I’m currently fascinated with GitLab’s handbooks. I heard of companies trying to be more open to the public, but the extent that GitLab is doing is unprecedented. They are documenting everything publicly. Most, if not all, internal processes are getting written for everyone to see.

• How we admit new people? It’s there.
• How and when do employees are bonuses? It’s there too.
• What is the ERP used? It’s there.
• In fact, what is the whole list of external software and service used? It’s there too.
• The scripts used to manage their own site? They are there too.
• Personal information, like employees’ actual salaries? Of course, they are not there.

Too much information? Maybe. But it’s definitively inspiring.

Another source of personal inspiration comes from a guy on Twitter: Keijiro Takahashi. This Japanese programmer does several mini-tools for himself but publishes everything on GitHub with minimalist licenses like MIT.

In contrast, I was checking my LinkedIn the other day when I decided to share my GitLab and GitHub accounts. There are so many projects over there. #ButNot. Most, almost all, were private! Many game prototypes, and small side projects. All locked. Some are live backups since are not been updated for ages. So I decided to do a couple of things:

1. Open some of the closed projects
2. Git-fy some of my personal and professional projects
3. Documentation as code for my new company

The first is pretty straightforward. Mostly checking a box. Sometimes adding small README or LICENSE files. Few times making real changes.

The second is a new mindset: I have dozens of small projects, from games to personal scripts, that I’ve never used git to track changes. But not only I could get better control of it, but also I could share it with the world. You will see more and more projects popping up on my GitLab account page.

The third, follow partially GitLab’s way. I’m considering documenting most of the processes in git-like wikis. It will not only be good to share the knowledge with other employees and partners. It’s also good for tracking the business decisions that changed these processes. A rather clever approach.

Can you prove what you claim?

Do you fully trust the media, banks, or advertisements? I bet you don’t. And you shouldn’t. Not blindly. Trusting is a very delicate matter.

By living in a society you are required to trust other people. That’s the way to share the responsibilities. Each individual does a thing for another. You simply have to give a bit of trust in others. If not if we should trust, the problem lies in how.

Source of Trust

The primary source of trust is the individuals themselves. You gain trust by living and presenting reliable results. It takes time.

Governments, on the other hand, use the power of law to reinforce what they want to be believed. They issue money, and certificates, documents and they all MUST be accepted as they were the truth. What makes you believe that a $100 bill is worth the $100? Simple: the law says it so!

If you need to be trusted but do not have the time to gain it organically nor cannot “fabricate” the trust? The solution lies on an already trusted third party vouching, a…

Certification

Someone that you trust can vouch, and give their word, for another one. That works like a web of trust. I trust my mom, that trusts her old friend. So, I might trust her too.

Language and professional certifications are the most common form. Several institutes, for a very diverse range of fields, can issue a certificate saying that you are good as you claim. Proficiency in Mandarin? Project management? Someone can certify that you master it.

Double Agent

Certification agents must be impartial, and indifferent to your success derived from the certification, otherwise, they might be incentivized to lie for you. It breaks the whole point of the certification as source of the trust.

• Accounting firms hired to validate a client company’s financial health might be interested in lying. The at-the-time famous Arthur Andersen participated in a giant fraud stating that its client’s, Enron, finances were ok. Enron bankrupted months later and AA was suited and had to split into two companies.
• The 2008 financial crisis also can be attributed to rating companies, which stated that several risky bonds were good and risk-free. They help clients to sell them to others, profiting from lying.
• Some colleges graduate their students even when they have really bad grades. Flooding the market with awful professionals, it becomes impossible to assert which one is good and which one is bad.

There are several good certification institutes. But these authorities have to be constantly monitored. Also, their processes have to be constantly certified, creating a big process of checks and balances.

It’s a worthwhile initiative for the whole of society.

This post was originally written on 2015-11-05. But was in draft mode by mistake for all these years.

As a programmer and businessman, I try to organize the world. So, I created a unified Rating page consolidating all reviews that I did. Games, board games, books, movies, and TV shows.

For a few of them, I wrote a full blog post. But most of I did not. That was driving me crazy. I often mention the same games/movies on multiple posts. When it happens to a piece of art that I did not previously review, I felt pressure to do so. I even might do so, but now it’s not required anymore. Now the non-reviewed-but-rated are properly acknowledged. And I shall have consistency.

I’m going to scan, in the next few days, all previous blog posts to cross reference, but the main step was done.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Also, in a similar vein to the previous post, Rating Art, I decided to give my ratings a more visual appeal. For now, besides the numeric 0-10 rating, it will show the according to the number of stars.

