For Those Unimpressed By Marketing

This personal blog post by Tizra CTO Francisco Rosa gives the hardcore technologist's view of why Agile PDF is different. He may not be in the marketing department, but it's safe to say he knows our software. He also knows how it matches up against expensive custom systems now in use elsewhere (he built a few for clients like Oxford University Press, McGraw-Hill and the World Bank before coming to Tizra).

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Technical Podcasts

If there is something the web as surely changed, it was the way that software engineers need to work. It is now a crucial aspect of our work to be able draw from the huge internet knowledge base out there in an efficient way to get to the right answers. Part of that information extraction is related to the keeping-up-to-date effort that every developer is required to accomplish to continue to be productive. While previous a software engineer could rely mostly on print material, nowadays we need to rely as well on content available on the net. Podcasts are such a source that can bring an amazing amount of information to the mix of knowledge one needs these days. If you are a software engineer and have not jumped into the podcast wagon yet, I suggest you do so. Here is a list some technical podcasts that we hear at Tizra: The Java Posse : a fantastic podcast on Java development. Containing news info update, analysis of tools, overall software development discussions. Software as She Dev...

The importance of continuous integration

Leading a team of developers in the effort of building a robust, quality software product should involve the establishment of some process and tools to assist the team effort and serve as a safety net for the errors of getting people to work together. Continuous integration is, I believe, a crucial element of that process. Introduced by Martin Fowler and Matt Foemmel (see article Continuous Integration ), continuous integration establishes the practice of frequent integration of work developed by the several team members verified by automated build and testing of integrated code within a clean sandbox. This practice is valuable for several reasons: It promotes the development of a clear process of building/deployment independent of any specificity of developer's platforms. Code that exists on a single platform only is bound to become dependent on specific aspects of that platform without anyone really noticing the dependencies until trying to port to other platforms. The existence ...

Pure Coolness

I have seen far from all the talks here, but from what I've seen and the buzz that I've heard the winner of the "coolest presentation award" was Manolis Kelaidis. He showed a paper e-book device that he's been prototyping. By means of conductive ink traces, a person touching a button on the page can trigger an action by an embedded processor. He had a book where pads on the page triggered actions on his laptop: going to web pages, playing songs on iTunes, and so forth. It was a hand-bound Bluetooth book! There's clearly a huge expense still involved in platform building and so on, but everything he did is compatible with contemporary printing technology, using inks that are commercially available (not experimental). Other developments in printable circuitry play into this as well: printable batteries, printable electronic components, printable speakers. Of course this is a technology, not a solution, and there's a huge chain of associated requirements ...

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