Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

If we outsource our Software Development , we can save considerable labor costs. For each USA based employee we can have 4 or 5 based on current ratios of India development resources. True, if the disparity between where the resources are currently located and where they will be outsourced to is large, you will save some personnel costs but is that the sole determinant whether it is a good idea or not?
Dispersing technology development/support (or operations) throughout the world has benefits besides cost and based on labor rate differentials. If you have a large enough inventory of sites to support that operate 24/7, having a team of System Administrators that overlap various timezones should improve the responsiveness when things inevitably go wrong. Also allows for system maintenance during the slow hours in whatever market the particular site has it’s lull. Also, you can smooth out the demand and supply imbalances in actual engineering resources that make acquiring engineering resources problematic regardless of what the pay scale is in certain markets.
On the other hand, if you are working in a domain that is subject to large amounts of uncertainty and market pressures in leap frogging features, what does a lower labor rate coupled with the latency inherent in time differences and maintaining context get you except 2nd , 3rd or further down in timely meeting the market need?
I have worked in situations where design is in the Eastern Time Zone and Web development on India time. A change in design would easily take 48 hour turnaround just to get the correct understanding of what the feature represented and how it fit into the rest of the product/design flow before anything could possibly be engineered. Given that Frontend Web development is relatively low technology this minimum latency is dysfunctional and has an attendant cost in frustration on the part of the involved product team including executive management as well as missed opportunities in the marketplace.

The aforementioned should not be cast as a criticism of engineering in India as those engineering teams are thrust into a position where success is not achievable.

Though I now find myself in Dublin, Ireland on my next leg of a two week trip to London and Ireland, I wanted to write a few more words around the Future of Web Application Conference (FOWA).
One of the most enjoyable though not educational aspects of the conference was the live filming of an installment of “Diggnation”. In the main auditorium in front of a standing room only audience, Kevin Rose and his sidekick Alex Albrecht (or maybe its the other way around) kept the crowd pumped,yelling and screaming with their adolescent politically incorrect banter while drinking whatever free beer was provided by the sponsors or fans.

Though I did not take an actual count, I suspect the audience as was the conference itself was about 95% male. The largest number between 20 and 29 years of age but there were 30 and 40 somethings as well to keep me from feeling anachronistic.

All and all, it was very interesting to be part of a group who truly believe they are re-making society and have that fleeting dream of becoming rich at the same time. It reminds me of the adolescent years and rock bands and thoughts of becoming the next Led Zeppelin or something similar. Now of course, behind all that facade it was just about finding and attracting girls. Sadly, the crowd at the Future of Web Applications hasn’t been as successful based on my visual survey of the scene.

Tags: FOWA, Future of Web Applications, Diggnation, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

Julio Miyares’s Twitter

Originally uploaded by julio.miyares

Twitter! Another one of those wacky Web sites - makes you wonder, do we just have too much time on our hands? Nevertheless like electronic gadgets, I am a sucker for these. I can enter simple communications of what I am doing at any point in time that all my friends (currently 2 on Twitter) can get immediate updates.

Well, now by linking to my Twitter profile in this blog entry, you will be able to search google such as “Julio Miyares drinking a martini” and immediately get my one-liners everytime I am drinking one. What is the true utility of this? I don’t truly know. Maybe I should get my kids to use it and send SMS messages of what they are doing so I can see. T

Anyone , become my Twitter friend. Here is the link to Julio Miyares’ Twitter home

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Twitter, Web 2.0

In my never ending quest to try out various social networking sites, I have been spending time with Julio Miyares Fotolog. This is one of the top photo sharing sites worldwide especially outside of the United States. It is more about blogging and sharing select photos then photo storage such as Flickr. That is an oversimplification both about Fotolog and Flickr but is a simple way to describe what each attempts to be.
Though I have not personally encountered such, Fotolog apparently has growing pains that cause site instability and frequent outages. Furthermore, in comparison to Flickr, appears to have a lack of many basic features such as Search and tagging.

Nevertheless , as the following link describes, Fotolog overtakes Flick , Fotolog is the 26th most popular site on the web compared to Flickr’s 39th place.

