Stephan Schwab - General category

Interesting idea from the US: instead gas tax breaks use the same money for highspeed networks

Sat, 03 May 2008 19:47:46 GMT

The context of this is the upcoming election of the next US president and although I'm not a US citizen and have anything to say about this particular topic it does refer to a thought I carry with me since the early days of running an Internet Access Provider in Germany back in 1994.

Dave Winer in Scripting News for 5/2/2008:
And the money we’d give up for Federal gasoline tax could be better spent on putting high capacity network lines under our streets to increase communication. Some of the car trips must be to exchange information that coud be replaced by moving packets around at gigabit speeds. It wouldn’t cost much to retrofit a few cities with really high speed lines, then we could get to work on developing the services that would make life more interesting, fun and efficient.

Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor

Sat, 03 May 2008 03:57:57 GMT

Signal vs. Noise in Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor:
Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

This is just so right I can fully underwrite it. If you think otherwise, think twice ;-)

7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:20:28 GMT

An interesting and well written article to be forward to the C* in many organizations big and small: Getting Clueful: 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development

Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger: a contrarian view

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:29:30 GMT

Really like that piece. It reminds me of a few things I witnessed not so long ago.

Marc Andreessen in Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger: a contrarian view:

Build something of value -- something that people want, and something that will be profitable at the appropriate point -- and the world is yours.

Successful companies -- companies that have built something of value -- have many options. They can stay private and throw off dividends. They can go public. They can get acquired by big companies who suddenly decide, hey, that looks really valuable, let's buy that. They can sell minority stakes to big investors or strategic partners at very high valuations. All options that are typically not open to the startup that started with the goal of getting bought and didn't build something of independent value.

Or, reduced to a phrase: the best way to get bought is to not be for sale.

Google Map for PanamaJUG 2007

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:04:26 GMT

One member of the Panama JUG, Gerardo Nuñez Pitty, created a Google Map with to show where the speakers of the 2-day event came from. Here is the original quote in Spanish:

Aristides Villareal in Mapa de Expositores de PanamaJUG 2007:
Agradecemos nuevamente a Gerardo, por su contribución al congreso, y por la realización del mapa con los diversos paises de los expositores que estuvieron en el congreso PanamaJUG 2007.

Click on the image to jump to the Google Map for more details:

PanamaJUG Conference

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:41:12 GMT

Thursday and Friday of this week we presented at the first PanamaJUG conference in Chitre. This event, as I announced in September, marks a big milestone in the development of the Panamanian JUG and in the work of Aristides Villareal who is professor at the regional center Azuero of Universidad Tecnologica in Los Santos.

Attendence was very good. We had between 50 - 80 attendees, many of them students. It was not a free event. They each paid $35 for students and $50 for professionals to cover the costs of the conference center, meals and equipment.

Fidel Chavarria, developer at my company Caimito Technologies, presented our agile project management tool Savila and as well the Workbench, which is a compilation of tools like Continuum, Maven, Subversion and Savila pre-packaged as a VMware image and ready to use.

My presentation was about An Agile Organization and Scrum similar to the talks I gave earlier in Tampa and Miami but with slides translated into Spanish.

I just finished uploading some of my own pictures at Flickr. A few more pictures can be found at Janice Campbell's blog who is Globalization Program Manager at Sun Microsystems. Follow these links:

Many more pictures were taken and I will update this blog post once they will be available.

Update:

Aristides created a series of animations based on pictures taking during the 2-day event: Janice, Fabiola, Augusto, Gerardo, Tomasz, Brian, Fidel, Rodrigo, Stephan, Workshops, Assistents, Raffle