January 8, 2022

Gear with soul

Does gear have a soul?

Recently I watched a YouTube video from Ted Vieira, a well-known photographer among the Fujifilm community, titled Gear With Soul? He shows a magazine by KEH Camera with the tagline “Gear with soul for people with vision” and spends the video showing photos and talking about that.

There’s also an old video from DigitalRev TV where Kai Wong discusses what makes a Leica M unique. And the very last line is “it got soul.”

January 5, 2022

Working through change

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the most adaptable to change.” This quote is often misattributed to Charles Darwin (it first appeared in a speech by Leon C. Megginson in 1963).

That quote refers to the evolution of the species, but we can bring it to the corporate environment, especially in the startup world. Companies pivot. Companies fail. Companies merge and get acquired—the culture of the company changes. For better or for worse, but it won’t stay the same. Some people can’t accept that. It’s ok to dislike the change and move to another company. People have different preferences and are suited to different environments. But if you’re resilient and can bear with the change, it can be an excellent opportunity to grow in your career.

March 28, 2021

One-on-one meetings

You can’t simply gain trust by saying “trust me, I know what I’m saying”, you have to earn it. Let’s start discussing trust and then how to conduct one-on-one meetings to earn that trust.

Trust

In The High Price of Mistrust, a book titled Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, is discussed and there are two parts I’d like to quote as they relate to remote management:

“One key lesson we can derive from Bowling Alone is that the less we trust each other—something which is both a cause and consequence of declining community engagement—the more it costs us.”

June 29, 2015

Movile Meetup

Movile has a new initiative called Movile Meetups. Every once in a while someone either from Movile or outside (for now, we had only two talks and both were from Movile employees) presents something and it’s open for the local community to participate, not only Movile employees. The talk usually lasts for forty minutes, then there’s a Q&A session and finally we go to the Recharging Area (our kitchen) to eat pizza, drink beer and soda and talk to each other.

May 19, 2015

Technically Speaking hangout on LAtINiTY conference

TL;DR: Technically Speaking is hosting a webinar on LAtINiTY conference and you should watch. Signup here.

Do you know Technically Speaking? It’s a great newsletter with tips to improve your tech talks, inspirational videos and call for papers delivered direct to your inbox. This newsletter is provided by Chiu-Ki Chan (site, Google Plus and Twitter) and Cate Huston (site, Google Plus and Twitter).

For those who don’t know them, let me give a brief introdution:

Chiu-Ki was a software engineer at Google for 6+ years, later worked at two startups and now has her own mobile development company. Also, she’s a GDE (Google Developer Expert) on Android and if you’re interested in Android, check her talks, blog and courses. She’s also an organizer of GDG Boulder

April 4, 2015

Tips for Android beginners

A while ago someone asked on Quora how to learn Android development. The person had knowledge of Java, but none of XML. I suppose the fear of XML came from the fact that is well known that Android uses a lot of XML. I started with a quick clarification on XML syntax and that’s the only required knowledge of XML. The parsing is done automatically by the Android system or the build tools. Unless, of course, the person is writing a XML parser or using one (e.g., parsing a response from a server).

March 16, 2015

GDG Talks #1

Usually every month we have an informal meeting at GDG Campinas, where we gather and discuss whatever comes to mind (most of the time it’s Android, the preferred topic for most of the attendees), but this month we decided to do something different.

Organized by Karuan Bertoluci, this month meeting was a series of three talks hosted at Ci&T, which provided the venue and some beverage and food.

After Karuan opened the event, I gave the first talk on Android Wear. You can watch it on YouTube and download the slides from Speaker Deck.

March 6, 2015

Messing MacVim

I published a new version of MacVim on last week Monday and was quite happy with it. It was early morning, I published it at 7:30 AM (UTC-3) and went to work. Of course, being an avid user of Vim, the first thing I did at work was updating my copy of MacVim.

Then things went awry. MacVim crashed at launch (of course, it didn’t occur at home). E-mails started popping on my inbox. Starting without a .vimrc was fine, so it was a problem with plugins. Probably I had compiled it against wrong version of Ruby (I use RVM and install several Ruby versions, but MacVim must be compiled against system Ruby), but I was quite sure I had issued a rvm use system before. When I came back home, I tried to investigate a little further and, as I suspected, it was Ruby (it crashed when I used Command-T plugin). But how? Well, I was so tired that I went to bed and decided to look at the issue later.

February 23, 2015

MacVim is back on track

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Vim. Although I can use it in the terminal, I like to have a nice UI to look at and when I’m on a Mac (e.g., at work), I use MacVim. I have no words to thank the amazing job behind both Vim and MacVim and I always wanted to contribute back.

I’ve been building MacVim for older versions of Mac since 2012 and since Björn has been busy, I’m maintaining it now.

March 12, 2014

3.11

Three years ago, on March 11th, a tsunami hit the east coast of Japan killing 19000 people and leaving many others homeless. Still today many of them can’t return to their home due to radiation near Fukushima disaster. Yahoo!Japan had a great initiative, donating 10 yen for each search for “3.11”

See the announcement: http://promo.search.yahoo.co.jp/searchfor311/ and the video below: