Alexandre Martins » Career Development http://blog.m.artins.net On Agile Software Development Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:09:21 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 2008 Retrospective http://blog.m.artins.net/2008-retrospective/ http://blog.m.artins.net/2008-retrospective/#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 12:45:59 +0000 Alexandre Martins http://blog.m.artins.net/?p=150

After reading posts from some friends I decided to write my 2008 retrospective, so there it go!

Personal Life

  • First year married :)
  • Moved to the land down under.
  • Tried to go to the gym, but it still seems like I am better as an investor :)

Professional Life

  • Joined ThoughtWorks Australia.
  • Tried to post more often on my blog.
  • Became a Certified Scrum Master Of The Universe!
  • Projects: 4
  • Conferences attended: JAOO Sydney

Learning

2009 Resolutions

Still haven't planned properly what to do for 2009, the only thing for now is continuing learning Clojure, and understand more about applying Lean principles into software development.

]]> http://blog.m.artins.net/2008-retrospective/feed/ 0 …From Musician to Software Developer… http://blog.m.artins.net/from-musician-to-software-developer/ http://blog.m.artins.net/from-musician-to-software-developer/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:01:14 +0000 Alexandre Martins http://blog.m.artins.net/?p=44 Before start working as a software developer on 2002, I spent three years being a musician. I played drums in a handful of bands from pop to contemporary jazz, and of course, also a lot of rock and roll!
I had great time doing this, I met most of my friends during this period, and it taught me quite a few lessons that I can use in other areas than music, especially in software development.

Mastering music (drums), and software development require a lot of dedication, both on reading and practicing.

In music, the first thing I did when I decided to take it seriously was to look for a music school to learn how to read and interpret music. Then I read most of the books related to drum techniques and rhythms, attended workshops, spent nights and weekends practicing to improve my ability and velocity. Practicing is very important! It’s when you give yourself the chance to commit mistakes and to let all the ugliness to happen; after all, no one is watching you. The intention is not to sound good, but to stretch your limits, so that you can perform perfectly on the stage.

In software development, it’s pretty much the same, you have to read a lot (books, blogs, articles, magazines), learn programming languages (choose two or three to specialise, and get a higher overview of others), attend workshops, meet people, practice by trying and evaluating different technologies, creating a blog to post your experiences, joining open-source projects, registering for coding competitions, solving some of the CodeKata challenges, preferably pairing with someone else, in summary, stretch your limits!!!! (Have you seen this before? ☺) Doing so will give you more self-confidence for you to perform well during your show, at client site.

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