Author: ricardofiel

Slides for my recent talk at Microsoft WebCamp. Demo project at my github.

I did a session on Agile Portugal 2015 titled Don’t Blindly Follow. It’s based on a post by Mike Cohn that left me wondering why so many teams I know adopt something (eg: Scrum, Kanban) and stick to it without questioning if it’s really fit for them.

Super kudos to the team that organized the conference. It’s been growing fast for the last couple of years and it reached more than 300 attendees. Very excited for next year.

I’ve written a post about having a great career while playing in a band. What I’ve learned about leadership, autonomy and working remotely.

https://medium.com/we-are-swat/how-to-be-in-a-popular-rock-band-have-a-full-time-job-and-stay-sane-ab1d2c9bff22

Hope you like it. If you have simliar stories, I’d love to hear from you.

There’s so much happening on the tech scene in Lisbon right now. One of the things I’m more proud of while working on the community side of Rupeal is knowing we’ve helped developers get great content.

I was squeezing some of the next meetups in my calendar and realized this could be interesting to you as well.

Hopefully this list will be more and more interesting each month.

Feb 18	Lisbon Conversion Stack	www.meetup.com/LisbonConversionStack/events/219699044/
Feb 19	XPlat (Cross Platform Microsoft) w/ Josh Holmes	www.meetup.com/XPlat-Using-Microsoft-Tools-for-Cross-Platform-Development/events/219930326/
Feb 19	require(‘lx’) – JS, Node	www.meetup.com/require-lx/events/219438288/
Feb 19	phplx February Meetup	www.meetup.com/php-lx/events/220445159/
Feb 19	Xamarin Experience	www.xpand-it.com/en/xamarin-experience-live-seminar
Feb 20	IoT at Microsoft	https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032615147&culture=pt-PT
Feb 21	Women in Tech weekly meetup	www.meetup.com/Lisbon-Mulheres-TIC-Meetup/events/220394583/
Feb 24	Scala – “The Play Framework at Codacy” & “Challenges of moving a Java team to Scala”	www.meetup.com/Scala-Portugal/events/220136534/
Feb 26	Productized Talks	www.meetup.com/Productized-Talks/events/220112582/

You can also checkout Kwan, we’ll try to keep it up to date with new meetups as we know about them.

You should meditate for 10 minutes everyday. Unless if you don’t have the time. In that case, make it 30!

Love this quote by Dale Larson at SXSWi 2014.

It’s been way too long since I’ve written something here. Life’s been full of changes and new challenges for the last couple of years and writing has gone way down on my list of priorities. Enjoying a holiday, I decided today is a good day for a status.

Change #1 – Welcome Lucas, the new family member

Lucas Santa-Clara Fiel was born. Being a dad is the ultimate experience and my kid has thought me so much about me and life in general. The scary thing is, this is only the beginning. What awaits for the upcoming years is a secret only time will tell, but let me tell you, I’m loving every nanosecond of it.

Change #2 – Goodbye Fullsix, Hello Rupeal / SWAT

After 5 and a half years at Fullsix Group Portugal, I’ve joined RUPEAL as Chief Technology Officer. I’ve been a close follower of the company since it began and many of the people there were my colleagues in college. The time at Fullsix was amazing and I can’t thank enough for the people I’ve worked with along the years.

Rupeal’s culture is very different from the typical IT companies in Portugal, and this is even more noticeable in the SWAT team. Everyone knows all salaries and everyone has a say on promotions, hirings and overall team strategic direction. Adding to the CTO role, I’m also managing this team and everyday I’m learning something new. SWAT are a Rupeal team focused on creating awesome web products, from UX to Engineering, mostly focused on Ruby on Rails. More on this later (I was a Microsoft guy, remember?). We only use Scrum and our main source of clients and projects is word of mouth, which is a very good sign for me that this team, basically, rocks!

