Fabio Akita
Who’s Fabio Akita?
I’ve been both a project manager for 7 years and software developer and architect for more than 10 years now. I am currently a Ruby on Rails Activist although I consider myself pretty technology agnostic and I am always interested in the bleeding edge. I advocate the Agile philosophy and I created the Rails Summit conference, the first really big Ruby conference in Brazil.
Do you have a Brand?
I think that would be AkitaOnRails, both my personal blog and a place to talk about Ruby on Rails, Management, Agility and other technology stuff.
How do you choose the idea and the colors in any new project?
It’s pretty much the good old open source way: scratch my own itch is usually the starting point. When I am working for some company, of course it’s the client’s choice and even then there’s opportunities to jump into some sub-project with new technologies or techniques.
What does your typical day look like?
As I am currently on a management role, there are the usual stuff: dealing with boring corporativism and other occupational hazards like that come with the deal. Luckily I get to know great developers and thinkers and I am always striving to learn more.
What are the tools you couldn’t live without?
Definitely I can’t live without my Macbook Pro. I also really depend on my iPhone for e-mailing on the go. It’s very hard to find time to just sit down for a few hours during work hours nowadays so having a mobile device that gives me access to my online stuff is really important.
What do you do in your free time?
Study, study, study. Oh, and considering that “free-time” means any small interval between meetings and hours late at night. I read a lot, both about new technologies, techniques and also about management stuff. I like to find out new open source projects popping up and testing them to learn its capabilities and understand where I can use them in the future.
Current favorite apps?
I like to test new web browsers as I spend a lot of time reading online. I like Firefox, Chrome but I still didn’t find anything compelling enough to steer me away from Safari. On the development side, specifically about Ruby programming, my current best tool would be RVM which allows me to have multiple Ruby implementations installed side-by-side. Other than that, I like Tweetie a lot for tweeting and Evernote to organize my research.
What OSs do you prefer?
In the desktop Mac OS X Snow Leopard, by far. In the server side, always Debian.
Small pic for your Wokrplace ?
Favorite: Colors, Font, Languages (PHP, Ruby), JS Framework ?
My favorite color is Red. My favorite typeface would be Helvetica. About my favorite language, I will be biased, of course, but definitely Ruby. And for JS framework JQuery.
The things or source that inspired you ?
There is no single source, I skim over nearly a thousand items from my Google Reader everyday. Add that to dozens of tweets from influential people I follow. Then I also listen to lots of audiobooks and read many books all the time, so inspiration comes from many sources.
What’s do you prefer, the freelance work or the full time employee?
I’ve seen both sides, and both have advantages and disadvantages, so one choice is not necessarily better than the other. Freelancing gives me much more freedom and opportunities, but also makes me worry more about my finances. Full time employment “feels” economically safer but most companies still nurtures a culture of workplace bullying that I find quite annoying. But I think freelancing wins.
Your personnel projects and goals for 2010?
I’m really not the kind of person that does long term planning 
But of course I condone that. Right now, I expect to keep on doing what I like the most: having opportunities to learn more, to meet insightful people, and work on exciting projects. Also to drop anything that annoys me for too long. At the technical side, I expect to learn more new languages such as Go, Scala, Clojure and experiment more with NOSQL technologies.
But of course I condone that. Right now, I expect to keep on doing what I like the most: having opportunities to learn more, to meet insightful people, and work on exciting projects. Also to drop anything that annoys me for too long. At the technical side, I expect to learn more new languages such as Go, Scala, Clojure and experiment more with NOSQL technologies.
