FOSDEM is an annual event for software developers, focused on open source software, happening in Bruxelles during the first weekend of February.
The event this year was the 5th FOSDEM conference I attended, starting from 2010. During the years I have seen it evolve: as the presentation focus moved along with the industry, some topics faded out and got replaced by newer things. Many of these newcomers did not actually gain traction over the years and also faded out at some point.
One of the main transitions I have noticed was the one from abstract or too general things (e.g. discussions on the Linux Kernel or performance tricks in C/C++) towards end products and getting (soon to be) mature technologies applied in order to get clear outcomes.
This is supposed to be a text about following your passion: some people follow on saving the world, others prefer apparently simpler things like popping green pigs. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not about the purpose per se but the way to get there. It’s always about work, a lot of work.
Looking at the screen below, one could easily conclude that – at some point – I did become very, very efficient in the pig popping business. At the end of the day, some of these golden eggs become available when winning 3 stars in maybe 60 different levels.
Note: This is a text about the project work at one of my previous employments.
Introduction
These days everybody talks about Agile, Automation, DevOps and Continous (whatever), without truly understanding why things have gone in this direction. After all, for many years, a software project had a couple of well-known steps that needed to be followed, like:
Full, thorough planning at the very beginning and from time to time, before significant milestones;
Development, lots of development behind closed doors;
Lots of manual QA work, little automation with some custom-written testing framework written from scratch by one of the developers;
Infrequent releases (e.g. every year or even every other year or so); releases were thoroughly prepared and tested, with code freezes for (sometimes) months before the Day.
Even if everybody knows these days that such approach may have been a bad way of doing things, it actually worked for many years because that was the way the world expected things to work. There were many constraints, e.g: