Stephan Schwab - conference tag

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

PDF for my talk "Agile Development in Panama"

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 02:55:14 GMT

Yesterday I gave a talk about Agile Development in Panama at the Atlanta JUG. I have to thank again Gunnar Hillert for inviting me and all the JUG members for their attendence and good questions.

This talk was a bit different than what you might expect at a Java Users Group meeting, as it wasn't the typical technical talk. My goal was to provide a realistic image of the situation for software developers in Panama, which is a small Latin American nation of only 3 million people. A significant share of those 3 million is comprised of the members of four quite distinct indigenous tribes who live in autonomous regions on small islands or deep in the tropical rainforest. About 800,000 Panamians - it might be more - live the in very modern capital and the rest is scattered over several provinces where agriculture is the dominating business.

For software development it doesn't need thousands or person. A few good ones make all the difference. So I'm particularly pleased that I had to opportunity to showcase the Panama JUG which is comprised of students of the Universidad Tecnologica and led by their teacher Aristides Villareal. The Panama JUG, together with other individuals elsewhere in the Spanish speaking world, is responsible for the translation of Sun's Netbeans IDE into Spanish.

In two weeks we will have a big event in Chitre, the capital of the Herrera province. Please see my earlier post for more details.

The PDF of yesterdays's talk is available for download. The file is 20 MB, as I had to print each stage of the slides.

Panama JUG: Two Day Conference

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:09:48 GMT

Who would have thought that 4 hours outside of Panama City a conference for Java developers will take place? It will be a two day event scheduled for December 13th and 14th at the Hotel Versailles in the capital of the Herrera province Chitré (Google Maps). The lineup of speakers and topics is quite impressive and it's international. There will be speakers from the Czech Republic, the United States, Chile and Germany. The target audience are Panamanian professionals and University students. All presentations will be done in Spanish.

If you have clicked on the link to learn about the location of Chitré via Google Maps and look at the following pictures you may ask yourself how it comes that one chooses such a location for a technology event. The Herrera province is located on the peninsula Azuero and the dominating lines of business there are cattle farming and rice plantations.

Panama JUG is organized by a teacher at the regional center of Panama's Universidad Tecnologia. His name is Aristides Villareal and he works at the UTP outpost in Villa de Los Santos. He does a pretty good job at teaching Java and software development in general. Together with a body of students he is working on translating the NetBeans IDE into Spanish. That's an important issue as not everyone speaks English reasonably well, but still there are many smart people with good software development skills and ideas. People should not be blocked from using a tool due to language barriers. So kudos to him for doing this important work.

My company Caimito Technologies is sponsering the event and we'll be doing two presentations. One will be about the SCRUM methodology for agile software development and the other one will be about something that we call "the workbench". The workbench is a preconfigured VMware image with Maven, Subversion, Continuum and our product Savila installed and ready for use.

I'm sure we will have a good time in the countryside and maybe a bit of adventure as well.

Silicon Valley is looking to do business in Latin America

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:41:16 GMT

Yesterday night I attended a meeting of SDForum with a focus on Latin America. The meeting was held in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University.

People talked about the opportunities for selling software based services to Latin American consumers and about providing outsourcing services from Latina America to US corporate customers.

Most attendees agreed that the protection of intelectual property is usually weak in Latin America, as it is in most developing countries including China. Unlike people in wealthier countries nobody wants to pay more than a months salary for the right to use software when it's available on the street for the cost of a CD-ROM media. So selling copies of software was seen as a difficult venture. Instead attendees thought about selling software as a service via the Internet or even via cell phones. Some believe that the cell phone might be the better platform than the computer as it's cheaper to purchase and maintain. Others remarked that in Latin America most computer users are actually using them in Internet Cafes for the cost of about USD 0.50 per 30 minutes.

What seems to work well is the business of providing outsourcing services to US companies. There is no problem protecting intelectual property, because the outsourcing company will respect its client's rights in order to stay in business. And most of Latin American countries have laws in place that protect IP. Theoretically a company can get sued and shut down. The same laws apply to consumers as well, but probably noone will try to enforce such rules against poor people.

My personal impression is that most attendees have very weak knowledge about what the situation in Latin America really is. They have some vage ideas about the level of education and the economic realities. Most think of beautiful landscapes. But they are interested and are looking for places closer to home (for North Americans) to purchase services. It seems that more and more people are realizing that the most prominent outsourcing destination India is not without difficulties. Latin America is mostly within US timezones and flights are reasonably cheap and travel time is only a couple of hours without jet lag.