Bruno Miranda's Notebook

Sinatra App

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:10:00 GMT

I wrote a small sinatra app this morning as proof of concept. The only function of the application at this time is to provide you a shorter link to a long URL.

http://s.bopia.com try it out.

The code can be found on github.

Pivotal Menu

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:57:00 GMT

I love almost everything about Pivotal Tracker. The one issue I have with it is the upper right-hand corner navigation menu. In my honest opinion I think the labels as misleading.

Here is how I would improve it:

The current “My Accounts” page contents should go under “My Account” which replaces “My Profile”

I always end up having to click around a couple times to get to the right place because to me the labels just don’t perfectly match their destinations.

Web's most productive Hours

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:00:00 GMT

What could you possibly be doing now that the website you visit and hit refresh 40 times per minute is down for maintenance.

Use the time wisely to get some work done.

PS. Let me tweet that, o wait :-)

Cyloop on Rails

Sat, 02 May 2009 09:03:00 GMT

We have released the new Cyloop music platform built using Ruby on Rails. I have had the pleasure of working with the team at Hoodiny to build and deploy this great application.

The platform has been adopted by MSN Brazil and MSN Mexico for their default music channel, soon to be the default music channel for MSN Latin America, MSN US Latin and MSN Canada.

While being featured on the home page of MSN Brazil and MSN Mexico we witnesses a tremendous amount of traffic. We knew this was going to be the case which is why we spend a considerable amount of time pre release working on caching and optimizations.

One of my favorite features of the application is the ability to follow your friends and discover music based on what they are listening to, you can also follow you favorite bands. We are using a messaging queue platform called RabbitMQ to accomplish the queuing of activity (writes/reads). Another aspect of our caching strategy is heavy usage of Memcached coupled with warm-caching of the activity feeds which are currently being stored to flat files.

During the caching and optimization phase we implemented a separate messaging queue for emailing and image uploads, lots of rails page, action and fragment caching as well as strategic usage of rails metal and cache-money to enhance performance.

Many thanks to the entire team who worked on this application. The Hoodiny dev team (Scott, David, Steven, Rick, Ana), the Hashrocket team, and Jason Seifer for bringing his rails scaling insight to the table. Also many thanks to Engine Yard and all the excellent application support technicians who helped up configure our cluster.

More to come, thank you and may we see continued success.

Farewell - Part Two

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:47:00 GMT

In the preceding post I attempted to describe my gratitude and farewell thoughts.

I am glad to announce that as of Monday I will be joining Hoodiny Entertainment Group. This opportunity was extremely welcomed as I realized my readiness for the next challenge. I have met the development and executive team at Hoodiny on numerous occasions and am fully confident that we will continue to achieve great things together.

This opportunity happened a bit out of serendipity. As a good friend of mine once said:

“Life is about serendipity, be ready for it.”

I am anxious and excited about taking on this new journey and glad to have once again be given the chance to make a difference. Isn’t that what life is all about? There will be challenges, there will be failures, thankfully for from those same failures, greatness can be achieved.

Farewell - Part One

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:24:00 GMT

Today is my last day at Todobebe. I have quickly realized how much I will miss the entire team. A team who kicked so much ass – and took so many names I would need an entire book to transcribe all accounts.

While at Todobebe I had the pleasure of working with extremely talented team players. People like Rich Cavanaugh who hired me and gave me a chance to shine. Chris Saylor who’s skills are, scary, to say the least. David Reckles, our CTO who taught me the importance of great communication and mitigation skills. Leslie Chavez who put up with a group of developers and became our official bucket of sunshine.

While at Todobebe I also had the opportunity to hire Roberto Soares and Dante Regis two of most capable and self-disciplined software developers I have ever met.

It is by no means a surprise that with such a team we achieved great things. From our adoption of Agile methodologies, thanks to Patrick Curtain, to amazingly effective development and superb software quality.

I appreciate the trust bestowed upon me by the entire executive team and would like to take this opportunity to once again thank Jeannette, Gillian, Cynthia, Michael, Allison, Cathy, Carol, Rogelio, Rick, Kevin, Damian, and everyone else, team member or vendor that I have ever dealt with while at Todobebe.

