Fernando Sainz Herrero

Ted - Shawn Achor

2012-02-05T00:00:00-08:00

Ted - Shawn Achor

February 5th, 2012 - Madrid

I like the optimism of this video, I don't know how strong is the correlation between positive actitude and performance but it makes sense in many situations, and in any case is a nice way to live.

If I know everything about your external world, i can only predict 10% of your long term happiness. 90% of your long term happiness if predicted not by the external world but by the way your brain processes the world.

Most companies and schools follow a formula for success which is this: "if i work harder, i'll be more successful, an if i am more successful, then i'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motive our behaviour and the problem is, is scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons: first, every time your brain has a success, you just change the goal post? of what a success look like: you have great grades, now you have to get better grades, you've gone to a good school, now you have to get a better school, you've got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, now you have to change your sales target (...) we think that we have to be successful, then we'll be happier. The real problem ist that our brains work in the opposite order, if you can rise somebody's levels of positivity in the present, then their brains experience what we now call a 'happinness advantage', which is you brain in positive performs significantly better than it does in negative, neutral or stress. Your inteligence raises, your creative rises, your energy level rises."

I didn't know the word undergird, I put it in a note.

Backbone Resources

2012-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

Backbone Resources

January 23rd, 2011 - Madrid

I've been collecting some posts and videos about backbone js, and I wanted to share them before going to @GermanDZ talk on Backbone + Rails + Handlebars, but I just realized that most of them have been already published in the repository wiki:
Tutorials, blog posts and example

There we have a nicely structured list of tutotorials. Beside those listed there, these might be worth taking a look:

Backbone Patterns This is a document with best practices in Backbone.

Backbone Fundamentals A creative-commons book on Backbone.js for beginners and advanced users alike

Backbone JS tips - Lessons from the trenches

Stop using backbone as if it were a stateless web server

Introducing the backbone boilerplate

Don't limit your backbone apps to backbone constructs

Backbone Rails Easily use backbone.js with rails 3.1, there's also a video

talks & screencasts

Talk at Pivotal Labs Pivot Jay Phillips shows how to get started with Backbone.js and demonstrates how he uses it on projects.

Talk at Boston Ruby Group Learn how Backbone.js is put together, how to use it with Rails, and how to make building JavaScript-heavy web apps a pleasure.

Talk at Sandiego Ruby Group Ryan Weald gives a brief overview of Backbone.js and the advantages it has for your project.

Also, there are three three (not free) tutorials at Peepcode, which I bet are pretty good.

Peepcode - BACKBONE.JS Basics

Peepcode - BACKBONE.JS Interactivity

Peepcode - BACKBONE.JS Persistence

Our Tetuan Valley Posts

2011-12-18T00:00:00-08:00

Our Tetuan Valley Posts

December 18th, 2011 - Madrid

We had a great experience participating in this last Tetuan Valley edition, there are many things I could say about it but for now I just want to link to the posts that alex and I wrote for the TVSS's blog:

Please make it profitable

It’s been already some years for us dreaming and struggling to build a good startup and over this time we’ve changed our minds about what a great business model implies.

(more )

Launching a startup is impossible (without a thermal detonator)

Lately, we’ve been laughing at the never ending pile of difficulties in order to run a startup. It’s the same kind of laughter that you have when you dive through a huge wave in the sea just to meet her bigger sister and the rest of the family upon emerging.

(more )

source: surlana.deviantart.com

Developer's Toolbox

This is a matter of personal taste, but there are still a few recommendations that we wanted to share and that we would’ve wanted someone to tell us... (more )

Cut & Paste in Lion

2011-12-18T00:00:00-08:00

Cut & Paste in Lion

December 18th, 2011 - Madrid

Finally, for the love of god, we have a (pretty hidden by the way) cut and paste feature on the Mac OS X Lion:

First: Copy (⌘ + C) Second: Paste ⌘ +⌥ + V

Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

Steve Jobs

7th October 2011 - Madrid

Yesterday I read about the death of Steve Jobs right after waking up, and I thought about why it saddened me besides the fact that someone remarkable was gone. It got me thinking of two things, the moving speech that he gave at Stanford, and the fact that from my perspective this person was bringing us "the future" closer.

One thing that I understand but which disappoints me is that our knowledge and technology is not so much limited by what we can get through our ingenuity but by economic constrains. We tend to advance towards short-time profits, we are not focused on racking our brains to solve every kind of problem, instead we go forward in some topics which receive resources for one reason or another. We have some independent research and we have different companies who develop and improve mostly what they need to compete. It's a great thing that the computer industry provides tools to scientists which would've been completely unaffordable, but knowing that research will get you longer lasting batteries faster than curing the disease that will kill you it's a little annoying.

