Flying, flying, flying

I've been to Rome this weekend. I used to fly a little more before my children's bbirth, but since then I haven't flyed for quite a few years. Train and car a lot. But no planes. I knew what I was going to face.

But the experience has been worse. To pass through the security line is something stressful and disgusting. Wait a long queue. Put all your belongings through the X-ray. Don't forget the belt. Pass through the metal detector. Keep your boarding pass in your hands. Keep your hands up. Beeeeep. Please go back and pass again. Some of the people go through patdown. And you ask yourself "Will I make some mistake? Will I be questioned because I did anything wrong?". And after everything is over you start to think what's the point of all this when you see a person on your side with three shaving blades.

But this isn't over. Wait, wait, wait. Your plane is delayed. Wait, wait, wait. You go in with a suitcase for two people. But then you see people with what it seems a non-standard suitcase, a laptop, and a garment bag (and a hat). You don't know where to put your suitcase because everything is full. You manage to do it at the end, but you still have to wait the take off of several planes before yours.

That was departing from Madrid. But Rome wasn't better. One hour delay for the plane, one hour delay because of the travelling weather. And half an hour to pick the bag, because I chose to checkin the suitcase.

When I travel by train (long distance, not commuting) I can come 15-30 minutes before the departure, maybe there's some security, but no queues, and I'm pretty confident of when I'm going to arrive to my destination.

Civil service: How to improve

A few days ago I promised to explain some of my ideas to improve the civil service in Spain. Of course there is no silver bullet. Instead, as you can see the links, all the bricks are in place:

1. Try to introduce economic incentives. People who work should be rewarded. Of course that could be misused to give more money to friends instead of giving it to the people who work.


2. Proper evaluation of how money is spent, trying to spend the money where it is better used.


3. Encourage initiative in modernization of the Public Service. Good ideas should be praised. Bad ideas should be turned into good ideas. All Ideas should be taken into account for the first point. It doesn't cost money and for some cases it's very useful.

In the end, nothing new. More money, better spent, not only money.

If it's nothing new and is not being applied, somebody could ask what makes some people work harder even if they know they won't succeed. You'll have to wait.

Corruption

Wow. It seems Wikileaks is going to publish some documents showing implication of some world leaders in corruption practices. I don't have any other information but the Reuters piece of news.

I wouldn't have brought it to this blog if it weren't for the last paragraph of the first page:

Two of the sources said Assange has also made the documents available to at least two other European publications -- the newspapers El Pais of Spain and Le Monde of France.

That would suggest that government leaders implicated could be Spaniards or Frenchmen. Don't know if it's true.

But watching financial markets regarding peripheral European bonds I can't help thinking that this could have connections with Spanish politics.

Spring course

I'm attending this week to a Spring Framework course. It's a very small class: the teacher, my boss and me.

I don't consider myself slow, and neither is my boss. No, he doesn't read this blog. But we two were trying to keep up the frenetic pace the teacher is imposing. I had already used Spring, but up to now I didn't suppose who little did I know about Spring, about TDD, or even about Eclipse. Watching the teacher coding, and trying to understand what he was doing, and trying to type as fast as him is a rewarding but extremely demanding experience.

Regarding Spring Framework, I do think it's a very powerful tool, and we probably are going to use it at one of my teams (the architecture group). But I don't think it's something it can be used in other teams. We'll see.

Copyright protection

You know something is broken with copyright when:

• You buy a "Barbie and three Musqueteers" DVD and you can't play in your DVD player because it's piracy protected. But...
  
  You download the same film from a P2P network, save to a CD and you can play it everywhere.


• You can't install the Windows Vista that came with your computer, on a VirtualBox over a Linux box, because it refuses to activate. But...
  
  You can download a file from a P2P network that contains 4 versions of Windows 7 (from starter to ultimate) that will happily install on VirtualBox, will activate and will update flawlessly.

I'm sick of this.

Lots of old friends

Yes. I know I was supposed to write about Civil service in Spain. But I've promised myself to write a blog post Monday through Thursday. Nobody reads this, my head is full of memories, and I'm not able to write about the planned topic. I could struggle with the it, but I prefer to write about my memories.

