2010/11/22

License

I've been thinking on licensing contents for this blog. I was sure on using a Creative Commons license, but was doubting on the options.

I finally chose an Attribution Non-Commercial license not because I don't want contents here to be used for commercial purposes but because I don't want that to happen not noticing it.

So I'm not against commercial uses of this contents, just let me know if you want to do such a use.

I thought about including the ShareAlike restriction to the license, but finally discarded it. Attribution is enough, I just don't need to restrict further use. If you want to include any of this contents into a copyrighted work, just feel free to do it as long as you give me credit for my contents.

2010/11/16

Experience

Some years ago, when I realized I had to quit my first serious job, I started up updating my resumé. That's the time when I first thought about what was there in my resumé that may actually make it more interesting than any of my co-workers' for a potential employer.

Some months after taking a new job I met some of my then ex co-workers for a beer and one of them asked what was I working on in my new job. Among other things, since I was using VMware appliances for both test and build environments, I told him I was working with virtual machines. So he replied 'Ah, so you're working with Java'. The only virtual machine he ever heard about was the JVM.

This is just an example, but in a general way my knowledge about software development technology and tools was deeper than his. In spite of that, his working experience was 2 or 3 years longer than mine. I also know people who has deeper knowledge than mine and have less time of experience.

So my conclusion on this was that any time you read in a resumé 'X years experience in Y', you should take it for 'X years seniority in Y'. So experience means the length of time that someone has been practicing or just in slight contact with a given technology or tool. In a resumé, experience and expertise have little to do.

In one of my recent readings (Rework) there is a section dedicated to this subject. It is pointed out there with this words:
How long someone's been doing it is overrated. What matters is how well they've been doing it.
But how can you get to know it?

2010/11/09

Start

This is a project that has been around my head for a while now. The truth is that the feeling to start writing a blog has been getting much stronger for the last months.

I'll try to be disciplined on writing at least one post a week. It is not a hard to achieve objective, but I hope it will make possible two things: a) get myself used to analyze, write and communicate on various subjects on a regular basis with a soft transition (from thinking to actually doing), and b) I'll get the chance to think about any actual progress or experience (or lack of any) in my work life every week.

For months, I've been thinking about where to write, whether to limit myself to write about software and technical stuff or have a broader range of subject, where to open it, whether to register my own domain or not, to set it up on my own server and use wordpress or drupal or just use a blog service out there, and then which one?, ...

The little push in the back that I actually needed to start this up has been reading Rework. I finally realized that basics for a blog are content and where or how to hold it are secondary. So I took what I have right now, which is my Google account.

Let's see where it gets.