Stephan Schwab - panama 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

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.

Panamanian supermarket: Taking pictures is prohibited

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 19:14:56 GMT

Now this is something new in this country of never ending stories that is called Panama. A supermarket in the capital of the Chiriqui province David posts a sign on the door telling you that it is not allowed to film or take pictures inside the store.

Don Ray in Have Camera - Need Permission To Take Photos:
I have gotten into the habit of carrying my camera everywhere I go. I never know when I am going to see something that is of interest to me. Sometimes I go to a location planning to take photos, such as when I last went to Parque Cervantes, but normally a photo opportunity just occurs. The other day, I went to Super Baru and was greeted by this sign at the entrance door.
It says that you are not permitted to take photos or film inside without permission by the management. To me this is a major annoyance.

Sure. It is their store and they can come up with whatever policy they feel appropriate for their business. After all the store is private property and who owns it sets the rule. There is no doubt about it. So there is nothing to claim about. But still it leads to some thoughts.

What's the motivation of the store's management to do all the effort to post that sign? Are they afraid of the competition checking out their in-store displays or their prices? Do their employees feel threatened by all the new residents who are moving to David and Boquete and wander the streets of their newly chosen home country exploring all the curiosities one can find when new to a place? I don't know that you think about this. Still it's a bit funny - don't you think?

Don Ray goes on to tell on his blog:

Just the other day, I had a reader tell me that they had sent the photos I had taken of the El Rey supermarket to their friends, in the US, so they could see what high quality supermarkets were available in David. El Rey is proud of their store and it shows.

Go figure ...

Update: Looks like Don Ray has more luck taking pictures at a local PC repair shop. The technician shown in his picture is a happy man and proud of his work. Nice.

Comment on Cultural Sensitivity and the backlash of having none

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 03:13:08 GMT

While reading blog comments on Boquete Guide one got me thinking. When you live as expat in another country you might become an invasive species destroying the local fabric of society and the local economy due to the fact that your economic power stems from the outside and was not earned within the local economy.

These are a few lines from the comment that made me think twice:

Anne on Boquete Guide in Comment on Cultural Sensitivity and the backlash of having none:

Here goes an idea for you all…do not become an invasive species instead, coexist with the locals and teach them the best of the place that you come from. I know you talk to your rich Panamanian friends and they advise you to pay low wages—because if you don’t it affects their labor cost. Well if you know enough about Latin America then you know the huge difference between the rich and the poor…

It goes something like: the rich eats a $50 per person dinner while the poor has to pay for: food, housing, education and all their basic needs with a $50 a week salary…and that is very un-American,

wouldn`t you agree.

What Anne says about the huge difference between the Rich and the Poor in Latin America is definetely true. And this very difference was probably one of the reasons why the poor in Venezuela elected Hugo Chavez as their president. The other reason might very well be the fact that middle class and upper class people frequently let the poorer people feel who commands, which is sad and in my opinion not very forward thinking, as over time it may turn against them.

But you can't change a society, an economy over night or by essentially donating to the poor paying them higher wages than the going rate. If lots of people do that, then the result will be higher prices for everything in that particular region and the poor stay poor albeit on a slightly higher level - the numbers will have grown, but not the value.

Instead the key in my opinion is education. Educate the children of the poor so they won't have to suffer, can take better jobs than their parents could and you will be en route to a raising economy with sane growth. This is substantial and not an inflated bubble.

I'd like to show a simple example. In Panama - and probably the rest of Latin America as well - a dish washer is a rare household item. While in Europe and North America you can almost expect one in every household's kitchen. The reason is that it's simply cheaper and more flexible to have a human do the dishes instead of using a machine that needs to be purchased for the equivalent of a local salary and needs maintenance. The human is so cheap and flexible that you would feel stupid to buy all the usual machines for your kitchen. And think about the effect of not employing someone. From what will this person live instead? You may not pay much - not much for you -, but it's something these people usually live on.

Now imagine you equip your house with all the machines and other stuff you are used to. Do the same with your garden equipment. And then you go ahead and employ people who have been raised in wooden shacks, have no idea about how to operate a washing machine to wash fine clothes, a dish washer, how to activate the cleaning mode of modern high-tech ovens. And don't forget that these people usually don't know Teflon coated pans and pots. The same goes for the gardener who knows a bit about plants, but doesn't have a true understanding of whats going on in the soil and how to combine plants to combat bugs without using pesticides. Would you still be willing to pay significantly more than the local going rate?

The amount of money someone gets paid depends directly on the value he is able to provide. Poorly educated people can't provide high value. If you would have asked me about some of these things a decade ago, I would probably have shared Anne's opinion in it's entirety. Back then I believed that all over the world people were more or less on a similar intellectual level and trade barriers were the biggest problem. Now with all the side effects of globalization more and more it becomes visible what the true problem is and money is not the number one concern. It's education and the will of becoming an educated person.

Last weekend we did a road trip to the Los Santos province and were surprised by the fact that in the tiny town of Villa de Los Santos at least 4 Universities are present. Those are the same that you can find in the capital. We talked to a professor of computer science and I came back impressed by his knowledge and what he teaches his students. None of his students is from a wealthy family. Instead they are daughters and sons of poor campesinos who can't afford a computer at home. Instead they spend every free minute using the equipment on the University's premises. Now let's think ahead and imagine what these guy's impact on the local economy will be when they start working, form a new family, buy a house and demand good education for their children.

Potential good news for snowbirds and investors in Panama

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:35:55 GMT

After a week of talks with high-ranking government officials and opposition leaders Prima Panama, a real estate developer, reports:

Panama Residential Developers Blog in Paradise recovered-Friday update:
It’s been less than a week since we starting receiving responses to our Internet survey and we’ve already achieved some spectacular results. Our sources in the Assembly have informed us that legislation is being introduced to return the length of stay for the tourist visa to 90-days (without requiring an extension) and issuing a temporary extension of the 20-year tax exemption on new property until December 31st, 2007. We have assurances that it has the full support of the President along with his cabinet.

At the very least it's interesting to see that in this small country (only 3 million citizens) it is possible to get into direct talks with the government. I can't predict what the outcome of all this will be, but my feeling is that the government will come up with some exception for European and North-American visitors while maintaining the 30 days limit for everyone else.