Mug Collection
Ξ December 23rd, 2011 | → 0 Comments |
∇ Fun | ∇ ACM, Alan Turing, DME, IOCE, Mug |

Quando vier a Primavera,
Se eu já estiver morto,
As flores florirão da mesma maneira
E as árvores não serão menos verdes que na Primavera passada.
A realidade não precisa de mim.
Sinto uma alegria enorme
Ao pensar que a minha morte não tem importância nenhuma
Se soubesse que amanhã morria
E a Primavera era depois de amanhã,
Morreria contente, porque ela era depois de amanhã.
Se esse é o seu tempo, quando havia ela de vir senão no seu tempo?
Gosto que tudo seja real e que tudo esteja certo;
E gosto porque assim seria, mesmo que eu não gostasse.
Por isso, se morrer agora, morro contente,
Porque tudo é real e tudo está certo.
Podem rezar latim sobre o meu caixão, se quiserem.
Se quiserem, podem dançar e cantar à roda dele.
Não tenho preferências para quando já não puder ter preferências.
O que for, quando for, é que será o que é.
by Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)
The best laugh I had in a couple of months. Great action, blood and guts movie!
I was watching this on TV! Come on… this is ‘quality’ TV.
The holidays are the perfect time to read, and I’ve been doing a good share of reading. The selected books where “Peopleware” from Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, and “Clean Code” from “Uncle Bob” Martin.
This book was presented to me as a selection of small essays and articles on team management, but it is so much more than that.
The first thing that becomes clear to the reader is the voice of experience that is expressed in each chapter. Some of the ideas win your over due to their simplicity, they are so obvious that they can’t be contested by anyone. But seeing then written down, black over white, gives then another aura of comprehension.
The authors devote themselves to the issues like the team environment (the physical space that the team needs), team members and their selection and team building.
I really like the metaphor of having a “jell” glue team members, and so increase their productivity. Some introspection really allowed me to relate with the requirements to achieve the “jell formation”, and also identify the issues that make it harder to build a better team.
The quality of you code is obviously something that should never be disregarded, but after reading Clean Code I’ve gained some very good tools (and specially validated arguments) to say “My code still isn’t ready, it needs to be cleaned!”.
The book purposes the idea that you need several iterations to incrementally clean your code. This alone, is not something new, but the author makes a good argument advocating that most of the time that clean up is not done. This leads to severe code rot, and decreased productivity and decreased motivation and…
Apart from showing several techniques to improve/clean your code, it also defends the benefits of Test-Driven Development. On this subject, I need to do some more investigations but it seems that the TDD approach has advantages over the usual “ill-defined” testing that is the normal approach. At least the book opened the “appetite” for the subject…

Having a bit of free time on my hands, I decided to create a list with the latests books I’ve read. There are still some missing, but the ones I’d recommend are already there.
As usual the list in currently very organized, but I don’t expect it to remain that way for very long. ![]()

The movie has everything good about the book and adds so much more. The book is too irrational for my taste. I had seen the movie before, but nevertheless it was good to remember this master piece.

Just found this video somewhere on the Web and tough it was interesting. It looks to be a pretty interesting book trailer for Leviathan. Never had the change to read something from the work of Scott Westerfeld… this really seems to be a good change to start!