Our Geek Space

What do users really need? That’s the question any software developer should ask themselves.

Here at moove-it, we always put ourselves in our clients shoes to understand their needs and give them exactly what they are looking for. In order to do so we’ve created the UX Department.

From the moment we started gathering up to discuss latest design patterns and the top UX tendencies, we knew something great would come out of it, and so it did. We managed to nurture the whole team with what we’ve learned, improve existing products and enhance new projects’s design from scratch.
We’ll keep working as hard as possible on UX, not only because of how thrilled we’ve got with the results, but also because the way the users feel the product is what matters most.

We present partial conclusions found by the UX group. We share the presentation (in spanish)

Last Saturday a group of brave Moovetians decided to accept the challenge and run the Nike 10K competition.

Nike 10K consist in running 10 kms along the coastline through some Montevideo’s neighborhoods enjoying the beautiful landscape.

Take a look at the pictures.

The whole team 

Silvana, Martin and Nicolas

Ariel before breaking the finish ribbon  :-P

Bird´s eye view

We are sponsoring one of the greatest technology events here in Uruguay. The Second RubyConf taking place within less than two weeks, the 11th and 12th November 2011, where many IT experts from all over the world get together in order to be immersed in this dynamic world and and up to date get with the latest trends of Ruby and Agile methodologies.

RubyConf Uruguay 2011

We are hungry for knowledge and refreshment, and we all want to be on the same train.

Please welcome all the new members to this awesome community. And help spreading the news, but even more important, do not miss the opportunity to meet the experts, discuss the future of RoR, and be Rail!

Our main tradition, heritage and passion: The beat of the “Uruguayan” drums.

It doesn’t matter if you listen to the drums once a month, everyday, or once a year.  When it comes to local music, there is nothing more Uruguayan than the sound produced by rhythmically striking a drum, and especially when playing Candombe, a unique way of percussion, which will make your hair stand on its end.

Team building activities can range from treasure hunts to Safari trips, though this time, we have decided to do one which people could easily identify with, and which does not require sophisticated skills, but the desire to unwind, switch off and connect. Drumming workshops come first, the bonding is just a consequence.

Last week we had our first percussion workshop. Pablo Leites, an excellent musician and percussionist, also known as “Gancho” has been our instructor.  He has also been Martin Cabrera’s (Moove-IT cofounder) best friend for a long time.

Please have a look at the following pictures…

Why percussion

Why is percussion so important to us? Being a country of immigrants, Uruguay was formed by people from all over the world. And like it always happens, music has played a tremendous positive role in bringing people together and creating stronger, more significant bonds. We connect with our basic instincts, we forget about language barriers, cultural differences, rank, and we just let ourselves feel and relax.  Just listen to a few strikes and you will feel multicolor, ageless and energized.

You may have heard of Las Llamadas (The Callings), a popular annual event during Carnival here in Uruguay, which gathers thousands of people from all over the world. The drums are the main stars, and the African music roots brought by the people once made slaves in this country (and happily freed more than 150 years ago) are now our truly genuine and local music.

I personally love this rhythm, and even though I am not a music expert I will recognize its pace wherever I go. I am not sure if it is the adrenaline than runs through your body, or the inseparable link to human nature, but percussion makes your body shake, like toddlers instinctively struggling to move their bodies to the rhythm of the music.

Team Building !!

For part one, click here…

What do they have in common and what makes them different?

Even though it’s hard to come up with a comparison table between all four alternatives, mainly because I can’t claim to have personal experience with all of them, the Internet has a lot of information on the subject, so I went ahead and did a bit of research on the matter.

Another point of interest to consider is that though on the long run, all four solutions provide very similar services; they do it a bit differently, since they can be categorized into two places:

• Full text search servers: They provide a finished solution, ready for the developers to install and interact with. You don’t have to integrate them into your application; you only have to interact with them. In here we have Solr and Sphinx.
• Full text search APIs: They provide the functionalities needed by the developer, but at a lower level. You’ll need to integrate these APIs into your application, instead of just consuming it’s services through a standard interface (like what happens with the servers). In here, we have the Lucene Project and the Xapian project.

Taking all of this into account, we can now proceed into a more in-depth discussion about our options:

Continue reading…

Today I want to write about Sebastian Borrazas and the programming contest he is taking part in.

Sebastian Borrazas is a talented developer, member of an exclusive group of developers which makes Moove-IT a big company – I’m not talking about quantity, I’m talking about greatness -.

Last week, he together with his team, won the Programming Contest organized annually by the ORT University of Montevideo, Uruguay.

The contest was basically about Programming Algorithms and Algorithm Design Techniques. Each group of contestants had to apply techniques like Backtracking, Dynamic programming, Divide & Conquer, Knapsack, Dijkstra, etc.

The challenge was clear: to successfully do the greatest number of exercises in no more than 4 hours. Then the jury would evaluate the execution time of the Algorithm and have a winner.

Next step will be to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina on November 5 to take part in the regionals. This will be hard. More than 500 teams from all over Latin America will be there too.

We are very proud to have Sebastian as our Geek Ambassador in this contest!

Good luck Moovetiano!

When it comes to data storage and data handling, we developers, are quite used to working with database engines (MySQL, Oracle, SQLite, etc) and database query languages.

Depending on the application being developed, one of these solutions can be more than enough to meet our needs and that is what we usually end up using.

But there are times, when the amount of information to be handled is so big (we’re talking about millions of rows of information) and the needed response times are so low (we’re talking about a few milliseconds time) that we need solutions designed specifically for searching large amount of information instead of generic data handling ones.

Continue reading…

We share some pictures …

We have been to the top 10 places to visit in the US. From a business perspective, Silicon Valley is the place to go. We share the same passion as the area of the world’s largest technology corporations and high-tech firms: Great Ruby on Rails design & development work. Outsourcing has never been so much fun here in Uruguay. And now our Schools friends are wearing Moove-IT shirts, so we are virtually present—though also planning to re- meet in the flesh soon…

Thanks to Howard Kao, Lane Lillquist, Michael Staton, Nick Punt, and Daniel Jabbour from Inigral!

From South America with love, working offshore