I have something to confess:  I’m an information addicted. I’m always reading books, checking out news, following a few hundred blogs, following another few hundred people on twitter and the list just goes on and on. I bet you do the same.

First of all, this is not about how to just pass over your next university exams but how to keep yourself updated or learn something with all the information we are throw everyday. It’s not possible (for me at least) to keep track from everything I read. People like me reads hundreds of information sources, mostly online. Besides that we also read books, attend conferences, meet new people, etc. We are literally bloated by information from everywhere.

how can we manage to digest this huge amount of information we face everyday ?

We all know there’s no unique answer for that question. Everybody has a different approach when it comes to learn something. Some people prefer to take notes while reading, some people prefer to record audio snippets, some people like to create songs that resemble the information, (your method here). As you might think, I happen to have my own technique (probably not only mine) and it’s being very useful to me.

I read somewhere else a good analogy: we have two “databases” in our brain. One is the short-term memory database and the other is the long-term one.  When we read something, every piece of information goes to our short-term memory which is something like a “heap” of unclassified information . As this “database” isn’t classified, our brain doesn’t know if the information is useful or not.  Later on, it can be even 10 minutes, when we try to recall some information from it, we may not be able to easily do it because isn’t classified yet. But no worries : how many times happened to you that you remembered something just a few hours later while doing something else? That happens because our searching process is asynchronous.

Ok, our information searching process is asynchronous, so what ? It literally means, your brain is still learning some subject even after you stopped thinking about it. It’s like dispatching a background process. The problem is you need to constantly remember that subject in order to transfer it to your long-term memory.

You can achieve that by keeping a sort of learning log. I’ve tried many tools to help me keeping track of what I want to learn. For instance, a simple text editor, an iphone app. You just need to ensure you have quick and easy access to it….As I’m a very moody person I keep changing, right now, for instance, I’m using a folder of my browser’s favorites bar which I sync across my computers. Sometimes I also use the favorites features from twitter. As I’m always checking them, I keep remembering the subjects I have demonstrated interest. Most of this links are shortcuts to blog posts, interviews, podcasts, which I may have read/listened only once. But just the fact I’m recalling the title, it helps me to internally recall the content I read before from that source. In case I don’t remember what’s the content is about I just go there and skim over the text so I get the general idea. If even doing so, I don’t understand the content, then I mark it to read it later using a javascript snippet.

What happens when my learning log stack is getting excessively big ? Just use your common sense! If you get to the point where you always need to recall every item in your list, something is wrong! So, how many items should you have in your list? It may vary from person to person. In my case I found 10 to be a good size. It doesn’t mean I need to first learn all 10 items and them move to the next 10 items. Some items can be in your list for a relatively long time, it’s strongly dependent on how complex is the subject and how fast you can learn.

Defining when you “learned” something is very subjective. In my opinion, you can’t know everything. My “learned” definition is when I get to the point where I can explain the subject to someone else and they properly understand it. Having a time constraint can help too, like imposing yourself a 15 days limit for the items in your list.

Resources used:

• Learning log (official way) http://www.csudh.edu/titlev/learninglog.htm
• Read it later http://readitlaterlist.com/

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After 4 months of no activity here (in my twitter I post more frequently), i’m posting some notes from Qcon London I attended this year.

Curiously, Qcon London began with a keynote from the scientist Tony Hoare (inventor of quicksort) that didn’t make me sleep. Hoare talked about the division between the academic practices and the commercial world doing many comparisons and little jokes regarding the “I’m a scientist, I’m a engineer” world.

Keith Braithwaite started his talk “Adopting agile is harder than you’d like but easier than you’d think” by comparing costs of a developer and hardware costs. Keith showed some statistics of how people improve productivity by using bigger monitors and how these hardware costs are related to the developer costs. According to him, if your company don’t gives you a big monitor, they are loosing money due to loss in productivity. Other comments he did were about pair programming where he defends its use in an all the time basis, saying that “choosing to work alone, is to choose have less quality in your code”. In a rant about Rockstars developers, Keith said that them should not be part of a team but hired as consultants or contractors instead. Finishing his talk, Keith presented some points to consider in order to know if agile methodology is working in your team which are: estimates converge, quality remains high over long periods and the team by itself find new approaches to work better.

“Web-oriented architecture” and his other talk “Transforming software architecture with Web as platform” by Dion Hinchcliffe predicts the obvious where most the applications will be web-based and web-oriented and still following the “always beta” philosophy because “the best products are never finished”. According to Dion, the web oriented architecture is strongly based on REST plus the use of mashups, integration and widgets. Dion said we are missing portability in our applications, so he believes that by using OPML to exchange data, we’ll be in the right way to the web-oriented architecture.