Makes you wonder what truly drives traffic to popular sites. Since the relative rankings of Fotolog to Flickr is surprising to me, I am going to continue to invest time in building up my Fotolog social network trying to discover the secret of it’s success.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Fotolog

Been a few weeks since I have been able to post a blog entry. Busy with work and kids and the host of administrative grunt activities that consume life. I have noticed in the few weeks since I have posted a blog entry that Google’s ranking of my blog when doing a vanity search has gone down. My dad also known as Julio Hernandez-Miyares, that i had totally eclipsed and relegated to the 2 or 3 page of results is making a strong comeback. Well, that is a call to action to me to stop that positive movement for him and negative for me. You see, this is a zero sum game. No room for more then one winner. 

In the never ending quest to get as much cross-linking as possible, I am adding a link to Naymz. This site appears to be designed to allow a person to aggregate the various sites where they have some manner of a profile ie LinkedIn, Yelp , Flick, etc. What the exact purpose I would use it for other then a place to consolidate the links to various sites I maintain a profile and hopefully by extension increase the rank of me when querying “Julio Miyares” , I don’t know.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, SEO

Downtown MiamiOriginally uploaded by julio.miyares.

Miami,Florida is booming. It may be the last thralls of a residential condo building boom nevertheless the changes in its skyline over the course of the past two years have been prodigious.
What is fueling this? Good weather, easy access to all things water related, no state tax, rich South Americans parking their money in safe investments within the USA.
I believe another fuel for growth if not presently but surely in the future will be as a gateway to cheap labor in the Caribbean especially around High Tech (Software Engineering) professionals.
I believe a wave of technology outsourcing to Latin American countries willgain momentum similar to the current wave of high tech outsourcing to China and India. Latin American countries will be helped by the fact they are “closer” at least in terms of timezones to the USA timezones.
Miami , given its cultural affinity to the rest of Latin America will be uniquely positioned to be the hub of many efforts large and small in accelerating high technology outsourcing to latin america.

Tags: Julio Hernandez Miyares, outsourcing

I have been involved in various outsourcing initiatives over the course of the past two years. The concentration have been in Bangalore , India where I have visited 6 times helping to setup teams concentrating in Search and Web Portal development.
I have been impressed (though not surprised) with the level of sophistication, technical competence and drive of the individuals I hae interacted with during my various stints in India.
There are a number of challenges that are fixed with respect to outsourcing in India. The almost 8,500 mile distance between the Eastern USA and India and the 10.5 hour time differential. Though those obstacles can be overcome to an extent through various techniques, they are still immutable and present a fixed cost that chip away at the cost differential between USA and India based software engineers. For those primary reasons I am investigating outsourcing options closer to home.
BusinessWeek Outsourcing Article

Tags: Julio Hernandez Miyares, Jittr, outsourcing

Its getting close! The big moment. The moment I have been waiting for who knows how long! Going off on my own , taking the plunge, not having to work for some idiot or bunch of idiots, instead working for this idiot (me).

Of course the initiative will center around technology at least from my prespective and Social Networking and Web 2.0 in particular though for the hell of it , I am calling it Web 3.0 for now as the preceding terms have become ? at this point.

The company is product driven as I am going in partnership with one of the best Product Managers if not the best I have ever worked with. I would be the CTO of the company which shows you what’s in a title.
Without revealing anything; not that it matters as no one but me reads my blog , the product beta is set for October 30, 2006 in time for the Christmas season. All will be revealed soon! Hopefully some of you will be receiving beta invitations. Just send an email to me through this blog if you wish to be included.

Much excitement in the air around the idea and its practical and non-practical uses.

The following is the link to the company site. Not yet formally established but hopefully soon if I can get my partner and friend to move on that front. Perhaps I should just do it on my own.

Jittr

The bottom line is the difficulty in getting your “own thing” started is getting it started especially when you are collaborating with someone. Its seems that inertia is cumulative and instead of moving quicker with the more people you have, the harder it is to gain momemtum. I guess that is naturally understood by anyone that has worked in a bloated bureacracy as I have but I did not expect that in an enterprise of two individuals.

Well, bottom line is I’m in it now either in a group or by myself. My days working for “the man” are over and if that is not exactly how the future ends up , I can just come back here and delete this post and leave no evidence of my hubris.

Tags: Jittr, Julio Hernandez-Miyares, John Rabasa