Looking for a new Job: the experience

Hi.

On this post I've said that I was joining a great team and that I was really excited about it; I did meant that but unfortunately this journey came to an end on Feb/1/2013 when my contract was not renewed after the latest corporate acquisitions round.

In this post I'll describe the process I took to find a new job, but first lets make things as clear as possible:

1. I am not an HR expert (far from it, I'd rather say I am a complete newbie on the subject), so take every world with a whole mountain of salt ;)
2. yes, I did follow most, if not all, of the presented advice.

Perhaps the most important advice (and probably the hardest to follow) is: don't panic! I know that it is easier to say than to do (I've been there, remember ?), but try to keep calm and review your options carefully.

The first thing you need is to realize that 

Looking for a new job is a full time job!

It may look like restating the obvious but I haven't realized how much time it may take! So, be prepared to dedicate a lot of time to this phase (fortunately, job wise I hadn't much else to do :).

My first step was to create a list of requirements/constraints for the new job, sorted by importance; you should take into account aspects such as compensation package, relocation, type of work, etc. Depending on your constraints it'll take longer to find your new dream job.

In my case the list looked something like:

1. It had to be fun and challenge.
2. The company  I'd work for should at least recognize and be committed to implement/use good development practices (TDD, continuous building, pair programming, etc).
3. Compensation should be closer to or higher than what I was earning before.
4. Work from home if possible.
5. Avoid relocation.

Soon after I come up with this list I started to suffer from the ROOR (Running out of resources ;) syndrome - for reasons that are not important to explain here I had almost no savings... :(.

At this point you really need to think about what you want, review your requirements list and refrain from accepting the first (or second, third, whatever) job offer you may get only because you are running out of money. 

Of course there is a hard deadline and you can't wait indefinitely  in my case I strove to get at least 4 ~ 5 job offers before taking a decision. More importantly than the number, was the quality of the offers; there was one in particular that I was really interested in so I discussed with my wife and we decided we'd squeeze as much as possible from our small savings and would try to allow me 1 ~ 2 more months before taking the decision (while I was waiting for the interviews to come I took the time to experiment with something new, but related to my field of interest). 

After some time the interviews started to come and suddenly I had participated in 3 ~ 4 of them, some in the traditional sense of the word and some virtual interviews (through skype / phone).

Some notes from these interviews (process wise):

• Never forget that interviews are a two lane road: you are not the only that is being interviewed! You should also be evaluating the company in question.
• Don't be afraid of challenges! Instead, use them as a motivation to you to learn and improve.
• Be humble but not shy. Do not put yourself in the position of someone that is reluctant to disagree because you are afraid of not getting an offer: be yourself.
  
  
• Be prepared to face ridiculous, unrealistic job skill set requirements / compensation packs. Just keep the professionalism.
  
  
• Show enthusiasm; would you hire a candidate that looks (and behaves) apathetic in an interview?
  
  
• Even if, in the middle of the interview, you've already made your mind and you don't plan to accept a (possible) job offer, keep the professionalism.

Fun fact: there was 2 situations that I found very strange: in one of the interviews I was asked absolutely no technical questions (at least none that I think would be able to assess my ability to do the job) and in another one the interviewer sold the company in question as the best company in the world but said that they could not get good developers to join them, hum... (guess what? I discarded both of them). 

When you finally get a job don't forget to get back to any pending job offer and let them know you are not available anymore.

Hope this was helpful.

I love my job ;)

I am so proud of being part of the team behind Unity (even if my contributions so far are really a tinny part of it - almost nothing ;)

I've joined Unity team 5 months ago and everyday I get impressed by how much they have achieved already.

Sure, as any other job, it has its "this task sucks" moments but most of the time I'm having fun and learning new stuff (and the developers / team mates are really supportive).

Thanks all for the opportunity. I am really happy working with such great people.

Happy codding.

The end of the world is approaching...

Hi

First of all, Happy new year! :)

Last night I was surprised (upset?) for getting an offer (that I could not refuse) from a well know web site (which I like pretty much, by the way) claiming that that was my last chance to subscribe to their 1 month free premium plan.

I have absolutely no problem with the offer. What gets on my nerves is the fact that they have been sending  this very same offer for the past 6 ~ 9 months, saying each time that that was my last chance. 

Come on guys. You should already have noticed that I even went to your website and started the registration process.... you should ask yourselves why I did not finished it, instead of keeping bugging me ;)

See you!

Modern times

When I was a child (not so long ago :) I used to turn on the TV and wait for some time until it warmed up (ok, don't laugh). Exactly, it was a B&W valved tube tv.

