--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

Today we walk into the next 2 chapters of the Software Survival Guide book, I’ll give a small summary and my thoughts on each of them.

Chapter 3 – The concepts

As the book mentions, even at scholar work level most teams want to avoid the processes and beginning planning that needs to go into a project, due to this, most of those experiences end up being stressful, full of rushing and emergency working, staying up late, stretching schedules and a whole lot of mess in short terms, yet after all of that experience a lot of people just laugh or talk about it as how interesting and strong they are to survive those or even how a new subject will require one of those experiences.

To me, it feels as something inherent, even obvious that something like planning and correct processes at the beginning of the project allow you to avoid incredibly big changes and loss of time, even from my own experience, projects that I haven’t invested careful proper planning end up having what would be a small mistake in the past to be corrected into a huge problem that requires quite some time for fixing.

It is true, having a process is the clear way to fix all of these problems, to make the whole journey easy, but the hardest part is to convince your team and coworkers to go along with this, to invest time into the processes, it always seems like the most boring thing, they just want to get right on the “interesting” part, and the question remains, how do you convince them? telling them of the consequences doesn’t seem to be enough a lot of times until it’s actually happening, the great focus is not only on learning effective processes but also an effective way of relaying them to everyone else and convince them of their use.

Chapter 4 – The skills

We begin with the main topic of the last chapter, planning, in this case the book adresses what I was talking about, trying to convince your team to take planning into account and invest the necessary time into it, talking about hours, hard data, time. It mentions how big the increase in time the projects mistakes upstream cost when you’re downstream, things that can be fixed for so much less if caught early on due to planning.

Not only that but we’re provided with several different examples of planning for software developping, including: the development plan, the project estimates, the revised estimates, a quality assurance plan, a staged delivery plan, and a few others.

One of the examples I have the most experience with is requirements development, identifying the main problem to solve or make a solution for and specify each and one of the many requirementes that it has to achieve by the end of development, be it functional, non functional, interface or business model wise, there are many things that need to be specified. What the system can and cannot do, where it will be supported and any rules from the client themselves that it has to follow for their business. This is something I don’t see a lot of people around me applying yet it’s so important and in my opinion, not difficult to do right.

Another skill talked about is two-phase funding approach. Where you ask for the funding needed for the exploratory phase so you can concretely find out how many resources you’re going to actually need for the project itself, knowing exactly what will be needed and what the client wants.

The planning checkpoint review is a great tool to find out how viable and what changes are required to the project to make it possible, better to have a good control of what needs to be done and how do-able it actually is before asking for funds for impossible tasks, unrealistic deadlines and complex functionality.

An important thing to note, also mentioned after the planning checkpoint is the involvement of the team members, you want them to have a clear vision of what the plan is, make them feel appreciated and actually part of the project, align their interests with the work assignments, in the end the projects isn’t being done only by the managers, but the whole developping team itself, there needs to be a good inclusion and integration from all parties to make all these processes succeed.

After all that, we touch possibly one of the most ignored and most important part in software developping, user involvement. The Chaos theory mentions how lack of user involvement attributes to one of the highest reasons of project failure, if the client doesn’t know what’s going on, isn’t invested and aligned with the project itself, what chances are that it will be deemed sucessful or that it will meet his expectations, when the users and clients themselves are fully involved and constantly being asked for feedback, the project is something deeply connected with them, something they are fully involved and interested in, and more importantly something they perfectly know the state of and have realistic and proper expectations for.

Far too many times teams want to chase for the next biggest idea or the best software ever made, which on one side thinking that big isn’t bad by itself, but keeping the core idea at front at all times and considering its importance is the deal breaker, clients want a software they can use, having differentiating software is very good, but if you can’t even provide the core solution without the polishing, then it’s basically no solution at all. It’s best to keep as minimalistic as possible early on and then add any polishing required should the time be available. It’s not about rushing a product, but focusing on what’s truly important.