What a surprise! After playing several Ubisoft open-world games lately, I was expecting another result of a generic and repetitive side quest generator with a superficial storyline over it.

I was a bit reluctant to start WD2. I read that the original title was overpromised and under-delivered. The second one flew on my radar at the time. Recently I got it through the Epic free game initiative. Then I read some reviews and comments from the launch time and there were good ones. So I decided to check it out. Not without flaws, I enjoyed the time, the story, and the gameplay.

Likable Protagonist

Far Cry 3 presented the very iconic and infinite memerable villain Vaas Montenegro. However, the Ubisoft writing team struggles to create memorable protagonists. I cannot name a single great protagonist in Far Cry and most Assassin’s Creed (old and new entries) are plain boring. AC3’s Ezio Salvatore da Firenze is the top of mind. AS Odyssey’s Kassandra was nice, despite being put in a split role with her unnecessary male version Alexios.

The player spends hours living the life of another person that she/he cares so little about. It’s sad really.

Marcus Holloway is a new entry on the likable protagonist list. Optimist, clever and lighthearted. His motivations seem reasonable and believable. However, there is a cognitive dissonance playing Marcus as an armed gangster, shooting at police and mob armies. From start to finish, all cutscenes present him, as well the other members of the DedSec crew, as non-violent watchdogs. People that fight to preserve individual liberties and respect life and diversity. Using machine guns to kill everybody on site feels wrong. I tried to play as much as possible in the way I understood the character: low profile, clever hacker.

For the rest of the crew, it’s a mixed bag. The only one that will definitively stick in my mind is the masked engineer Wrench. Horatio, the guy that works on Goog… Nudle becomes relevant. The rest is the rest.

For villains and NPCs, none are worth mentioning. The main villain, Dušan, is both an idiot and annoying.

References

The hacker theme is presented as the usual Hollywood cliché. Type furiously into the notebook and any bank account in the world is yours!

However, the overall universe is set using several references to popular culture. Movies, music, and video games are often mentioned by characters. Some are more obscure, but most of the time these references are more common sense. For those that know them, they are quite fun. For those that do not, is an exotic flavor.

Some references are less subtle: There is a search engine and maps company called Nudle. A rocket launcher Galilei commanded by a millionaire much like SpaceX. I linked the main villain company, Blume, as Microsoft, but it’s my own thing.

Watch Dogs 2 does not take the story and theme too seriously. There is even a good dose of self-mockery about being a hacker/programmer. It’s not like FarCry’s Blood Dragon over-the-topness. WD2 translates complex problems into smaller bites to make them more accessible and fun to a broad audience.

Gameplay

As I said before, it is possible to be Rambo and shoot everybody. Like GTA, you will attract police attention and will die, respawn and try again. But I feel that is not the way it’s meant to be played™. Harder, but more satisfying, is avoiding direct conflict and using gadgets and powers to sneak. The same could be said for old Assassin’s Creed games (the new ones embrace direct combat as pillars).

The hacking abilities are more useful for small interventions, like distracting guards, than creating mayhem. Hacking citizens’ phones in the streets are fun for 10 minutes, then becomes quite useless. Event robbing their bank accounts, money in general, becomes irrelevant mid-game, after upgrading Marcus’ drones.

Most puzzles are repetitive, but fun mini-game.

In the end, the core mechanics are solid. Open-world games tend to be repetitive, but WD2 scrambles the same basic mechanics offering variety.

Less than a couple of months after I got certified as a Project Manager, I decided to invest in an area that I was not fully confident that I know the stuff: defining cloud architecture. I started to create, develop and manage cloud systems in just the past 5 years or so, and it evolved super rapidly.

So, applying for a such certification would require extra study on my part. There were areas that I definitively do not grasp, such as networking and many Kubernetes corners. I decided to go with my beloved Coursera. I did a couple of free and paid courses there and I love it. Also, it which was the official training platform for Google products and services. Google itself design the courses and its employees that teach them. So there is some comfort.

The course is very practical. They provide a demo but real user to allow students to act in a Google Cloud environment for real. So one interacts, creates, updates, and deletes real things. It’s a major factor. Hands-on baby!

I went to the examination and was much more relaxed. They were as much as professional as the PMI guys but more relaxed and humane. I passed.

I learned a lot for sure. It will help me in future and current projects. Even being Google Cloud-focused, it addressed many of the issues of a generic cloud architect in any provider.

I can assure you I can handle the job. From computing, serverless, storage, and, yes, networking, I’m pretty confident I can design a better pretty cost-efficient solution than before. In the evolving cloud business, as long I keep updated, it’s a new passion that I am so excited about.