Tales of the CodeStorms

2010 has been a great year. Here's a rundown of the things I did.

* Gave an introductory talk on NodeJS to the front-end team at Blast Radius
* Explored test automation with Selenium and NodeJS using SodaJS + Kyuri
* Created a free cross-platform app built on PhoneGap (CoffeeCheck.In)
** Iteration 1 Video
** Iteration 2 Video
* Contributed to the HTML5Boilerplate (Pull Request 209)
* Learned NodeJS (Express, npm, etc)
* Learned MongoDB
* Learned CouchDB
* Read "The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge
* Read "Getting Things Done" by David Allen
* Read "Rework" by Jason Fried
* Read "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick Brooks
* Read "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
* Read "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell
* Built a NodeJS Pokemon demo with HTML5/CSS3/JS/WebSockets
* Built a jQuery Omniture plugin
* Released a more sane way of doing IE6 Warning with localization
* Released B…

The Art of War has taught us that when a skilled general decides on a strategy to execute on, they either move quickly, or stay in a position that yields a tactical advantage over his/her enemy. Incidentally, we can apply the same concept in corporate culture. If you take a second to disconnect yourself from your environment, zoom out to a birds eye view, you'll realize how really slow your team is progressing in comparison to the rest of the world.

Naturally, human beings can only see what is in front of them and they need to be constantly reminded of where they are and how they're progressing within their environment. That said, dispelling the blindness of corporate software development is like fighting against an enemy on his own turf and consistently having a positional disadvantage.

The question we keep trying to explore is: what can we use as leverage against such a tough and determined enemy? This is a vicious opponent that not only flattens the spirits of your teammat…

So stop saying you have ideas and start executing.

Good luck and have fun,
Jaime Bueza

Jaime Bueza is a software developer in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He has developed web applications for Nintendo, Starbucks, Electronic Arts, Ritchie Brothers, Kiwi Collections, Cox Communications and Microsoft. When he's not developing useful software that constantly evolves with business requirements, he's creating tutorial videos for aspiring front-end developers.

Mobile app spendings are consistently increasing as we push forward into the future. Incidentally, there are advertising agencies that are still stuck on desktop customer experiences. The future is going mobile and I feel like Apple is the only company that is scaling with the growth of Mobile advertising with iAd.

The biggest trending mobile web services at the moment are location-based. FourSquare and Facebook Places aim to drive local advertisement throughput by being able to notify users which locations are hot and which are not. From fine dining to parties--location-based services will shape our reality by changing our views on our local environments. A simple use-case would be if I were in the area and one of my Facebook friends was at nearby Coffee Shop that I've never gone to before. I would be inclined to meet up with my friend and grab a coffee. Since I've never been there before, I would be rewarded with a badge or an achievement (FourSquare).

A simple reward syst…

After being in a meeting on how to increase team effectiveness and increase the quality of the products we're trying to build, I thought of the process of building teams based on a common passion.

Diving deeper, have you ever met a creative person that loved designing social networks? What about a designer that loved creating interfaces on Mobile platforms? Have you ever met a developer that loved building software that connects people? Why is it that teams in the agency realm with multiple disciplines can't grab a group of people who have a common passion. This is totally different from basing it on "skill set". It's about what they love to build. For example, my skill set ranges from backend (multiple databases, multiple integration languages, localization) to frontend (html, css, js) on different platforms like web and mobile; however, I love building social networks on mobile platforms and how you can integrate with different 3rd party services like Flickr, F…