August 25th, 2009 by ABS
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As we all (?) know finding good, senior people is relatively easy but finding good junior ones is not and takes a long time (and money). I see two strategies to tackle this issue:
- never stop the recruiting effort even when you don’t need new people. If you stop, it then takes too long to restart it and because you usually restart it when you have a need it’s kinda too late anyway
- have a proper internship programme in place.
While point 1 is, again, relatively easy although time consuming, point 2 takes a bit more effort but I think it’s worth it. The problem is: everyone is looking for good interns! In a competitive market I believe that having an Internship Program at the European level (in Sourcesense‘ case) gives us an edge.
Of course our values, principles, and commitment to OpenSource are great for attracting already experienced people but works somewhat less well with graduates who don’t necessarily have an opinion on Open Source or might not be that interested in our unique selling points because they are at the beginning of their career and couldn’t know better. At the same time graduates often shoot for the (very) big names so that at least by the end of the internship they will be able to put that name on their CVs.
What can we provide to a prospective intern that others cannot? As I said there are our unique values, principles and our strong commitment to Open Source, the fact that we don’t exploit interns by making them billable on customer projects and more. But I still think it’s not enough as other companies have that as well (not sure about the not exploiting bit…. 
).
So here is what we do on top of everything else:
- an internship with Sourcesense means the interns will have a chance to work in multiple offices across Europe. E.g.: Peter, the first Sourcesense UK intern, started 2 weeks ago and is spending sometime with us in London but will be flying to our Milan office on Tuesday to spend 4 weeks there. This will give him exposure to Sourcesense as a European company rather than just a UK one and will give him the opportunity to build a relationship with colleagues there.
- an internship with Sourcesense means spending sometime on a customer project/site and sometime working on and contributing to some open source project. As I said we are not going to bill an intern, it wouldn’t be fair neither in his regards nor in the customer’s. It’s a way to expose the intern to a real life situation rather than just keeping him away
- an internship with Sourcesense means, if there is the opportunity, the intern can then ask to move permanently to another office/country. In my experience there is nothing more invigorating than working and living in a different country.
- an internship with Sourcesense means we want to hire you rather then just exploit you for a while and then let you go
Are you looking for an internship? Let me know 
July 30th, 2009 by ABS
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And so it begins! The sixth Italian Agile Day will be held on November 20th, 2009 in Bologna – Italy.
The conference has organically grown:
- Milan, 2004 -> 100 attendees
- Milan, 2005 -> 150+ attendees
- Milan, 2006 -> 180+ attendees
- Bologna, 2007 -> 260+ attendees
- Bologna, 2008 -> 400 attendees!!
This is a free conference for the community by the community and instead of looking for commercial sponsors we accept donations. Real donations as in no minimum amount required and more importantly people don’t have to donate in order to participate.
If you are interested in knowing more about how that worked, statistics and analysis about this aspect take a look at:
July 19th, 2009 by ABS
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On March 6th I posted my TwitterSheep tag cloud and today I generated a new one to see if and how my use of twitter has changed in the last 4+ months. Here are the two results side by side:
| March 09 |
July 09 |
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 |
July 18th, 2009 by ABS
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Over the years I’ve tried almost any system I’ve come across to manage my TO DOs and my time. Off the top of my head:
- nothing, just a big mess
- a text file with all my TO DOs and notes
- multiple text files, one for each area of interest
- a calendar
- a structured spreadsheet (resembling a product backlog + sprint backlog in Scrum style)
- Inbox Zero
- the Getting Things Done approach with pen and paper
- the Pomodoro Technique by my friend Francesco
- Google Tasks
- various tools GTD style the best of which is Things for Mac (that I bought and is really a great tool)
I went back and forth a few times adding and removing tools and looking for the best combination for me and this includes not only the system but the supporting tools for someone like me who alternates days in office with days taking 6 tubes, 5 buses, a couple of trains and a flight here and there.
This is my current setup which seems to work better than others:
- Inbox Zero
- Google Tasks
- Google Calendar
- All Sync’ed up and pushed to my mobile (and the other way round of course)
Inbox Zero
I strive to empty my inbox as soon as possible and GMail labels help a lot here:
- as soon as I get an email I apply the relevant labels
- unless it’s really urgent I then leave it there for whenever I’ll be able to tackle it
- depending on the importance of the task associated with the email I leave it in either unread or read state. This gives me a visual sense of how much important stuff is still in my inbox (unread) and how much is stuff that can just wait
- an email stays in my inbox until I have done whatever needs doing then I remove it from the inbox
- if I’ve done whatever needs doing but I want to make sure I’ll remember to follow up I’ll star the email before removing it from my inbox. Starred emails are therefore emails I’ve answered to but I should really keep an eye on (e.g.: if I don’t get a reply back in due time).
- If an email requires both a reply and some other activities I’ll create a new Google Tasks linked to that email (More Actions -> Add to Tasks
Google Tasks
Google Tasks is where I dump all the tasks I’ll have to tackle. I like the fact that it can be as structured or unstructured as I want it to be. Some tasks can be very structured (due date, notes, links to an email, nested children and so forth) while others can be just a line.
Google Calendar
I do realise my use of the calendar mixes things up a bit: of course I put all my meetings, calls, conference calls, trips and the likes but I also use it to remind myself of deadlines for very important things. Hence it is a mix of things I need to do with other people and things I want to be sure I remember myself.
All Sync’ed up
I’m a push addict: everything must be pushed to my mobile and the other way round: email, calendar and tasks.
On top of that I like to have a dashboard-like view whereby everything is visible from one single web page and for that reason I’m missing more than ever the old Better GMail feature of having my email and calendar in the same (please bring it back!!). As a workaround I’m using the little google widget in the left column but it’s not the same (and it also pushes the Google Docs box down below the fold of the page):
May 26th, 2009 by ABS
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…and nearly a couple since my last post: either I don’t have enough time to post or I don’t have anything interesting to say. Probably a bit of both
The truth is that I’ve been very busy (and happily so) with my new challenge and even though I started writing this post with the intent to do a quick recap of the story so far I’ve realised it would take me too long and wouldn’t probably be that interesting for most of my (few) readers. So I thought I’d share only a few things that I found interesting about the business climate nowadays (at least in UK).
The biggest differences I’ve noticed first hand in comparison with only 1 year ago are:
- high interest in Open Source and Open Development at C level: in the past few weeks I met 15+ C level people in Fortune 500 companies and all of them showed an active interest not only for the usual tactical reasons (a.k.a. cutting cost) but also for the more farsighted strategic ones. OK, I met them because OSS was high on their agenda in the first place but still!
- sales cycles aren’t longer than usual but companies are willing to commit only to shorter engagements (with likely extensions). This looks to me like an incremental and iterative approach and having preached it for years I’m only glad to see it spreading even though it’s driven by external factors (you know, the global downturn).
- for the first time in ages companies are not that happy to pay NET 15 or NET 30. Coming from Italy where NET 120+ is the norm – if you are lucky – this doesn’t bother me at all. I know how to deal with it.
- budgets are being slashed but there are still companies who get that investing in training is one of the things that will get them out of the downturn ahead of the curve and we are in fact improving our offering in this space. See the upcoming Maven Training with Jason Van Zyl Sourcesense and Sonatype will be doing in London on June 15-16 (shameless sales plug, I know…)
Back in a couple of months!
April 5th, 2009 by ABS
2 comments »
Got back to London after having spent the day in Oxford at the BarCamp Apache Oxford (#barcampoxford).
Between meeting interesting people and discussing various topics Gianugo and I led a session about Open Development and Agility. As you might expect the topic is very broad and it’s easy to get sucked into one aspect or another (and even one specific practice or another) but I believe we managed to discuss quite a few interesting things.
The discussion started by showing a wiki page I wrote back in 2003 titled OpenSourceAsAgileProcess. Yes, the page is kinda stale now but it was my way to try and focus the session on values and principles rather than practices.
Of course all sort of questions and opinions came up about colocation vs distributed, programming focus vs management/governance and so forth but I hope I managed to get my main point across:
I see little value in mapping exercises (being it mapping XP or Scrum practices to CMMi or Open Development or whatnot). I see value in discussing commonalities and differences in values and principles and drive everything else from there.
Now, values are so high level that it’s easy to agree on them and then go about implementing completely divergent practices. That’s where principles come into play – those 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto that most people have never heard of (or at least forget easily about).
From my point of view principles are what bridge the gap between values and practices: use the principles to drive the practices that help you realise the values.
During the session we took a look at the 12 principles in question and it became quite obvious to me that one of the reasons why it’s so hard to adopt Agile fully – whatever that means – in a typical Open Source project can be nailed down to one single word in the first principle:
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
As there isn’t necessarily a customer in the common sense of the term. It might be a whole community, the single developers working on the project or something else entirely.
Will need to think more about this and luckily a conversation started on twitter among a few people following the BarCamp and we are going to try and discuss this further soon.
Thanks for the day!
March 18th, 2009 by ABS
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In the May/June 2007 issue of IEEE Software magazine there was an awesome series of articles about Test Driven Development and I’ve just discovered that one of them – the main one – is now freely available: Guest Editors’ Introduction: TDD–The Art of Fearless Programming by Ron Jeffries and Grigori Melnik.
Go get it, read it all and spend some time studying Table 1 on page 28:
In particular the last two columns: Productivity effect and Quality effect
March 17th, 2009 by ABS
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It gives me great pleasure seeing the UK goverment putting together some serious and thought-out plans for Open Source and Open Standards.
Directly from the Chief Information Officer Council website:
“Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades [...]”
“[...] it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work [...]”
“[...] Over the past five years many government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services.
But we need to increase the pace: [...]“
Check out also the action plan and this cool public page set up by the cabinet office to track blog posts, news and tweets about Open Source!
Update: some data taken from here:
“50 per cent of main departmental websites use Apache as their core web server; the NHS spine use an open-sourced operating system; 35 per cent of NHS organisations covering almost 300,000 users, will soon be supported on Linux infrastructure; open source components are used in major systems such as Directgov and electronic vehicle licensing.”
#ukgovOSS
March 16th, 2009 by ABS
6 comments »
As I wrote here my professional life boils down to a couple of things: Agile and Open Source. Within these I’ve done almost everything from software development to programme management, from coaching to facilitation, including a couple of ventures as owner and CTO.
I’ve spent the last 3+ years mainly in London working for ThoughtWorks and that has been the most mind-opening experience both professionally and personally. It’s mind-opening to work with people from all over the world (in my first project with ThoughtWorks we had 15 different nationalities) and to realise that there are enlightened people who really care about values and principles and doing the right thing. I learnt so much!
But the time has come for me to move on to new pastures and as of today I’m the managing director of Sourcesense UK, a European Open Source systems integrator providing consultancy, support and services around key Open Source technologies. Go check the website
The sadness for leaving the greatest company I’ve ever crossed path with is today replaced by the excitement for this new opportunity and I honestly hope I’ll be able to bring with me everything I’ve learnt in these past few years.
March 6th, 2009 by ABS
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Thanks to Peldi’s post I’ve just discovered TwitterSheep. This is my tag cloud:
Cool!
