Mahsoub's Website

A 3D Printer, from Zcorp:

Swim like a dolphin with Flyboard, from Zapata:

Jetman, from Switzerland:

This is really cool

Another clip:

I’ve been using Amazon since the days I was working for fatbrain, despite they were our biggest competitor. We were third, after Amazon and Barnes-and-Noble, but we did better in B2B market. In fact, we were saved from death when Barnes-and-Noble acquired our company during the rough times of 2000. The landscape has changed a lot since then but Amazon is still number one by far.
I really like their Web2.0 products. Book reviews, for example, are irreplaceable. Let alone it happened before the term Web2.0 came out. Reading List, a Linkedin application, where users share book recommendations. To me, it’s very useful to watch, and be guided by, what industry leaders read and recommend. Whether in software, Internet marketing or any other field, I find book reviews and recommendations very useful.
Amazon’s Wish Lists, is also brilliant. I’ve created several actually, to bookmark my favorite books, even if I have them and already read them.
I’ve taken it one step further and added this page to share my recommended readings, in technology, and that page, for business and people management. I intend to add more recommendations in other fields, if I get good feedback from you.

Please let me know what you think. I’m sure you’ll have great additions to this modest list.

Finally, someone speaking critically about social networking. Enjoy this video clip:

Seriously, networking is just a tool and not the whole deal. Many people, job seekers, as well as in business development, focus too much on networking and think it’s every thing. Just as some project managers focus too much on meeting the dead line or motivating/applying pressure on developers and loose sight of the big picture.

Let us know what you think.

A friend of mine shared this short video with me.

It illustrates a very common mistake many managers do, especially if they’re moving from other industries to software. It also offers more suitable solutions.

The RSA site is presenting Daniel Pink as the author of provocative (it’s a promoting word these days) bestselling books.

After watching this presentation, many situations popped up in my mind.

Have you faced a situation where a talented developer was feeling down and a raise didn’t motivate him/her?

Have you been micro-managed and hated your job for that?

Has the lack of purpose frustrated you? Despite the good pay?

Let us know what you think? Leave a comment.

In his blog, James Gosling has announced that he left Oracle earlier this month. Back, in the mid nineties, Gosling co-invented Java, the language and the virtual machine, while working for Sun. The dream, at that time, was to write software once and run it anywhere. That is, on all machines that can run the Java Virtual Machine. A great paradigm shift in software. Sun was acquired by Oracle last year.

For many, his resignation was expected. I am not saying that it was inevitable but one can very easily imagine that the vision Oracle has for Java is very different from the vision Gosling has. After all, paying money to own Java is totally different from putting your heart and soul, and a good bulk of your life time to create it. In his blog, he wisely avoided getting into explanations and details; at best, one can imagine his mixed feelings about it.

As for the future of Java, no one can really say, not even top management in Oracle. The future is something still to be crafted, not ordered by giants. With the advent of dot net platform, someone said that thousands of existing systems rely on Java; these systems won’t go away over night. In addition, Java hasn’t been standing still; Java has been incorporating several modern features over the last few years.

On the other hand, as they say, change is the only constant; in technology just as in life. No matter how we feel, no product or technology is perfect for all times. At a point of time, I could have never imagined seeing a book titled Java Pitfalls. Sometimes, we just forget that today’s top technology is just a milestone in our collective learning curve and progress. We just have to keep our eyes and mind open for new challenges and opportunities.

We can only express greatest respect to this history maker, James Gosling, and look forward to his next contribution in our field.

Let us know what you think about it. Leave a comment.

JDC 2010, Cairo

Yesterday I’ve attended the JDC 2010 in Madinet Nasr, Cairo. Thanks to the organizers (EGJUG) and the speakers, it has been a great success, despite the usual local challenges; they had to change the venue in the last few days. Successful beacuse sponsors, such as Google, ITS, and iCraft had a chance to meet the most serious, highly qualified,  job seekers. Attendees, like me, had a chance to hear about new trends and technologies directly from speakers from Google, Oracle (now owning SUN) and IBM.

As expected, cloud computing was a hot topic. Mohammad Refaey gave a nice overview of what it is and Fred Sauer talked about Google App Engine. Refaey also mentioned a contribution from the Arab world I didn’t know about, from Meeza of Qatar

Developing for mobile was not as dominant as expected. However, Google team did a nice demo on Android using voice and image recognition but these applications were also available on iPhone and from other vendors.

Presentations on presentation technologies were also a big part of it. If you’re new to Java and have attended the sessions on JavaFX, JSPX, JSF 2.0, PrimeFaces, Mashups and JSF you must definitely think that this is too much. Let alone frameworks that are getting old like Struts and Spring MVC. There was even a presentation on MVC-Generator, an open source project started by an Egyptian group.

Among the cool sessions were definitely the sessions on Spring Roo, Scala, Groovy, Sonar and an overview of JEE6.

The organizers had back up sessions ready and were able to replace two sessions in the last minute: Scala instead of Java Store and JPA 2.0 instead of Glassfish Clustering.

I’d like to thank the organizers and the speakers for this event; the notion of self organizing groups is becoming more meaningful in our field and hopefully in the whole country.

http://jdc2010.egjug.org

This month, I left my company, NetSignature, as a full timer at least. It’s very hard to write about this as I have mixed feelings about it. After all, I started with the company as a co-founder, the fourth partner, and second employee.

When I think about it, it feels like I’ve worked for 2 or 3 companies. The change hasn’t been only in geography (Madinet Nasr, then Tagammu then back to Madinet Nasr). The change has also been in the company vision, policies, target market(s), management, staff (at one point we even had celebrities working for us), and, yes, my role and involvement.

Anyway, I don’t regret going thru any of the many challenges during these (almost) four years. It feels good to have this experience in the bag. Nothing was wasted.

Now, I am focusing on a single project and intend to take it as far as it goes.

My next post will be all about my vision for this project and how I see it beneficial to people in our line of business, especially in the region.

Thank you and Salam