To make things worse, enterprises don't have to do better products than the others to be successful. A company can try to do something innovative but something crappy with a lower price or a stronger marketing campaign is equally valid. I admire google for expanding mankind's intelligence (nothing less :) and i'm furious with Telefonica for giving a damn about improving infrastructures (for example at my neighborhood) while reporting the highest profits of the country and attempting to charge the user for every action he makes on the Internet. I can not blame companies if they don't hurry to make innovative products because that's not their goal, but it's sad to know that they have the power to do it.

... And then it's when the ipod appeared...

I may have been spoiled with futuristic objects from books and movies, but I see the computers we have and i feel like someone had taken me to the past. We've not only been inspired, we've seen realistic renderings in a thousand videos and somehow I feel that i'm just waiting for the future to finally come. It seems almost a matter of time. I'm a few years I've seen the first computer change from being regarded as a strange typewriter to something as fundamental as electricity. I've seen the mass adoption of mobile phones and the rise of Internet, and in all this time it is like if it was written somewhere "this is just the beginning"

We are waiting for our computers to stop being noisy overheated boxes of wires to ubiquitous instantaneous machines. We want every surface turned into a screen, we want perfect videoconferences, we want augmented reality, we want to be seamless connected everywhere, we want personal robots, solid virtual reality, affordable spaceships, we want our organs cloned, our genome understood and used to cure us, we want nanotechnology, powerful quantum computers and cold fusion. We want everything that we believe to be achievable through ingenuity. And we would like to have it soon.

... And then a friend show me his iphone...

And I didn't care about the phone part at all. It was a terminal. A futuristic portable terminal the way we had imagined it. I didn't think "ah, that's great", i thought "finally!". Phones had had already applications, small screen slow awkward applications prone to go accidentally online and which were as usable as browsing the Internet by sending sms's. For years every sloppy improvement added to my phone made me wish that they could just keep it as it was. What i wanted was a piece of Internet in a rectangular format. I wanted a responsive machine in an simplified interface given the size, and they just aced it. Four years later, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop admitted that even then they didn't have a product close to their experience. For me it was a huge step towards being always connected, to the fact I could have a world of information in my hands.

... And then three years later rumour had it that they were going to present a tablet...

I was working with a couple of friends waiting for something "revolutionary" to be broadcasted. By that time steve jobs had already turned into some sort of legendary inventor, and we had the kind of the excitement that you had in your stomach when a movie you've been waiting/anticipating for years is about to start. Technology makes progress steadily and someday your processor is 4 times better, but this man was on stage, directing our expectations like a magician and promising to deliver something exciting that we would soon have in our daily lives.

He went out and presented the ipad we had the feeling as if we were watching a mobile phone or a laptop for the first time.

Lost of people said that it would be useless, that they wanted a light laptop and not a large iphone. They mocked the idea and said that other companies had tried and failed because the market didn't like it. I was surprised for the avalanche of critics. Personally, I wished that it succeeded to proof that people wanted to bring computers to other parts of their lives. It was another step towards to screen tables, walls, mirrors, glasses.. anything we could imagine, to make the way we interact with computers more close to the way humans would naturally interact with objects. A tablet, for it's size and simplified controls was ideal for a huge new range of scenarios, and they were brave enough to prove it.

From that moment we were won over. Not that apple was perfect. Apple is a brilliant company that wants our money and to have us tied, which annoys their own developers many times and which for some reason believes that moving files with cut&paste is a bad day (it is not! change it dammit!)

But we are willing to go through many things if that's what it takes to enjoy this little pieces of "future". I command control over your music library in exchange for the ipod. I will decide which apps are worthy on the iphone and ipad. I've just developed the robot EVA from WALLE while my competitors have talking toasters, but she will carry your wallet from this day on. Apple can set some unnerving conditions because their products are worth it.

This is the first of the two reasons that will make me miss Steve Jobs. The second is this video.I don't know how Steve Jobs was in person, but I believe that he meant every word he said:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Steve Jobs managed to get everyone excited with his personality and the continuous innovations of his company. He presented products so appealing that their legion of fans almost fight to advertise them themselves, and I don't know if we'll see any other person capable of creating this enthusiasm for technology. I believe that he contributed to take us closer to a future full of possibilities. He was completely devoted to doing what he loved and he inspired us all. We we'll miss him.

