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Since I joined to the company and during the implementation of projects in which I participated, I have conducted a serie of activities for the management of those projects, activities and daily meetings, monthly, retrospectives among others, all this because in our company uses Scrum as a framework for managing our projects. Deepening about Scrum, it woke up in my desire to learn and perform the activities of a ScrumMaster.

Sponsored by our company on March 2 of this year I traveled to Bogota along with two co-workers, Bryan and Jessica, for the ScrumMaster certification course, the course lasted two great days, and while is true that we get to the course with a lot of practical knowledge about the Scrum/Agile world, Kleer (the company who conducted the course) used every possible tool to establish these concepts and secure them in a dynamic and practice way.

Common company organizations figures closed management groups, where the tasks related to maintain and guide companies processes rely on a hand of experienced people, while in some cases this could ‘work’ if we measure this based on short term financial results, this is not a good start to make a happy environment inside the company and in the long term this will lead to very bad results, after all, what is a company without his people ?.

Let me share something interesting:

If a system is to be stable the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.

– The Law of Requisite Variety (W. Ross Ashby)

Based on this we could initially deduct 2 things.

The first one is that in order to control/direct a team of people, you need a human being, another kind of being wont be able to do it, that because after all, who could understand a human being with all his complexity more than another human?.

In part one I talked about what refactoring is and all stuff related to that. In this post I want to show you how refactorings are related to frameworks and give you a real example of their use.

Frameworks were design to make your life easier in some way, and they should fit to solve your problems. Nowadays developers rarely build apps from scratch, we use frameworks according to our needs to speed up construction, testing and delivery. You realize that get used to a framework doesn’t mean you are except from live without code smells. You can actually apply refactoring techniques using the components and elements those frameworks provide.

To give you an example, last week we were working in an app which was built using Ember.js framework, while we were in a manual code review activity, we found some duplicated code into three route components.

Let’s imagine you want to visit a friend in town but you don’t know where he or she lives, so you call him/her and ask for his/her address. The address becomes your target place, it’s the place where you want to go. When you are about to decide to move, you think, what path should I take so it can lead me to my destiny?…So your options are probably based on less time path, or more secure path, or nearest path. After you decide to use a path, you move and follow it until you end at your destination (your friend’s house).

That kind of thinking is a little bit related with the concept of refactoring. Imagine now that the situation is not to visit a friend but to extract a piece of code in your app. With that piece of code, you want it to live in a new method, the new method now becomes your target (the place where you want to go). So you think again, what path should I take to put that piece of code into a new method in a safe way?…

In 2013, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development accepted Colombia as a candidate to become an active member of this privileges countries group. If Colombia accomplishes all the requirements for membership requested by OECD, it would be part of “the best practices club”, where countries with better perspective and better performance in social and economic fields help each other to improve their public politics quality, which means more investment, more employment, more capability.

There had been great progress in some areas along these two years. One of the greatest progress made in Colombia is related with IT investment. With help of ICT ministry and FITI, some programs were developed to help entrepreneurs to create businesses around IT technology, programs to capitalise IT professionals which offer free certifications, free scholarships for MBA and PHB degrees related to IT industry, I+D+I, just to name a few ones.

An info-graphic emitted by ICT ministry for the last four months of 2014 shows how IT technology has improved its use and capability to coverage almost the whole country. Also, statistics from the same source show how GDP had behave in a decade thanks to IT investment.

Last week we ended our internal, FIFA tournament, we play this tournament every year (2 years now), after all, what are we without the joy?.

Results this year were very succesful, i’m glad to say that we had 8 teams and all the matches were played, which means FIFA on PS4 is gaining traction inside the team, ( huh.. ).

More than that, its very good to see how our culture starts to grow with events that may seem to be outside of the range of the technology-mind guys, but, want it or not, are creating a very nice space where we can joke, laugh and build connections outside profesional scope, which after all, are the ones that will persist.