Gardenunez blog

TrustYou: A self-reflection and farewell letter. April 30th was my last working day at TrustYou . It has been an amazing 6 year journey and I feel grateful for all the opportunities and growth. Working as engineer, manager and director building Reputation Management solutions for the Hospitality sector has been incredibly challenging and rewarding. I still remember when I joined with the purpose to co-create and stream-align the process to enable scale and grow, and we did it (at least in some parts and up to a certain degree). Everything boiled down to continuously contributing to the mission of “Making the Guest Happy” by building and evolving incredible reputation management products like: Meta-Review , TrustYou Analytics and CXP Platform . Products used by world-wide key companies in the hospitality industry like: Accor, B&B group, Google, Microsoft and Hotpepper, just to mention some. I feel honoured for having had the opportunity of leading and/or actively participating in:...

I have two kids and nowadays they cannot stop running, jumping, and spreading energy all around. A few years ago the running and jumping skills weren't part of their toolbox, they crawled and step by step they learned to walk. Do you have kids? Do you have nephews or kids in your neighborhood? Have you stopped for a second and think thought carefully about how what the process of learning to walk is? Let’s imagine for a second your baby is crawling. Don’t be scared if you are not a parent, just bear with me and imagine you are sitting on your couch in the living room, your baby stops crawling just in front of you. She looks at you, sits down and from there tries to stand up and poooom, she is pushed back by her own body and gets to sit down again. She tries without success multiple times but never gives up until fatigue overcomes her. The next day she doesn’t feel defeated at all, she is fully energized to try again to stand up on her feet. After 5 minutes you see yourself holding ...

Here are some books I have read during 2020. I hope some of them can be useful for you. [Re-visited] The 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey A book I like to have in my pocket and re-check from time to time. There are innumerable occasions when as a manager you feel you are not managing well enough your time or as a person you are not focusing on the essential. The 2020 pandemic has given me the chance to see what’s essential and fundamental for my life multiple times in a single year. Habit 3 ( Put first things first ) and 4 ( Think win-win ) were walking with me throughout this last year. Even really difficult situations become more manageable through putting first things first and by keeping a positive and win-win attitude. For example, a common scenario for parents was having the kids at home while they need to do home office. What a great opportunity to spend more time with your kids, to understand better how they would behave in a classroom by doing home-schoolin...

  En los 2 últimos años he formado parte de un equipo enfocado fundamentalmente en hacer Data Engineering en TrustYou . Quiero compartir mis experiencias en cómo este equipo disfuncional en aquel entonces ha llegado a ser lo que es hoy. Contaré qué probamos, qué y qué no funcionó, qué visión futura tenemos en términos de procesos y prácticas y qué papel ha jugado y jugará la cultura y prácticas DevOps en ello. Teniendo en cuenta además que estamos en un contexto de BigData, Data Science, Data Engineering y código legado. Slides y video de mi presentación en la DevOpsDays Caceres 2020. Enlaces relacionados Videos DevOpsDays Caceres Scalability Basics, application to systems, teams and processes   A brief history about agile transformation   Referencias Accelerate,  Nicole Forsgren et al. Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim et al. continuousdelivery.com (Jez Humble) trunkbaseddevelopment.com (Paul Ham...

El pasado 24 y 25 de octubre tuve la oportunidad de participar en la TarugoConf en su 4ta edición. Después de unos cuantos años suscrito y leyendo, domingo tras domingo, la Bonilista por fin pude asistir a esta conferencia que le recomiendo a todo el que esté interesado en temas de Tecnología , Negocio y el Pulpo en España. Me gusto el formato de un día de talleres y otro de charlas. Destacar el reto que representa tener 700 personas en un solo track de conferencias y lograr captar la atención de los participantes en todo momento. Agradezco la oportunidad de volver a ver a mucho colegas del gremio, desvirtualizar a otros como Javi Santana y me voy con el agridulce sabor de no haber podido conversar un poco con Bonilla, Andrea Barber, Molpe, Jaime Novoa, entre otras. Muchas gracias a Candela, David y todo el equipo tarugo por organizar este eventazo ; donde se come como en una boda, se presenta a los speakers con band...

Slides que utilizamos para nuestra presentación en CommitConf 2018. También se pueden ver  aquí Video:

By re-reading a post from a friend of the honey-badger tribe , I realized how much in common it has with a known situation experienced in a recent past. Imagine you join a team in the following situation: Unclear processes and workflow Lack of knowledge about the product Team executing decisions taken by others Vague software development practices Also, within this context, imagining you receiving a great market opportunity which requires deliver something with a fixed deadline. Looks like a case to continue doing what's done in the past to avoid taking risk of failure, but off course leaving the same picture as above regarding team processes. There is always the chance to be counterintuitive and use this greenfield project to boost the team processes to another level. The good thing is to have an organization aware of this issues and the willingness to support any change that improves the way they work. So, having this context, the willing to improve it and a dea...