This is a good compilation of his keynotes.

Common questions at Techcrunch Disrupt SF 2011

2011-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

Common questions at Techcrunch Disrupt SF 2011

25th September 2011 - Madrid

I took advantage of the weekend to watch the videos from the last Techcrunch Disrupt through their itunes feed) and I made a compilation of the most common questions for the teams grouped by similarity:

market & user acquisition

who’s the user? Which is the size of your market? How do you accelerate the uptake in that market?
How do you get the attention of people? third party distribution strategy? tie-ins? How do you get to this group? Where would you initialize focus? How are you gonna market it? which are your verticals? which are your partners?

value proposition & differentiation

Why would I use this? Do people already have that behaviour or how are you going to get them in that behaviour? What’s the value proposition? Who needs this and why? Why would someone use it? What’s the specific feature that you’re giving him? How is different to X? What do you believe is the single most important thing for consumers that you solve better than X? What’s your position against your competitors? How are you going to compete against X? What’s the differentiator? / How do you get the differentiation? What’s the new piece that you are bringing in?

business model

How do you guys will charge? What’s the business model? Which business model do you focus on first? What would be your second business model?

other interesting questions

What stops a second player from doing X?
How will your product roadmap look like? What locks you in to the artist? How you will moderate user content? When did you launch? Where does your traffic come from?

Piling Up

2011-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

Piling Up

August 29th, 2011 - Madrid

I'm trying to tackle in a more systematic way how I gather information from multiple sources hoping to manage this overflow a little better. The goal is to make the most of the ever-increasing pile of new things knowing that in reality there is always very little time and that it is better to enjoy and learn a handful of things than staring at a huge tower of piled up papers feeling bad about yourself.

The trickiest parts is forcing yourself to store less. Since we have almost limitless storage capacity for practical purposes, I tend to save anything that could potentially be interesting in the present or in the long distant future. But the shock of looking at a folder with thousands of files makes me back away and not even try to deal with one of them.

Gradually I’m doing better at this and I want to write what it’s working for me. For now I'll just list the main contributors to my mess as a way of acknowledging my enemy :)

Mail
thank god for archiving in gmail, I was reluctant at first but now I encourage everyone to use it since taking the old ones out of sight gives you peace of mind. Deleting them might be as good, but this way I don’t have to think about it. I tend to clear the inbox folder each couple of days, and It's not so hard to empty out even after a fews weeks.

Social networks
I'm too adicted to google reader to put too much time into them :) I use twitter time to time, I see facebook as a noisy agenda, and I like google+ but still have little traffic on it.

Downloads
this folder gets cluttered easily but it’s also straightforward to clear.

Podcasts
I’ve got 24 subscriptions but thanks to the iphone/itunes and the hours of commuting time I could even use a few more.

Languages
I have hundreds of notes that I’ve written through the years on English, French and German. They are full of words that I wanted to learn along with questions and important things to remember, and they were completely unreachable. It was so frustrating to know that somewhere there was written three times a useful sentence that I wouldn't be able to remember when needed, that we ended up developing a whole website and community to publish notes and test them periodically (wolty.com).

Books
I don’t buy books compulsevely, so even if some are covered in dust, it's not overwhelming.

Music
My music folder is sort of a disaster but I can live with it. I’m waiting for a service such as iCloud to sort it out. Recently I threw away most of my cds since their main use was to weight down the shelf in case it decided to escape flying out of the window.

Photos
In September 2004 I started to save them in a more or less neatly way. The first three years are pretty good, the next two and a half are ok, but since Febrary 2009 it’s a chaotic disaster of numbered new folders. That’s about 35000 photos waiting for me to set them in order. So far my approach is taking care of the new ones and waiting for a (summer, may be? retirement?) when i’ll have more time. I hope that dittit.com launches soon, so I can make a goal out of it.

Reader
I love feeds. I’m subscribed to about 150 feeds ranging from blogs which publish twice a year to massive ones as HN (I recommend the score filtered versions, check out talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload). I skim through them and “mark all as read” in a daily basis, but the real problem for me is that I save the links for future reading.

Links
This is the hardest for me. They are not just bookmarks to help me find the urls, most of them are things to read or to learn from. I’ve had enough to draw out some stats, and in average I save between 5 to 7 links each day, that’s about 200 a month. Twice a year I break the 1000 barrier and sweep away 90% of them. This is absurd, but lately I got it under control. If what I’m doing works i’ll post about it :)