If you think about it, time is relatively easy to add to the
experience of a person: it’s just a matter of time :-).
The quality of a person’s experience, on the other hand, depends a lot on his/her
own will.
Posted in Career | no comments | no trackbacks