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I’ve just received my order from Amazon and it’s in a very, very sorry state. Two books have been pretty much destroyed, one is badly damaged, the rest is not in an ideal state either. I started to fill a refund form in, but they require sending the items back in case of required replacement and, frankly, it doesn’t make much sense in this case. Let’s see how their customer support reacts to these photos first.
Needless to say, I’m very disappointed…
I’ve been reading through some discussions on LinkedIn, regarding offshoring practices as performed by companies located in the US and, oh boy, this topic does bring out some emotions. I don’t know how volatile these posts are, so instead of linking to them directly, I’ll just quote without mentioning any names. I hope they are easy enough to find given the titles.
Let’s start with this sneaky attempt at suggesting some general racial/national problems to analyze:
Should Gartner do research on the quality of code produced in India?
Would you find value if Gartner were to perform extensive research to provide insight into the question of whether Americans write better code than their Indian counterparts? Does code written in India have more OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities than code written onshore? The perspectives of IT executives and how they make tradeoffs on quality for cost?
While most of the responses are balanced and in good faith, it’s not unusual to see a retaliatory “answer”:
I think Gartner should research quality of code produced in America, exclusively… and Indians should stop writing code on services projects for america.
Let’s take an another topic:
What european country do you suggest to outsourcing/offshoring software development?
While probably not intended to be so, I found these comments quite amusing:
Try outsourcing to the Midwest. (United states).
You’d be surprised at your cost savings over the life of the project.
Or:
How about outsourcing to USA.
Contact -[email removed for obvious reasons]
Way to go! Obviously, not everyone likes peaceful means of promotion/competition, and replies along these lines happen as well:
I’m sorry, with very few exceptions, any US company that outsources/offshores its software development should be boycotted.
The topic is “hot” right now. Different kinds of arguments related to the state of economy are being brought up and I believe what can be found in these posts is just a tip of the iceberg – the moods are probably much worse than that…
Those of you who are looking for free Mercurial hosting for your little libre projects – search no more. freeHg.org is out there and works quite well.
Kudos for showing me this site go to Maciek Ligenza. My little prototype has its home now. 
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. – Albert Einstein
My relatively short “professional career” has already taught me what “enterprisey” software means. I’ve known this word before, I’ve seen it used to describe systems that suffered from bloat and lacked relative simplicity. If software is hard, then creating “simple” software is even harder.
Why do people like complicated solutions? Why complex object models get introduced in simple applications that could be more intuitively expressed without them? Why monsters that internally convert one XML data format, to another and another exist..?
There’s so much to see and learn from!
One quick note: the fact that I’m not posting here as much as I’d like to isn’t due to the fact that I’m dead or bored with the general idea of blogging, but should be attributed to me getting too busy with boring stuff like work. However, I realized (not the first time in my life) that I should try to find some time for other activities as well, so I started cycling and working on some small projects a little bit recently.
Hopefully this change will result in new entries Soon™.
I’m currently moving my posts from the dying jabba.pl site to this WordPress blog. It will take some time to finish but I expect no major problems. The idea is to make this my “professional” blog, where I can share my observations in the technical field and inform about progress being done in various projects I happen to work with. As such, I plan to create a separate personal blog, where I can post stuff that my family or close friends may be interested in, but otherwise boring to general public.
For now, please bear with me.