Last weekend (October 5-7) I attended, together with some colleagues from TrustYou , the PyConES conference in Málaga. Like in PyConES-2017 , this was an opportunity to meet again with the python community, meet new people and companies, meet with former colleagues and friends as well as browse the challenges they face. All this around a common denominator that in this case is Python. Some of the talks look interesting to me: Keynote by Héctor Socas Navarro Hector Socas is a physics at The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias(IAC) and he shows us some cutting edge challenges that Astrophysics is facing nowadays and how the technology is playing a key role in those. It was amazing to learn about the marvellous things about the Universe and see how Python is helping those things. Back to Basics: NLP by Claudia Guirao I especially liked this talk of the Data Science track because the speaker managed to explain the concepts using a friendly language so the...

Last July I had the opportunity to attend the Europython Conference. It had been 4 years since the last time I attended Europython but the experience was again amazing. I highlight 3 things:  Spending time with TrustYou team, learning more about Python and the Community, and having the experience of improvising a lightning talk being a bad speaker but still a good way to give back to the community. I'll go through some of the talks I have attended and provide some summary of my learnings. In this post, I summarize half of them ( you can see the others in the Part II blog post about to come ) Technologies to master parallelism in Python by Shailen Sobhee Even though the title is misleading (I find it difficult to master something by only taking a workshop), I liked it and it helped me to recall and discover some insights in parallel executions in Python. Some topics that we played with: Multithreading Multiprocessing Joblib Dask This image gives an over...

Hace un mes ya que no trabajo en TheMotion. Es un buen momento entonces para hacer retrospectiva y dejar por escrito lo que ha significado este período para mi. Aclaro que en este post solo haré referencia al equipo de tecnología con lo cual cualquier halago, crítica o feedback presente hagásele corresponder a dicho equipo. Aclaro tambien que todo lo escrito está basado en mi visión y opinión personal. En el equipo de tecnología de TheMotion ( tech  o tech-honey-badgers team ) hemos pasado por varias etapas, buenas y no tan buenas, donde siempre ha prevalecido la transparencia, la calidad, la diversión y el trabajo en equipo. Son valores que destacan en este grupo incluso cuando hay un intento de desviar su atención hacia otros haceres que puedan derivar a otros valores ( positivos o negativos ), los valores mencionados emergen solos y de alguna manera indican el camino de hacer las cosas correctamente, muchas veces en formas totalmente opuestas a lo que otros sugieren....

El pasado fin de semana ( 22-24 de septiembre ) asistí, junto con algunos colegas de TheMotion , a la 5 edición de la PyConES  en Cáceres. Es siempre una oportunidad para re-encontrarse con la comunidad, conocer nuevas personas y empresas, reencontraste con ex-colegas y conocidos además de curiosear y conocer retos a los que se enfrentan, todo esto en torno a un denominador común que en este caso es Python. La organización del evento hasta antes de llegar al día de las conferencias me pareció genial brindando bastante información sobre el evento desde el momento de compra de entradas hasta agenda al detalle, pasando por detalles ( que tiene importancia ) como la localización del venue, como llegar a Cáceres, brindar opciones de hospedaje, de traslados, jobs board e incluso de hacer turismo en Extremadura. Agradecido por las cervezas de bienvenida dando paso desde el primer momento al networking e involucración con la conferencia. Dicho esto creo que aun existe margen de mej...

The feeling of pride of belonging to the university you studied at sounds like a common thing worldwide. But what if your university was in a 3rd world country, with poor/none internet access and lack of resources? Would we feel the same? Well ... YES. The University of Havana taught me to code without internet, something that I'll always appreciate because it forces me to really understand what's behind each line of code I write. I hope to keep this custom as long as possible. In our first years in "La Colina" my classmates and I wrote most of the software in paper sheets or in a lab at midnight, without internet but having us as the community to throw questions and catch answers. We were our own StackOverflow. This situation forced us somehow to consult books instead of surfing the internet, to figure out solutions instead searching them; taught us (or at least taught me) do not provide solutions or code that we don't understand, as an effect of being unable...

Have you ever wonder how difficult is to delete some code in your service? Recently I watched  The art of destroying software by Greg Young which is a good starting point to think about something that have been ringing around my current work place: "delete code is good". Nowadays micro-services and distributed systems are trending topic in software development. It seem like if you are doing the micro-services way then you are in the right path or at least in the modern path. In my opinion is more about: Know well enough the responsibilities  of each part of you system Keep good balance of coupling and cohesion As consequence be able to Delete Code  Because when you have those then you can go and delete part ( or complete) of a service because: is not need anymore, want to kill some technical debt or even for the fun of recreate it from scratch with different approaches. At the end you are going to have the same system from business perspective but with less code...

The past week ( April, 6-9th ) I had the honor to be a participant in the SoCraTes Canaries 2017 , the Software Craftsmanship and Testing conference. Almost three days full of experiences that helped us to become better people and better crafts(wo)men. It was my first time in a Socrates Conference and also first time in an  Open Space conference format. This are the strong points I would like to remark: Open Space or Unconference People willing to share and open to learn Software side talks ( like: liquid modernity, mental health, time management, ... ) English as default language The Venue Networking It's amazing how the unconference flows leading by our own goods, filling the talk slots by the spontaneous willing to learn something new and/or to share knowledge, experiences and/or learned lessons. Something that shocked me, in a good way, that talks did not need to be prepared, if needed we just improvised so we all learn/share.  All the talks, workshops, mo...