I would like to wish Todobebe continued success and to make known that I will be forever thankful and always just a phone call away.

Agile South Florida Facebook Group

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:36:00 GMT

I am pleased to introduce the new Facebook group about Agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming, SCRUM and lean.

Feel free to participate if the subject interests you and share with friends.

Thank you

RefreshMiami

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:02:00 GMT

Refresh Miami had a great turnout last night. Brian generously bought us pizza, we also had a ton of beer.

Over 100 folks socializing and discussing all things tech. We also had great presentations on usability, microformats and “start ups”.

Alex DC

Obie and Tim

Itunes playlist "I want to Hear"

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:32:00 GMT

I think I have finally managed to create a smart playlist that plays songs from my library which I actually want to hear. Without constant repetition of the songs I listen to often already.

Here is what it looks like:

I limit it to 8 hours which is a full day of work. These settings keep often skipped songs out and refrains from playing those songs I manually tent to want to listen to more often. I find myself rediscovering a bunch of fun songs.

Let me know how it goes for you.

Christmas Lights

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:00:00 GMT

This is how I want my house decorated this holiday season:

Customer Review

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:04:00 GMT

Here is something that may be crippling your agile project/team if you are not yet practicing it:

Story Based Customer Reviews

During the engineering meeting (you do have one of those right?) stories are assigned and to developer/s and prioritized. The developer must go back to the customer and obtain the requirements/specifications for said story (but that you already knew).

Once the developer has working code the must take it back to the customer for review and feedback. This is a crucial step that if skipped will hinder the process, delay stories and result in incomplete iterations. When an iteration is not fully completed due to reviews and feedback from the customer after the end of said iteration the entire project timeline will suffer.

I can’t emphasize how important getting customer feedback as soon as possible within the iteration is. Our team is partially distributed and so are our customers. After the request for feedback has been initiated, which is typically done by e-mail, the developer moves on the next story. Due to customer availability the feedback may take 2-3 days to come back at which point the developer has time to make necessary adjustments and is just about ready to submit the next story for customer review – keeping the project moving.

We have created a new state for stories in our PM tool called ‘Customer Review’. The predecessor state is ‘Open’ and from ‘Customer Review’ it will go to test (QA), with the requirement of the customer acceptance comment.

Open -> Customer Review -> Testing -> Done - > Done-Done

Done-Done happens after the iteration demo.

Drowned in RSS feeds?

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Be honest with yourself, you shouldn’t be spending so much time reading feeds.

Yes, I know, you are thinking to yourself, why would I give up reading my feeds. I can’t do that. Yes you can. Don’t you want to be more productive?

Anyways, if you can’t drop them ‘cold turkey’ at least compromise. I used to spend 30-45 minutes each day reading my feeds, that is way too much time in week. I started to consider ways in which I could gain some of that time back. The first option and what I did for the first month of my experiment was to trim the feeds. Initially this worked out nicely, but after a week I realized I was missing a lot of important news from blogs I enjoyed. That was not acceptable, so I re-subscribed to the ones I enjoyed the most.

I then realized that most of my feeds were not terribly time sensitive. The next experiment revolved around limiting when and where I read my feeds. Basically devoting downtime and alternative devices for RSS reading. The first portion of the new regime was to read feeds when I am on-the-go such as waiting rooms, restrooms or during exercise, the iPhone + Google Reader makes this a snap.

Whatever items had been left over I would read once or twice a week sitting on the couch which watching TV. This normally took 30 minutes each time. This is working out perfectly, I don’t miss any of my favorite news, and still manage to save 3-4 hours a week which can be put to better use.

Inbox 0 Manifesto

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:33:00 GMT

I am about to state the obvious. Perhaps the simplest concepts you have ever heard. If Inbox 0 sounds more like a legend than reality, you are doing it wrong. I used to be drowned in email myself, at one point it looked like the reason for my existence was to answer emails.

Here are a couple of concepts to get you out of your misery and make you a more productive person. In other words, have a life outside of your inbox. GTD is greatly overrated so I won’t be talking about that here. Some of these may not apply to you, most will.

