Julio Santos

I wish I could say that I’ve been so busy with work and other important stuff, that I didn’t even have the time to write a couple of lines. I wish I could say even though people who don’t even have the time to write a couple of lines are pretty sad.

The fact is that I’m just lazy and was also wondering who the hell I’m writing this for anyway? As it turns out, *I* like to read what I was doing or thinking 6 months. And so it seems I’m really writing this for me. So Julio in the future, hi there, hope you’ve grown up a little and hope those drums that I don’t have but you must are keeping you happy.

Alright, what the hell happened in the past 2 months?

- We launched our fine website! It’s still in internal beta, and it’s working like a charm. Thanks to XP, a fine group of developers and a great product manager who understands “stories”, the whole thing worked like a charm. I probably should blog about how we did it, since this was the best xp/agile project I’ve been involved with. I also know myself quite well, and the chances of me writing about are rather slim. So here’s the short version of how it was done: smart product manager, short iterations (1 week) with real content at the end of each one, team in the same room, test-first or at least “test before you check-in”, smart folks (some superstars even), lots of test coverage (95-100% depending on the day), mutual respect and last but not least: a decent language and framework. Ruby and Ruby on Rails were a big part of the success. That’s it, easy, anyone could have done it.

Here’s a conversation Fabienne and I had the other day:

Fabienne - “You guys have launched!? I haven’t seen you work past 6 o’clock or on weekends for months!”
Me - Yep, that’s the power of XP baby.
Fabienne - But, but, you’ve been doing XP for years!
Me - Nah, that was “XP-but”. I’ll blog about it…or not.

So anyway, we’re live (even if only to a small subset of the world) and should go live to everyone in less than a month.

This is us (the whole company) celebrating:

- What else happened? Oh yeah, I was given (for free!) a level 65 rogue in world of warcraft, on some PvP server that was not “my usual pvp server”. I couldn’t resist pwning noobs with a rogue, so I played him “a little”, brought him to level 70, transferred him to the proper pvp server, and now I’m camped on top of the roof in Southshore (alliance town) stealth and waiting for noobs to pwn.

- Fabienne and Morgane went to Belgium for a week. Morgane fractured her skull over there, could not fly until the bones were all properly glued together so they stayed 3 weeks. It was all very upsetting. Even the rogue miss me, as I didn’t play him at all then. My buddy Scott practically had me live at his place the whole time, and I’m grateful to him and his family. They made it almost easy. Morgane is fine now and now she can see through walls and bend spoons with her mind.

- Morgane went back to school and she’s doing great. She took some tough classes and so far she seems to be doing fine (I never thought that seeing through walls could help, but apparently that is the case)

- I gave up exercising but didn’t like to see what the scale was telling me day after day. That if you don’t exercise, you gain weight. So I don’t go on the scale anymore. Fixed.

That’s all, Julio in the future. See you then.