Disqus - Latest Comments for jruano

Re: The monetary return of principles

Josep Ruano — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:58:31 -0000

Thanks for the comment Isilion.
Very interesting to remark that, at the end, you're hurting to the bottom line of your P&L statement. That's exactly what I tried to show out in the post, and I think that is quite important today to think about shor-term and long-term decissions in the companies, givent the current economic situation and the drivers of it. A shor-term profit culture can be very harmful in the long-term.

Thanks for your contribution.

Re: Albert Einstein on crisis

Josep Ruano — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:19:10 -0000

I've taken it from several sources, but I'm really having serious doubts about the author of these words. I've seen it first on a finance newspaper ("Expansión"), then in several websites, but now, after searching some serious confirmation of it, I think that these words are too optimistic to belong to Einstein.

However, these words are good enough to make us think about.

Thanks for coming.

Re: How to be a good consultant

Josep Ruano — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:35:28 -0000

Thanks for commenting Alberto.
Completely agree with you, these principles are great for day-to-day life, in my opinion.
Also, I think that often we don't learn enough from the past which cause us to make the same mistakes again and again in the future.

Hope to see you soon

Re: How to be a good consultant

Josep Ruano — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:29:15 -0000

Thanks for visiting and commenting Pau!
The book is worth "to amazon".

Re: Visualization for dynamic data sets

Josep Ruano — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:12:34 -0000

Edu, this is really cool. Progress in data visualization techniques may change a lot of things a we know today. For example, it may help in software engineering to know what components, source code, configurations,... are you more depending on, so you can see more easily where to focus for quality improvement. It may help also to analyze what media channels and people are more influent in stock exchange markets in a very simple and quick way.
In a world where data volume is increasing exponentially and current data warehousing techniques are often not enough to extract knowledge from raw data, visualization techniques can play a very important role.

Regards,
Josep.

Re: Unix toolbox

Josep Ruano — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:56:31 -0000

thanks for coming and commenting Edu :)
I think it's a good reference stuff to have at hand, specially for non-senior unix sysadmins.
I didn't saw the nero image thing! Really cool!

Josep

Re: The (right) meaning of words

Josep Ruano — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:32:08 -0000

Thanks for posting, Pau! The teacher you mention was at high school or at University?

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last phrase: "clearly defined concepts, targets and aims". I have seen too often projects failing because of targets being not clearly defined, or because same words means different things to different actors playing a role in the project. You got it, communication is very important. And I must add, motivation is one another pillar to succesful projects too.

As Fred P. Brooks, Ph. D., said in his invaluable "The Mythical Man-Month", that "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, or in simplicity". Moreover, study after study since late 1960's has found that the productivity of individual programmers with similar levels of experience does indeed vary by a factor of at least 10 to 1 (Sackman, Eirkson and Grant, 1968; Curtis, 1981; Mills, 1983; De Marco and Lister 1985; Curtis et al., 1986; Card, 1987; Vallet and McGarry 1989), and variations in the performance of entire teams on the order of 3, 4 or 5 to 1 (Weinberg and Schulman, 1974; Boehm, 1981; Mills, 1983; Boehm, Gray, and Seewaldt, 1984). These variation can only be due to peopleware issues, and authors agree that peopleware issues have more impact on software productivity and quality than any other factor.

Said this, motivation, and so communication, are the most important things in any software project.

Re: To scale up or to scale out

Josep Ruano — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:43:27 -0000

Hi Zarate,

yes, the reason is the config of the blog. I thought it was better to have short feeds for those who just want to see what's about the post and then come here to read the full article if it's of interest to them. This is the usual way to work with feeds. If more people asks for it I will think on changing, but right now I feel this the best way to go.

Thanks for coming.

Re: Comments switched to disqus

Josep Ruano — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:53:58 -0000

Thanks for coming, Edu!
I'm trying disqus to see how it works, but yes, it seems a good idea with a good execution.