Please note, if your inbox has over 500 unread messages at the moment, you will need to declare email bankruptcy (delete all message) and start from scratch. Don’t worry, the important ones will make their way back into the inbox shortly.

Let’s start with the basics:

Stop Sending Email

As crazy as this may sound, the more email you send the more replies you get. Also stop sending “Reply-all” messages. It is very unlikely that all those people need to see your message or your reply. Only include the absolute most necessary recipients.

Unsubscribe from ALL newsletters. Really.

No one needs all that promo stuff. If you need a new cellular phone you will do your own research. If you need a new LCD monitor, you will search for it.

Unsubscribe from Groups

Unsubscribe from 95% of the groups you are currently receiving email notifications from. Groups that you absolutely can’t unsubscribe from, elect to receive the abridged version of the notifications. One per day is usually the case.

Review your Messages for Patterns

Create a folder for receipts, important, clients, travel and action items. Create rules to automatically move mail to those folders. Your folder names may be different from mine, remember you are looking for patterns.

Stop Flagging Email

Flagging is completely useless. You are basically adding yet another reference to something in your memory which leaves an empty node in your brain wasting space, sort of like a rogue process.

Remove the New-mail Sound

Nothing is more disturbing to productivity than that annoying sound mail clients make when you receive a new email. Do you silence your mobile phone when you go inside a church or meeting? Then silence your mail when it is time to work.

Turn off Automatic New Email Check

Imagine if your mailman came by your house every 15 minutes and potentially left new mail for you. You would be much more likely to stop what you are doing and go outside to check for new letters. How many times a day do you check you physical mailbox? Probably once.

Open your Email Reader 1-3 times a Day.

In the beginning this will be difficult. Hide the shortcuts to the application which will make you think about what you are doing every time you hunt to open it. Do this until it becomes second nature.

Make Constant use of Read/Unread Buttons

If you glance at a message and realize you will not be able to action upon it instantly, stop, mark it as unread and move on. One may ask, won’t this create more new email in your inbox? The answer is NO. It gives you the liberty to move on to the next messages, deleting, marking as read or moving them to their final resting places. This will leave behind only the messages you need to act upon at a later time. Move them to a designated folder.

Enable Threads

This compacts a conversation of multiple email messages into a single topic. This gives you the impression you have less pending items. Instead of seeing 10 unread messages under the same topic, you just see that the topic has pending messages to be read. See sample below taken from my receipts folder in Mail.app

Hide Unread Count (if possible)

The new Gmail Labs let’s you do this. No need to see exactly how many unread messages you have in your inbox other than for panic generating purposes. Mail.app unfortunately likes to create panic by showing your unread messages count.

Turn off Notifications

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, whatever it may be, make sure they are only emailing you important messages, and not every time someone browsers your profile.

Delete Button is your Friend

Do not be afraid to delete it, if you think about deleting it, chances are that the best thing to do is delete it.

And lastly rejoice.

I Dropped IE 6

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 11:30:00 GMT

Are you tired of having to support Internet Explorer 6? Well do something about it. Stop supporting this dead browser and list your website here Idroppedie6.com

I got tired of having to remember the sites that dropped support for IE6 as support for my arguments when talking about IE6 with friends so I decided to create a mini site where a list could be kept. Kevin Burg did a great job designing the site too.

Check it out Idroppedie6.com and help spread the word.

Big Bang Rewrites

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:26:00 GMT

Have you ever second guessed yourself when talking about rewriting a large piece of software? Most will argue that rewrites are a bad idea. Usually these initiatives are chosen to remedy software that is full of technical debt, or when unnecessary or half implemented functionality composed the majority of the code-base.

In my opinion rewriting a piece of software is awesome, it gives you a chance to start fresh. Why so many advise against it? Because you must first fix the root cause. The reason you have technical debt is almost always because of a broken process. The reason you implemented something that no one will ever use is almost always related to poor business owner <-> developer communication. If you don’t fix the process before you rewrite, you will end up with yet another technical-debt filled application. Your team members will certainly be more frustrated. Stakeholders and managers may lose faith and your life may continue to be a living hell.

