SOFTWARE ENGINEERING blog & .lessons_learned
manuel aldana
Manuel Aldana

IT-Skills

Personal Guidelines

Hard to reduce myself to a bullet-point list, but here we go:

  • Be Passionate. Be Curios. Have Fun.
  • Technology is NOT a solution by itself
  • Cause => Effect
  • Results are important
  • Agility = Discipline != Chaos
  • Embrace Change
  • Embrace Failure
  • Technology < Process < People

Special-Interest: Software Evolution

The core challenge of building Systems is coping with change and failure. Getting out version 1.0 can be tough, but the “real magic and skill” is shown on how you keep up with next requirements or influences when the baby is out the door. This Software Evolution aspect is happening on many areas/levels: team/company-organization, external stakeholders, growing usage of system, legacy technology, refactorings, system-build/deployment, introducing risk by changing your system… you name it. All these bigger-picture success-factors teach me new lessons everyday.

Publications

Practical experience, work-places

Following list is a rough overview of practical hands-on work experience. Private projects, open-source or too minor scoped projects are excluded. Just contact me if you want to have further details (e.g. written references).

Student management system (Oct. 04 -> March 05)

Related to a university course, a prototype of student-management for software-engineering faculty got created. It was a system creation from scratch involving whole (iterative) cycle of analysis, design, implementation and test.

SOA project at Vattenfall (Oct. 05 -> Feb. 06)

Analysis of processes of the domain ‘Regionalstruktur’ inside Vattenfall AG company. Working out a solution how to overcome internal complexity with shared services from technical and organizational point of view (SOA-governance).

Fraunhofer institute (FOKUS), (July 06 -> Feb. 07)

Implementation of Adobe Acrobat Plugin, which makes transfer and digital signature of PDF documents possible. Used protocol/standard was OSCI technically based on encryption/signatures standards and SOAP. Project of e-Government lab initiative from Fraunhofer FOKUS institute. Connected topic with diploma thesis.

IVU (Sep. 05 -> Oct. 06)

Employment as a student for company IVU Traffic Technologies AG, which is a supplier of IT Systems mainly for transport and logistic processes. Assignment in the area of software quality assurance for a standard software system for public transport.

gematik (Jan. 07 -> Sept. 08)

Employment as a software engineer for company gematik mbH, which is responsible for introduction, advancement and maintenance of german’s electronic health card (eGK) and its interrelated telematics infrastructure. Assignment as a software engineer with main focus on design, development and enforcing software quality.

Dependency-Analyzer, Open-Source project (Dec. 07 -> June 09)

Tool to analyze the complexitiy of maven2 related dependencies and graphical display of the maven dependency graph. Due to limited time to work on this project and orientation different software development areas, this work has stopped.

eBay Kleinanzeigen, formerly Kijiji (Sept. 08 -> current)

Employment as a software engineer for eBay, specifically for local classifieds part. Started to develop for the global platform (in many countries branded as Kijiji or Gumtree) including international work setup with China and California. Since 05/09 developing on the new local classifieds platform eBay Kleinanzeigen custom made for Germany.