In the last couple of days there's a lot of activity in my mailbox. Agus, one of my friends (more about that later), send me an email. It was a mail with lots of names I knew. They were classmates from the school. I met some of them more than 10 years ago. But last time I saw many of them is more 20 years ago. Reading about them, brings back a lot of images. We are going to have dinner in a couple of weeks. No discussion about the date. While writing this text, another classmate is in the list.

I said that Agus is one of my friends. He is obviously another classmate. But he is also a colleague. We work 10 meters one of each other. We studied from 6 to 16 years old (in fact from 5 to 15 because we both celebrate our birthday in December). Then we took different routes. And then again we found one each other working in the same company... for the same client. I still remember that day. It was January 2001.

I love this frenzy of mails and images, and memories.

Civil service in Spain: Productivity

I wrote yesterday about why job security is a good mechanism to protect civil service from corruption. But I also explained that it's a mechanism that makes difficult to punish slackers.
That wouldn't be a serious problem if there were mechanism to reward people who do right. And the truth is that there aren't. The salary has a variable part but could be more or less explained as "if you come to work twice a week in the afternoon, you get it". Not very rewarding to productivity.
If you come to work but don't do anything, you get paid. If you come to work in the afternoon, but don't do anything, you get paid more.
Of course money isn't everything. At least in my case, a challenging environment is a great part of the deal. But here again civil service is difficult. It's slow and innovations are difficult to pass through.
It's surprising that people do anything. But, truth to be told, there are lots of people who work. There are all sort of tricks, but in general, people work.
Tomorrow, I'll try to explain additional ideas.

Civil service in Spain: Job security

I'm a civil servant. Civil servants in Spain can't be fired. Well, in fact they can be fired, but only because of extremely serious infringements, and after a complicated procedure.
This protection is intended to give security so that one civil servant can oppose employee's chief orders if the employee thinks that what is being ordered is illegal. Let's imagine I'm asked to delete certain documents in some repository. If I worked in a company and I don't do delete them, I could be fired. As Civil Servants have to do special things concerning laws, they (we) are given special job protection.
But the protection makes nearly impossible to fire lazy employees. And with the term "lazy employees" I mean people that only go to the office to clock in, or people who go to work to play Tetris all day. I've seen them. For me is something mysterious how anyone can go to work to play Tetris day in, day out. But there are people like that.
Anyway, the situation in Spain (with more than 20% unemployment rate) is not quite well. And people start to point at that job security as something wrong. Tomorrow I will write about productivity in the Civil Service in Spain, which is related to job security, but it has more issues. But today I wanted to stress that job security, by itself, is not something wrong.

Scrum for myself

Yesterday I explained I have attended recently a couple of courses. One of them was about Scrum.
The course was very interesting, although, as I explained in the evaluation, there were times when I wished there were only one teacher instead of three.
At the end of the course, I took a test, and now I'm Scrum Manager certified. I must say that the exam was quite difficult, but I don't consider myself a Scrum manager. Not even a Scrum practitioner.
Anyway, as I wrote yesterday I'm trying to define my future as a professional, and I have planned some topics in which I would like to improve, and some things I would like to do. So I decided to create a list of stories, with tasks, and planned short sprints in order to complete those stories. I even started to use Scrum Ninja. I'm the team, the product owner and the Scrum Manager. Yes, I know that isn't Scrum. Maybe "Scrum in name only".
But it has been very interesting to read Borja Prieto writing about Scrum in a company.

The passionate programmer

The last few weeks have been really intense with respect to my career. I've attended two courses, given some presentations, launched a few projects at work, and read some books. Sometimes I've been under a lot of self-imposed pressure, but overall I've learned a lot of things.

One of the books I've read has been really enlightening. It has been The passionate Programmer. It's a book I wish I'd read years ago, and I'm tempted to buy a few copies and give them to some of my coworkers.

Initially I thought it was to late for me, but as times passes, I'm more and more convinced that it's not too late. I don't know what future will bring but I hope I'm still able to influence it.