Fix your process, then fix your your code. Implement a process that makes sense, which is not always easy to follow. Make sure you follow it. Stay as close as possible to the business owner, he who holds the keys to the application’s features and their acceptance criteria.

Albeit somewhat obvious, avoid the “cave mode” like the bubonic plague. Software writing should be an open process between stakeholders and development team. Gather feedback early, make sure you are on the right path. Don’t assume you are in the right path. It is better to know you are on the wrong path than to think you are doing it right.

There is no conclusion to this post, as software processes are ever-evolving, so are the conversations about them.

Remedy before you go bananas.

RubyOnda Widget

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:41:00 GMT

RubyOnda is a ruby news website in portuguese built by myself and Roberto.

Today Felipe Mesquita built a nice little widget for those interested in showcasing the latest community news posted to RubyOnda on their own site.

The code to insert the widget is:

< script src="http://rubyonda.com/widget-embedded.js" type="text/javascript">

Here is what it looks like:

TargetProcess new UI sneak peek

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:49:00 GMT

I have the privilege to share a sneak peek into the TargetProcess’ new user interface. Michael warned me that these are not final mockups and may still change in the future.

In my opinion these look great. I am really excited to see that TargetProcess is aware of the need for an improved UI and they are certainly in the right path here.

I can’t wait to see these implemented.

Agile Project Management Tools Evaluations

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:52:00 GMT

At Todobebe we have adopted one of the Agile methodologies commonly know as XP (Extreme Programming). I remember a couple of years ago seeing a book called “Practicing Extreme Programming” and giggling to myself with the thought of “Isn’t programming extreme enough already, what’s next? Programming martial arts and a The coding black belt?”. All jokes aside, I really thought it was some sort of crappy idea by a big corporation like Microsoft or Sun. Little did I know had I picked up that book and studied it at that time, I would’ve been at a much better place to help my team during the past couple of months.

The principles of the extreme programming methodologies are fairly simple. Have the customer (he who holds the stake) in the room to decide which stories go in the current iteration. Complete stories (specially formatted requests) with the direct guidance of the customer. At the end of an iteration, conduct a retrospective, see what you can improve upon and repeat. There is also the concept of having managers, developers, customers and testers in the same physical room, which is not always feasible for non co-located teams.

XP definitions aside, with the methodology comes the need for a good electronic tool to aid in the management of stories, iterations, releases, retrospectives and of course, the beloved (by some) reports.

After some research we settled for Tracker, Pivotal Lab’s Agile Project management tool. It is a very simple tool, easy to learn and use. Composed of one main screen holding multiple containers for Done, Current, Backlog, Icebox, Search, etc. You can show/hide them as you please, the interface is snappy, ajaxy and usable (want any more cliche words?). You can drag and drop items between the buckets, quickly assign points and the system automatically calculates your future velocity. There is also a ton of other little features that I won’t mention here for the sake of brevity. Tacker is free at the time of this writing.

Pictured: Tracker

We have been using Tracker for about 10 weeks and it has been working fairly well. Our team is growing, and we have started to realized Tracker’s shortcomings. There seems to be no easy way to transfer stories between projects. Also release planning is very elementary, the interface does not help with this particular agile practice. Reporting is a bit deficient and time management is limited.

Since then I have done a considerable amount of research regarding Agile tools. Many players, a large array of losers and a few contenders. The last bucket included ThoughtWorks’ Mingle, a very expensive and complex web app, VersionOne a java web application both available as SAAS and self hosted, and lastly TargetProcess.

I have put together a comparisons table containing pros and cons for each application and their scoring categories suited for our needs. Your needs may vary but it should be a fairly good starting point.

Mingle is not available as a hosted solution. You must host the big boy on your own server. At first glance it was a bit disappointing, it seemed clunky, slow, and it requires 2GB of ram on the server to run well. Even if you go with an economical option like Linode you will be looking at a $200 monthly hosting bill. Mingle offers the first five user licenses for free, after that, it will run you $60 per month per user. The application also felt bloated, and not easy to understand at a first glance. Every time I tried to get into it, my eyes kept glancing over all the options. Mingle does have a really cool looking story card board which resembles a white board with Post-it notes on it. Perhaps the my reason why people get so excited about it at first.