--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

The blogging is back once again, this time it will focus on the progress of a book with a very interesting title. The Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell, for now I’ll be focusing on the content in the first two chapters.

Chapter 1 – Getting welcomed to the survival

There’s a common thing I’ve been hearing throughout my software engineering studies and that’s that software development is in crisis, that referring to how so many projects that are started tend to either fail or be challenged (in other words exceding the expected cost and time) which is interesting but not that surprising due to the increasing complexity nature of today’s software needs.

One thing that does stand out is how on one side products are expected to be these perfect, enormous piece of software that can be used with ease and with no errors while projects are expected (hopefully) to just work, to succeed.

To begin with the book gives an analogy of the Marlow pyramid focused on the needs for project developping, how there’s some things we have to fulfill and be addressed before we can even touch anything else.

At first glance the first I thought is “well yeah, this seems like common sense” but it’s surprising how in practice there’s a lot of problems with the base of the pyramid, needs that HAVE to be fulfilled before we can focus on the tip, which adds the quality for the project to stand out, and creating that chance of failure.

Another important thing I agree with the book is how both the client and the team project need to have these set of “rights” or “rules” that they have to respect between each other, things as simple as providing requirements and meeting them that aren’t taken in mind given the proper importance and communication can be fleeting or missing, things like this as told by the Chaos theory are the biggest reason of project failure.

Chapter 2 – Putting yourself to the test

The book provides a simple yet hard to pass test for all project works going on or starting out, even dividing all of these questions in different sections of the project like planning, personnel and project control.

This is really useful and something to take at heart. There are a lot of situations already going on in college where teams decide to skip steps, to avoid documentation, avoid planning, ignore project control. Might it be to skip the “boring” part or to just get the work done for the grade, but it creates this really bad practice that goes out to the field once everyone graduates.

Ever since my engineering fundamentals class I’ve been amazed at how much failure exists for things that to me, start to seem like common sense. So many other engineering or professional areas already use planning as stepping stone for a surefire way to start off correctly, why don’t we?

--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

No, not the ending of the blog, not at all, I’m still planning on trying some things out with this space and see how it goes, but it IS the end of the little course I took on digital identity.

Today featuring, video editing being really hard, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone, it’s serious stuff, props to the people that do it cuz god, I sure have almost to no experience with it.

We tried making a little video story on a very limited time and I sure couldn’t manage that, I didn’t feel ready to use a new program or with the resources to get some good shots, being in a new place and all.

Maybe I’ll try it again in the future, but for now sadly I got no video to post here. Let’s see what the future holds for this blog and for the others, thanks for the people that have taken their times to read these so far!

Special thanks to all the people that gave us those very interesting talks and to the teacher that organized everything!

--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

Security always seems like a topic that people tend to ignore more than needed, “We’re never really safe online” is a possible argument to avoid the extra hassle of double authentication or keeping more passwords, specially with the events of big companies getting hacked as an example, recently with yahoo getting a whole lot of user information hacked from it.

I’m one of the people that find it difficult to keep tons of different passwords for every account, specially cuz of not wanting to have a notepad with them or a program saving them, but in the end that keeps me more at risk than safe which might be a good reason to change that. Today we were searching for new tools to learn for our online usage and one of the ones mentioned was Last Pass.

Last Pass is a program where you can keep all your passwords for all your different websites stored in an encrypted form and in a sort of vault for you to check when needed, all saved through a single master password and a possible double authentication.

The thought of having an external program always makes me anxious, what if they have access to my passwords?, are they actually safe?, is pretty much what I think when considering these programs. The one difference here is the recommendation of our course teacher who has used this program for several years, which makes me more confident to try it out.

Now the only problem is to go around all my accounts and make a completely different and new password for all of them. That’s gonna be problematic.

--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

I’ve already talked about what I think about using this blog and what purpose I can find for it, but what do other people think about them? what does a blog mean to them?

