27
Jul

My work environment

Following a curiosity by Claudio Franco, i will try to explain what tools do i use and what hardware do i have to support my day-by-day activity.

Computer: My old MacBook 2.16Ghz / 4 GB Ram

External monitor: Acer AL1912

Backup Drive: External Hard Drive 500 GB + Dropbox

Operating System: Mac Os Snow Leopard 10.6.3

Virtual Machines: Virtual Box Software with 1 x Debian Server (emulate production) 1x Windows 7 machine (Browser debug)

Linux Datacenter VM’s: 1 Slicehost (US) and 1 Linode (UK)

Mobile Phone: Nokia E71

Media Device: IPOD Touch 16GB

Communication/Office Tools: Google Apps (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, …) , Skype

Code editor: Vim and TextMate ( The inseparables )

Am i happy with the hardware that i own ?

Definitely NO, i need urgently to upgrade my MacBook and the External Monitor is old and low quality. I haven’t choose the hardware i own in order to support my consulting activity, it’s just the hardware i had. And, until now, has been enough, with some memory performance issues from time to time.

What about fun ?

For fun i just play my Xbox 360, in this area i have no complaints.

What’s your work environment ?

23
Jul

Long time no see

Hi, long time since i have wrote some content over this blog, no excuse, just got lazy for the past 2 months, a lot of things just changed and i am adjusting myself.

4 months working from home

The past few months i shifted to a freelancer role and started working from home full-time, there are some drastic changes that you need to make in your way of living in order to adapt and keep productivity high, i will talk about it later on.

You can hire me for some freelance project now! Wanna know more about me?

Moved this blog from my us slicehost to uk linode vm

Needed more resources for some personal projects without increasing the price, so Linode was a good solution, with the bonus of having a better round trip times to Portugal.

A child on his way

A new family member is on his way, it’s a boy and i am extremely happy about it.

Open for questions

You can now ask me something over at http://www.formspring.me/iamjosedasilva, feel free to be curious.

Future writings on this blog

I am preparing a serie of articles to release on this blog, but feel free to suggest some topics you’d like to hear about.

21
May

The “are we there yet” syndrome is delaying your team

Everyone that is around software development for several years have already been at the situation where an “eco” is constantly buzzing  at your ears, saying “are we there yet ?”

continue reading…

14
May

Brain and guts is everything you need

Just found a great post by Caterina, “Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college.“, and got myself feeling a great joy, finally someone say’s it out and loud.

Some great quotes from Caterina post :

“College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.”

“… the basic skills necessary to start a tech company — design or coding — are skills that can be learned outside of the academy, and are often self-taught.”

Go on and read the full content at Caterina blog.

I have a whole shelf of books praying about entrepreneurship, motivational, work less, be in charge of your destiny book, although read none like the truths on this post and written down over at “Linchpin” book.

Does this mean that a whole new mentality is rising ? Would this be the start of a brand and modern society ?

What do you think about this ?

24
Apr

Introduction to MongoDB “Video”

Just found a Kristina Chodorow, Software Developer for 10Gen, talk on introducing MongoDB.

The talk definitely worth’s the 45 minutes.I suggest for you to go to Parleys and see the talk with slides side-by-side.

The talk touchs almost all MongoDb hot topics:

  • What is MongoDB
  • MongoDB’s Goal
  • MongoDb 5 min installation
  • Basic Concepts: Database, Collection, Document, ObjectID
  • Interacting with MongoDB : Querying, Inserting, Updating, Deleting
  • Storing Files: GridFS
  • “Stored Procedures” .js collection
  • Replication