Pictured: Mingle

VersionOne is both available as SAAS and a on-site app. This app is very customizable and versatile. The same customizability greatness arose my first concerns about it. It is incredibly bloated. Some nice features like a place to record individual retrospectives and extremely extensive reporting capability don’t quite offset how complex this thing is. Yet it is surprisingly easier to work with than Mingle, don’t ask me how. I did notice that VersionOne is not very Safari friendly, which was a small turn-off at the time, it did work fairly well in Firefox. Version one also integrates with Subversion which may be useful if you are still stuck in the land of non distributed source control management (god help you). VersionOne will run you about $30 per user per month.

Pictured: VersionOne

TargetProcess came to me in a late night google search rampant . I am not quite sure how I found it or what the search term was. I do know however that I had done a lot of searching on the topic before and it never came up. Perhaps they need to invest some more time on SEO. TargetProcess caught my attention fairly quickly with their quick start demo. What was premature excitement heighten as I uncontrollably watched all the available demos on their site.

I have yet to get my hands on it (currently waiting for a trial password), but what I saw brought back the hope that perhaps there is a good tool out there. TargetProcess is both available as a hosted solution and on-site application. At a fair price-point of $25 per user per month it is much more achievable than most of the other solutions described above.

Even though it is a massive application somehow it feels very intuitive. Reports are easily customizable, processes can be changed to fit your style such as XP or SCRUM. You can comprehensively organize your stories into iterations by dragging and dropping. In-place editing almost everywhere allows for super quick updates. Overall the app seemed extremely configurable yet uncluttered. Also available is a public API, support for Subversion integration and a rich story card board that seems easier to use than Mingle’s. I should have the login credentials for the test account shortly and will be posting an extensive review on TargetProcess in the near future.

Pictured: TargetProcess

We will be picking a tool to work with in the next couple of weeks. At this time my heart is leaning towards TargetProcess but I can’t be sure until I get in there and conduct a proper colonoscopy. I will make sure to report my findings and hopefully provide a conclusive resolution to this dilemma.

Correction: VersionOne is built in ASP.NET

Also check out TargetProcess’ new UI

UPDATE - Jan 2009: I have since gone back to Pivotal Tracker for it’s simplicity and easy of use.

Mix 1 - Once Again

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:16:00 GMT

I know I have blogged about Mix 1 all natural drinks before but I felt compelled to emphasize how great these drinks are. They are 100% natural, taste delicious and only cost about $2 each. I have tried every flavor available and they are all very tasty. Chilled or over ice these make for a great meal replacement. I usually consume one for breakfast and sometimes another one as an afternoon snack.

Great before and after a workout, gives you energy without the huge carb and sugar overload that others do. Mix 1 also contains a fair amount of whey protein which aids in muscle build and accelerates recovery time. At exactly 200 calories, 15 grams of protein and 23 vitamins & minerals is also a quick way get your daily servings of fruit/vegetables as well.

Lactose free, gluten free and caffeine free the energy kick comes mainly from the vitamins and antioxidants.

Go grab some and enjoy!

If you care about this earth, help us abolish IE6

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:31:00 GMT

Most of us often pull our hair out and cry uncontrollably when it comes to dealing with Internet Explorer 6. I have no doubt that it will eventually go away but in the meantime we each need to contribute to help speed up the process.

I am not sure why people still use such junk, if by not knowing better, we, the web developers must educate them. If they haven’t yet upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 because their copy of windows isn’t Genuine; Microsoft please give them a break, or better yet, go download Firefox and tell me it doesn’t kick some serious ass.

Web developers, if you can please either A. Stop supporting IE6 or B. Include a little friendly note at the top of ALL pages on your site letting the unfortunate user know that his experience will suck and that his personal information is unsafe on the web.

Here is a quick template I used in the past:

Feel free to make it < blink>, IE users probably love that :-)