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What you have landed on, possibly inadvertently, is the website of a certain curious character a.k.a Nigel Fernandes
The aim of this page was to serve as a landing point for those of you who want to know a little more about me. The links on the right and left will take you deeper my world, or possibly on to different exciting things.
Its a big web out there and this is just one more street for you to saunter down. I hope you like it.
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About Me
- Name: Nigel Fernandes
- Location: Panjim, Goa, India
Crazy, dancing, programming, Goan.. I'm a computer geek and proud to be one. I program in Java, Ruby and .Net, PHP, Javascript. A lot of my recent work has been about CSS and UI design practices for large scale websites and Agile teams. I still while away hours dreaming up a web startup.
Microsoft's Popfly quietly rolls into open Beta. Bring on the mash up wars.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Microsoft's answer to Yahoo's Pipes mash up platform, Popfly quietly rolled into an "open for all" Beta on October 18th.After a relatively well covered launch in May, Popfly (originally code named Springfield ) has flown quite under the radar, much like Yahoo Pipes, which has only recently begun to come out of its shell.
I have yet to see widespread use or even hype concerning Pipes. Thats a shame really, because I thought it was a really brilliant offering. Even more exciting was the vision the creators of Pipes shared in this video lecture at Google.Also interesting is that Yahoo seems all ready for a battle, and looks like they will be rolling out some more bells and whistles sometime today. (looks like they tried to get it out closer to the Popfly Beta, on the 19th, but that did not go as planned).
I really believe, like Douglas Crockford, that mash ups are probably one of the most exciting directions the web is taking in recent times. If your a developer and even if your not, customizing the way the web works has enormous allure.
Google's not out of this one either but in my opinion, they have chosen a rather different strategey.
However probably the most interesting thing about Popfly, is that they seem to focusing at least party of their energy on the social network phenomenon sweeping the web world. That could potentially really help drive adoption, but no signs of any real intent in this direction from Pipes (Google's looking at it in more than just the Orkut way) .
I wonder if Popfly will have something in the kitty for Microsoft's forgotten child Wallop.
Labels: mash up wars, Microsoft Popfly, Yahoo Pipes
Thinking of expanding your business with Facebook?
Everyone wants to get onto the Facebook band wagon these days, and why not. Given the amount of user traffic, the trends towards developer API's, and the sheer hype involved with not just Facebook but most major social networks today, this kind of thinking is pretty valid.So if you are in/part of/a founder of, a business venture/website thinking of expanding onto the social network platform (and not just Facebook) here are a bunch of videos from fairly recent Graphing Social Patterns Conference. Pay special note the discussion panel on Viral Strategy.
Another couple of sites I find particularly worth a read when trying to get up to speed with the world of Social networks are Inside Facebook & Face Reviews , sites which style themselves as a review websites for Facebook applications, but actually cover quite a bit more.
P.S. For those of you who regularly watch the wheelings and dealings of the hiring world, you might be intrigued to know that even Google is being hit by Facebook's lure.
Labels: Facebook, Social Networks
Facebook goes down. App makers be warned.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Interesting. Close on the heels of a Flickr outage some weeks back, we have another high profile site going down unexpectedly.
Facebook at the time of writing this post is currently unavailable. I checked their blog and my emails, and there's absolutely nop notifications.
At this point I can't help but think, that all those people trying to build a business from on Facebook Applications must be nervously watching their traffic. Funny thing about dependence on a social networking site is that if they go down, you go down too. Maybe you could ease your pain abit if your product actually works across several social networks. But until Orkut releases its external API (November 5th?), and MySpace decides to change a big part of how they work, lets agree on one thing.
As one of the panel members in this video taken at the Graphing Social Networks conference notes..
Its not a wise idea to build a business on top of Facebook.
BarCampMumbai2 was ok.. on to CodeCamp?
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
About a month or so ago, I was in IIT Powai, for BarCampMumbai2. So while this post has been rather delayed due to sitting in my drafts folder for really long (looks like I'm not alone in this either :-) ), I've finally got it out there.I've been a regular at several of such camps over the last one year. Barcamp Pune 2 and 3, BlogCampPune, and more...
So anyways here in a word is my 2 cents on what the experience was. Disappointing.
There were way to few developers present. Of the few that were there, some were just the downright annoying kind who come to BarCamp to show the world how (over)smart they are. The kind who try and hijack every session with stupid questions and rubbish points of view really.
This particular BarCamp had a lot of entrepreneurship themed sessions, and from that angle I think the camp out was a success. There were several people from the whole VC + founders strata worth talking too. Mahesh Murthy was there, and some folks from Sun's Startup Essesntials program (who were also sponsors). So good news if you had a business idea you wanted to flesh out or get trashed about.
Next up... CodeCamp in Pune ;-)
Labels: BarCampPune2 BarCamps
Test Engineering Lecture at P.C.C.E.
For my alma mater's tech festival Blitzkrieg 2007, I was invited by Mr. Olavo D'Souza, a senior faculty member, to give a technical presentation. On his request, the topic was Test Engineering with Selenium.
I thought I'd upload the slides of the talk and for those interested you can download if off Slideshare here. However since a large part of the talk was a live demo of a Selenium based test in IE and Firefox using Selenium RC and PHPUnit3, the slide show really isn't much.
Anyways, the tech festival was a small scale affair and rather disappointing in the level of participation form the senior students. But I'm really looking forward to getting more involved with some of the students. More interestingly, a friend of mine from ThoughtWorks is now employed at P.C.C.E. as a lecturer. Working a little closer with Anay Kamat as well as Mr. Olavo will be one the ways I hope to repay the college for the base it has given me.
Labels: Blitzkrieg, Lectures, PCCE, Selenium