Change #3 – Welcome Rails and Apple

Most of my career has been around Microsoft technologies – ASP.NET, SQL Server, Azure and Silverlight. I’ve been a regular speaker at Microsoft events and, most of the times, a big fan of their products. My new team is focused in Ruby on Rails and everyone uses a Mac (including me, and I’m in love with the 13″ Air). By joining SWAT I had two choices – learn these platforms or try to push MS ones. The choice was obvious and learning Rails and working on a Mac have greatly opened my horizons on some things. I’ve not stopped using Microsoft. I’ve just added some new ones. We do some work on the Microsoft stack (ASP.NET, Web API, SQL Server, Azure) and our latest experiences were great. Microsoft is in the right direction for web development and, IMHO, is now better than Amazon for PaaS in the Cloud. But my time on Rails was very important to really understand where the new concepts in MS stack come from: migrations, continuous deployments, etc…. This is not just coding, this is a whole new mindset. Most of my time, however, is spent on Salesforce, Excel and management stuff.

See you really soon. In the meantime, check Rupeal’s new website and the really cool video below.

If you are into .NET web development, you’ve probably heard and tried Umbraco, the leading open-source content management system for the Microsoft stack. For the past few years, Umbraco has turned into a solid, simple and powerful solution, powering around 100.000 websites around the globe. Yet, if you’ve missed the news, the awesome new version of Umbraco was killed after RTM.

Back in 2008, me and the heavy-metal-guitar-player Marco (previous software architect) had the task of choosing a new CMS to be used at Fullsix Group Portugal. We are a group of digital marketing agencies with some of the biggest Portuguese clients and our custom-built CMS was far from serving our needs at the time. After some research and small pilot projects, we decided on Umbraco. And what a good decision it turned out to be!

At the time, Umbraco was still in version 3. The main selling points were:

1. Simplicity (for developers and end-users)
2. Zero-frontend, meaning we had full control of HTML
3. Extensibility
4. Open-source

While far from perfect, we did a couple of projects on v3 and were happy with the results. By this time, version 4 was released and we were spreading the word among the teams and more and more people were being introduced to Umbraco. At some point, version 4 had a big change, with a whole new data schema and Razor support. Development was even easier than before. Cool, don’t you think?

Fast forward to v5 and more than one year of following the development of the platform. By now we deployed more than 100 websites on Umbraco 4, we have a team of around 20 developers loving the platform, clients are happy, marketers are happy and everyone is eagerly awaiting the new version. We created the Portuguese Umbraco community, presented it at several industry events (like this one and this one) and watched other agencies adopting Umbraco in a hurry.

The changes introduced in v5 were, in a single word, astonishing. A new data layer, custom trees,, an MVC frontend, a new plugin architecture… WOW! More about this here. What could go wrong? Apparently many things. If you read the above post, Paul Sterling from Umbraco states that “v5 has become an overly complex system that has turned into the very monster Umbraco was originally created as a reaction against”. And he goes deeper into “It was difficult to use, had performance issues, and was generally not an improvement over v4. The vast majority of Umbraco community members were continuing to develop and release using v4.”.

I fully agree with Paul’s comments. What was initially a simple yet powerful product turned into a complex, unstable, slow and unfinished one. Remember the top feature that made me choose it in the first place: simplicity. That was key for Umbraco. That was lost in v5. By putting all focus on v5, we started having issues in v4 as well. Mostly, performance and caching issues. v4 became less stable that before. Which means there’s not a rock-solid Umbraco version at the time of this writing. Hopefully 4.8.0 is out at any time now and most issues will be fixed. And there’s my main source of happiness for killing v5: get the team together, fix what became broken in v4 and bring the best of v5 into it. It has a history of excellence in previous minor versions, so it has a good codebase. And did I tell you the Umbraco team is really smart? They are. They’ll know what to do and how to do it. After all, it’s hands-down the best open source CMS for .NET.

On top of this, Windows Azure, the cloud platform from Microsoft, whose website is actually built on Umbraco, was not supported in v5. How can you release a major version and drop support for one of the things you were good at? This one I don’t get.

Honestly, I think v5 architecture was a very good one. It was the implementation that turned out wrong. Still, I believe the team did an amazing job and, in the end, were humble and smart enough to kill it before adoption started growing.

Finally ,when chosing a CMS, I don’t care if uses MVC, WebForms or whatever. I care about developer and user experience, extensibility, stability, performance and features. For me, WebForms and Umbraco 4 are enough. (We do use other CMS – Kentico – for the larger projects, but I’ll keep it out of scope here). So, bring the best of v5 into v4 and I’m sure Umbraco will be on the right track again really soon. We’ll be eagerly waiting the improvements.

PS: Can we ask for native Windows Azure support, please?