AgileAndArt

Last month, at QCON, I was in a great talk about functional programming languages (like Haskell) and their benefits to the Art world. The title of the talk was "How Functional Programmers can Help, Inspire, or even Be Artists". First of all I'd like to emphasize that all good programmers are artists, and as Richard Gabriel said 6 years ago , we programmers should be trained like artists. This is the major problem of our Computer Science Courses. We all know artificial intelligence and computer tools are getting better and better. Right know we can easily produce things like this video: In his talk, Prof. Paul Hudak also showed the examples of how we can do image animation using functional programming. The project he described was the Functional Reactive Animation (FRAN) . All these things are not really new, but now that functional languages are returning to the main stream, those are the things that begin to appear. With tools like FRAN, an animation can be made as easy ...

A new video I made last week at Locaweb about Patterns for Introducing New Ideas. Sorry, but these videos are in Portuguese. Click the YouTube link up here to see other parts... :-)

For me, it was an honor to eat my morning croissant with Martin Fowler. Sharing my emotion with you!

Last week, walking along the San Francisco streets, I had many insights . It was a great week at QCON , where I could meet many of the great people in the software development world. I'd like to share with you one of my biggest insights. It has to do with how language is deeply related to thinking. English is not my first language (I was born in Brazil and here we speak Portuguese), so I don't know English as I know Portuguese. When I was in San Francisco, I've created a challenge for myself: I wouldn't think in Portuguese. I had to think everything in English. This was a great experience: I noticed that I just couldn't think well! Once I didn't have the right words to represent my thoughts , the thoughts couldn't come. Right now, even writing, I'm trying to say something to you, but I just can't do it properly! So I decided to train my abilities, not just in speaking or writing English, but in THINKING. That's why I decided to write my blog in ...

I'd like to use this post to announce 2 big changes in my life. The first one is that since now I will post here in English instead of Portuguese. With this, I'd like to make my blog more understandable outside Brazil. I'm not sure I'm ready to write everything I think in a foreign language, but the only way to find it out is to begin writing and see what happen. So, here I am. For the practice I will also write some poetry in English, in my poetry blog . The second change in my life is that I've just became a film maker. I've done my first short film and I'd like to share it with you. The film title is "Todo mundo tem o direito a vida - todo mundo tem o direito igual", which means Everybody has the rights for life - everybody has the same rights". It's the story of a foot and a dog . The foot wants to dance as the dog just want to turn around the table in infinite cycles . They both have their rights to do it whenever they want, and I h...

Linda Rising talked about coffee effects in our lives. I leave here just a picture she showed us to think about this issue

Here are some photos of the first and second days of QCON SF 2008. Enjoy! QCON SF 2008