Martin Fowler, who doesn’t need presentations, in “3 years of real word ruby” gave us an overall idea of how ruby was introduced in the projects inside ThoughtWorks. Martin talked about how people were dealing with ruby, how the productivity was affected and many other considerations of using ruby for real world projects. According to Martin, there are 41 projects made with ruby. One thing Martin said, was how people felt when they need to go back to work with languages other than ruby. Not surprisingly (for me) most of the people didn’t want to go back to work with other languages, mostly because the easy of use of ruby. About ruby performance in the projects, Martin said “Ruby is slow, but that’s not the bottleneck in most of applications. The biggest cause for slowness nowadays is accessing database” . Regarding the tools to develop with ruby, once again, wasn’t any surprise for me. Nobody in the team feel the need for a IDE like Eclipse. All in all, nothing new for me in his talk, but it’s always good to hear from guys like Martin.

“Agility: possibilities at a personal level” by Linda Rising was a really weird talk. During 95% of its time, she talked about Caffeine and the way it affects a person’s health. It was for sure a nice talk and Linda definitely knows how to keep people’s attention. The message that she tried to present was that being agile can be (bad) the same way “caffeine” is for our health because being agile makes you feel energized, stimulated, addicted to work and makes work be a fun thing but our body and mind are not ready for such “energy”.

Joseph Pelrine in “Coaching self organizing teams” was about how to make people do things without telling them directly. It’s all a matter of achieving the right behavior which for Joseph is a function of people vs environment. Self organizing teams have a emergent behavior and are in general conditioned to the “first fit pattern match”. It means, they make decisions based in what they experienced. This kind of team needs diversity in terms of behavior in order to stimulate a evolving behavior as a team. A team is not just a bunch of people working together, they need “heat” to move and work better. According to Joseph, it’s near “chaos” when people do they best. To defend his idea, he states there are team “temperatures” to keep track:

• burning, when the team is in a organized chaos where everything is done fast, synchronized and without errors. According to Joseph, although this is what every team manager wants this “temperature” only can be maintained for short periods because it can drive the team crazy.
• cooking, when the team have everything fitting nicely and properly. Projections are made with realistic dates and everything flows to achieve a goal without help of the team manager.
• stagnating, when people in the team starts procrastinating the tasks because they don’t realize the real value of it.
• congealing, the team is lazy. They know they could do something better, but they are too lazy to do it.
• solidifying, the team starts adding bureaucracy for everything just to procrastinate even more the tasks.

One important lesson from Joseph was if you want to change a team, you’ll need to stimulate the team’s network by creating confidence among the members of the team. How can you do that ? It’s like flirting with somebody , first it requires a real context to apply, it means, something to talk about, then you’ll need a good environment, it means the place where it will evolve the stimulation.

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Congratulations Barack Obama !

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For those you don`t know, when I attended RailsConf Europe, I came to Europe to make a live test in a job I was applying. As you know by my blog post, RailsConf Europe was great. I just wrote one post about it, but that week was incredible busy for me. I still have my notes from the second day of RailsConf, but I don`t know if I`d post them.

The fact is: I got approved (yaaayyy ). So I back to Brazil to start arranging documentation to apply for a work permit in Spain (Madrid City). Now I`m in Madrid, working in the company. This changes a lot of things in my life, but it`ll be an amazing experience for me in any field.

Here i`ll learn a new language (spanish), work and learn with amazing people like Pratik Naik, Xavier Noria e Raul Benito, play guitar hero in the company when stressed, attend nice conferences in Europe like Goruco, RubyConf and others, meet new people in the effervescent nightlife of Madrid…

One last thing: My google summer of project went live yesterday (October, 21) and everything is working fine. In case you want to check it out the URL is http://www.christmasfuture.org/.

Thanks,

ps: In the picture is the amazing new terminal of Madrid`s airport

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Está quase pronto o Portal UCA ( um computador por aluno) o qual irá agregar os estudos de caso realizados durante o projeto piloto com o laptop XO.

Após o término do mesmo irei disponibilizar, em alusão ao portal, um estudo de caso de como foi desenvolvido, plugins utilizados, problemas enfrentados e demais questões enfrentadas no desenvolvimento para ajudar quem está iniciando no mundo Rails, pois é uma aplicação bem simples, mas que apresenta bons detalhes pra quem está recém se aventurando com Ruby on Rails.

Outra novidade: irei participar da minha primeira RailsConf e vai ser na europa, mais precisamente em Berlim. Para saber mais sobre a conferência acesse o link que está na minha barra lateral aqui do blog. Pretendo é claro fazer uma cobertura do que eu presenciar por lá, fiquem no aguardo.

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