Not everyone has a wordpress blog, but I do know a lot of people with a tumblr blog and I decided to ask a friend their feelings about their blog.

For one of my friends, who I’ll call Kyle, the purpose and meaning of his blog is to share the content he creates, he believes tumblr blogs were the correct tool for that because the website uses the dashboard to present the content in a quick manner, where a lot of people are able to see it. Kind of like a “faster blogging” than the more commonly known blogging that you can see here with wordpress.

He says that unlike twitter, which is also managed with a dashboard where you see multiple posts of the different people that you follow, tumblr allows you to present longer posts, even without the need of words or captions and have an archive and tags for them which you can also use to search things exclusively inside the blog or the entire website.

These reasons for why he uses a tumblr blog are pretty much identical to mine, since we both use it for content sharing, although it does have its disadvantages depending on the content, plus the fast paced nature of the website makes it not appropiate sometimes for very detailed pieces of art, favoring more the quick funny comics or silly images.

--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

I would call it night of the final day but there’s no terrifying giant moon falling towards us today.

Coincidentally enough, today we did an exercise where we categorized the websites we used in 4 different places, which is kind of a followup to what I mentioned on my last blog post. How we don’t use all of our social media and different websites for the same purposes or with the same themes. Those categories were personal, visitor, residence, and professional/study. Some of them probably fit in more than one, while a lot of others only stay enclosed in a single area.

Two of these areas I mentioned might seem obvious (professional/Study and personal) but what about those other two. In visitor sites, you go into it with an objective, to look up information, to do something, but leave no social trace online, kind of when you use google to search up things and you aren’t really commenting or interacting with people or in the site itself.

On the other hand we have resident, where in contrast with visitor, you socialize, meet up and talk with other people and basically leaving your trace online.

I can say that for myself the biggest place where I have content, where I have online presence is in tumblr. A website I both use just to look at art, jokes, among other things. But a place where I also post my art and interact with my followers through asks and replies. This constant activity and presence has allowed me to meet a lot of people from across the globe, who I have started chatting with on pm through programs like Discord, and also do things like play games and what not. It creates a completely new experience and kind of friendship that wasn’t possible and didn’t exist before.

There are a lot of people who complain and say that friends met online aren’t “real” or they aren’t as good as real friends. I don’t think there’s a point comparing both, they’re different in their own way and I can say for sure that friends met online can be just as “real” or even closer to you than the reduced amount of people you can meet in person in the restricted space of your city.

--Originally published at Debugging My Mind

There was a lot of information to reflect upon today. Describing yourself, blogging for yourself or just even what things a blog can be used for, and how in the end, there’s no real formula or rule to go about what exactly to write in one, it ends up being a personal thing, a choice of whatever you wanna do with it, with all due knowledge of how to stay safe and what-not. (Special thanks to Laura Gogia, Lee Skallerup, Amy Burvall and Alan Lavine for today’s discussions about the topic).

A lot of social medias cover different areas; instagram allows you to share pictures and comment on them as far as I know (not one I use), facebook allows you to connect with friends, or in my case, privately message and manage groups for college (I really don’t like facebook). On the side of sites I have used more are for example twitter, where you can ramble about random things or post small short worded sentences, it’s quick and condensed and finally tumblr the one I use the most, where you can technically post anything, but comics, images and jokes are easier to manage there.

This is where having a blog differs, it’s a more personal place yet public place, an archived place where you can have from big reflections to small opinions or journals. One can argue tumblr is also a blog, since that’s what profiles are called in the site, but the difference is how it’s presented, through a dash, a quick scroll down method where you don’t really expect reading long posts most of the times, at least not me.

What would I use a blog for, one differing from my tumblr blog which I dedicate to art. Most likely I’d love to use it to discuss both technology and mainly videogames. I’d love to give my personal review and thoughts on games, something I feel can be interesting for people tired of the common big company reviews, which can get influenced by money and what not.