cedmax.net

…and a few things happened.

Actually I was about to write something completely different, but without a brief summary of what happenend in the meanwhile that wouldn’t have had much sense.

The problem is everything happened so damn fast.

Last post was April 21st, 2012.
Let me think…

The following month, toward the end of May, I had to deal with the fact that I may had to leave my job at Spreaker.

Saying goodbye was going to be though: despite of an hard start, working there has been one of the most interesting and fullfilling job experiences I’ve ever had. But sometimes there is not much you can actually do to avoid things happening and, even though they were not kicking me out and I didn’t really want to, I started sending resumes around and, after a while, considering to move abroad.

In July I came to London for some interviews and I accepted an offer.
In August I moved to London for good.
In September, well: From The Front and started my new job in Shazam
In October I got an article published on .Net Magazine
In November my older kid started the primary school.
In December I got married.

This is a post a wrote 2 years ago, I never published it, don’t know why.
It feels kind of weird to read it now: in the meanwhile I had another kid, quit my job, started organizing meetups (and a conference) and started speaking at conferences too.

In 3 words: Life went on.

But still Fronteers 2010 has been a landmark in my following choices: I quit my job because they were not investing enough in my professional development, I started organizing meetups (and then the conf) because I wanted to help creating a frontend community in Italy.

Starting from the end: Christian Heilmann’s talk was like an enlightenment for everyone at the venue.

Nothing really new came up from the conference: almost everything was already heard (except Cameron Adams talk about web animations), but still was really inspiring to listen to such great speakers talking that passionate about what we are doing everyday.

Going to fronteers was the highest point of a road that I’m running since 8 month ago.
I was really considering to quit my job, then I changed my boss and started the biggest javascript project my company have ever had since 2006: creating a sort of middle layer (an interface adapter) between js frameworks and our in-house code to get it library agnostic.

That can sound pretty weird as it can may create performance issues and we won’t be able to use some framework cool features if we don’t implement them on our interface. but we are having a lot of issues in upgrading our current framework (prototype 1.4): we have a lot of code built on that and we are not in a technology driven company that can invest so much resources refactoring code without any marketing goals. if we did not do something to solve that we would have had even worst problems then having the inability of chaining with jquery, for example.

In this 8 month (not just working on that: as I told before marketing goals are on top of our agile boards) I studied a lot of solution to manage the architectture of all that stuff and I found out I’ve been passing through the same problems Jake Archibald had when he worked on glow with the bbc team and we arrived at the same conclusions.

Also, I looking for some stuff, beside some known and well documented best practices, that I couldn’t find anywhere on the web (for example something to create a consistent unit test platform ant driven. there were several solution, but some of them were not console driven or library agnostic or were to complicated to integrate and use in everyday workflow) and recently we discovered that there is a new o’really book that is on publishing about that manner.

Christian Johansen, the author, is using the same testing framework we are and published a library that solves our major concern on testing Ajax transaction (sinon.js)

So it seems we made the right choices afterall and I am proud of our team: we were not really ready to manage all that complexity but in spite of that did really a good job and now we are ready to go further on that.

(ego boost was when Zakas said that we were going in the right direction to solve some performance issue we are having in old IEs).

never been so proud of doing my job.

Cena fuori con un gruppo di signore di mezza età.
Niente milf o che: la morosa collabora col loro gruppo teatrale e qualche volta siamo invitati alla loro magnazza stagionale a base di crescentine (che però non sono crescentine – nel senso di tigelle – ma gnocco fritto, che qui a Bologna si chiama così. barbari).

Una di queste ha passato la serata chiamandomi Luca. Alla prima mi ha colto alla sprovvista e non ho avuto la prontezza di correggerla, la seconda volta non volevo metterla in imbarazzo…

Il sembrare un ritardato che dev’essere chiamato 5/6 volte prima di reagire non mi ha pesato tanto, mi spiace solo che uscendo una delle altre mi abbia salutato con un “Ciao, Marco” a pochi passi da lei.

Questo post ha lo stesso senso profondo dei film della Coppola. Se non lo capite siete voi.

avevo un post lungo e articolato per salutare i miei 5 anni a yoox.
un post in cui li ripercorrevo ringraziando le persone che hanno fatto parte dei 2 team che ho (informalmente) guidato, ricordando i momenti belli e quelli meno e in cui salutavo un’azienda con cui, nonostante la sana conflittualità che accompagnava i nostri rapporti, sono cresciuto e ho imparato a fare il mio lavoro meglio e ad un altro livello.

l’ho cancellato perchè lo covavo da 2 mesi e non so se l’avrei mai postato e averlo lì, in sospeso, inibiva la mia già poca voglia di scrivere.

namaste yoox, chi ha avuto ha avuto, chi ha dato ha dato. move on.

domani sera parto per Parigi, ospite al Paris Web, la più grande conferenza francofona in europa. il mio primo talk in inglese, ho testato la lingua al workshop di From The Front e credo di potercela fare.

in caso potrete vedermi fallire in streaming, se vi va, venerdì alle 14 ora di Parigi (che forse è la stessa, non ho voglia di controllare).

il jsDay è stata un’esperienza dal sapore particolare.

Intanto per la prima volta ho giocato “fuori casa”: avevo già presentato un talk da 15 min a From The Front, ma FTF sono io, siamo noi, è casa.

Qui ho portato un’ora di materiale a perfetti sconosciuti.
Un’ansia abbastanza palpabile si è sciolta nel momento in cui ho consegnato i fucili

@alex82y: @cedmax distribuisce pistole spara palline per fermarlo nel caso cominciasse a parlare troppo veloce.. genio :-D #jsday http://t.co/f6HrWVl

Dopo è stata in discesa, anche se il tema era pesantuccio non molto supportato da codice (la maggiore critica che ho ricevuto).
Il mio problema su questa cosa è che mi trovo molto più a mio agio con presentazioni con tanta fuffa: mi piace divagare e perdermi in filosofeggiamenti e il codice te lo impedisce… e poi non mi piace parlare di codice, il codice mi piace scriverlo.

Però è quello che la gente si aspetta, quindi prossima volta, che ci sarà, nonostante i punti moglie persi in questa 2 giorni veronese, proporrò un workshop collegato alla presentazione, in modo da rendere la cosa più interattiva e pratica.

Poi sono arrivati i complimenti da Johanson (l’autore del libro Javascript Test Driven Development) sulle slides, non che fosse presente, ma l’internet è venuto in soccorso

@cedmax: I think I’m missing a @cjno speech at #jsday even if my talk would have been almost pointless if he was here
@cjno: @cedmax eh, what?
@cedmax: @cjno I made a talk on jstdd (as a valuable dev strategy and how to setup a testing env) at the italian jsday: I miss a more technical talk
@cjno: @cedmax aha, cool. I was worried that I had forgotten to show up for something :)

[...]

@cedmax: ok, slideshare made it http://j.mp/isykdp
@cjno: great slides! And thanks for pimping sinon :)

Sarebbe bastato questo, ma nel frattempo ci sono stati 600km di macchina, una quasi cena accanto a Robert Nyman (diciamo che stavamo per ordinare condividendo il menu, quando è arrivata la telefonata da casa che mi ha imposto 300 dei suddetti km), una maglietta con scritto “Javascript, Motherfucker, Do You Speak It!”, qualche spritz e tante idee coi colleghi, una pianificazione lavorativa che nella mia testa, posto che vadano in poto certe cose, va da qui ai prossimi 2 anni… TBC