Then, at my adolescence, my father bought us a new, shine, top technology color TV; it did not used valves any more and as a result live became better (not only I could turn the TV on and start watching my favorite programs instantaneously - or play video game - but now it had colors!!

Some more time passed (just a few years) and we fast forward to current days.

Now, after a long working day, leaving my office and walking 3 meters, I take a seat in front of my shine new, 51", full hd, 3D plasma TV, turn it on and... it takes 10 ~ 20 seconds to start displaying any interesting content (sure the TV maker logo appears in less than 5 secs but it is not that interesting any more)! What? Are we retrogressing ?

I really don't care if these TVs are actually computers... please tv makers, do it right! make it "boot" instantaneously, don't make me wait. I can foresee how the TVs ads will look like in the near future:

you do need to have this flub glob shob TV! It has more features than a computer scientist with a PHD is able to handle and it starts in (put some low number here) seconds!

What will be the next step? getting BSODs (calm down *nix fan boys I did not forget you ;) or Core dumps while watching TV?

You may think I'm kidding about the BSOD stuff, but I am not; for sure my cable TV setupbox already "implemented" this feature (the only deviation from the original BSOD is that you get absolutely no feedback so you are left wondering what happened and the only option is to restart it (hopping it fixes the problem); seriously, it is so crap that sometimes I need to restart it multiple times to get it working again (the cable tv support staff is so used to these issues that the first thing they ask you is to reset the setupbox :m ).

What do you think?

Project deployed

Hi


In the latest days I've been really busy with the deployment of the project formerly known as "baby 2.0" (by the way, the official project name is Gabriela). 


Last Thursday (May, 6) my daughter was born with 4.1 Kg and 52 cm. Of course my whole family if very happy and I an my wife are very proud :)


Following you can see some pictures of her:

 

   

That's it for now (I'm gonna to sleep :))

Best

Adriano

I am not dead. Not yet

Warning: Personal content ahead

I can hear someone screaming already: but it really looked like you have died! :)

Well, you know, I have been having to much work fun lately.

Also, more or less 7 months ago, I and my wife decided to start a new project, daughter 2.0, and since then we have been working hard to get the environment ready to the deployment (there are too many details in such projects deployment). 

At this stage we can say that the project is growing as expected and that we are looking forward to the deployment date.

As always we expect the maintenance phase to consume much more time/resources than the development phase, but we are more than willing to do the required investment so the project will be able to meet its goals; after all, this is our baby :).

Last but not least, as you can see, I am actually alive :). So, bear with me! As soon as I get some spare time I'll do some more posts!

Good to get back to posting!

See you all.

On test writing discipline and gains

Hi.

Let's start this post with the usual disclaimers :). Actually, I have only one: Everything discussed here is related to my own experiences with unit testing and/or TDD in the last years.

In fact, I have been in contact with some sort of more formal testing procedures for some time now; in the early days it was more a desperate act trying to avoid SDD (sorry if I use potentially valid acronyms here), i.e, 'Shame Driven Development'. Since most of my code have no tests at all (other than the usual driver application that covered only the changes being applyied at the moment), it was not uncommon to have some developer, tester or even final users approaching me and complaining about some broken feature in a just released version of the module I've worked on (whence the shame). Of course the usual problems of lacking good tests were plain visible: resistance to refactor / change code, lack of confidence whether a piece of code was good enough or not, no sensible metric to declare completeness, regressions all over the place, etc.)

After understanding (thanks to my coach :) the importance of having a well developed ( one that values readability, maintainability, expressiveness, in the sense of making clear test intents, completeness, etc) test suite, finding the time and motivation to write such tests became easier. Even though understanding the benefits of having such tests, the urge to get something working, and so that it could be shown (to managers, clients, whoever), made me tempted to skip the test writing (remember, I haven't get into the TDD mind set yet, so tests were seen as a post development phase).

In these early days, most of my teammates had little or no idea of the concept of unit testing and it was hard to convice them that it worths the time dedicated to write such tests. Anyway, sometimes I took the burden upon myself and wrote unit tests (even though no time was allocated to that). Of course everybody noticed that my code was less buggy and that I was less concerned aboud changing it :)

Some years have passed and even though doing my best to start my coding sessions with a test I must admit that I am not a TDD practitioner yet, at least not in the strict sense of the definition. This becomes clear when it comes to my personal projects: most of them have no tests at all :(.

But thanks to some embarrassing episodes (related to one of these personal projects) (and to my coach :) I had finally decided to do "the right thing^(tm)" and I am writing the tests I should have writen long before :) (guess what, I've already found hidden bugs). I am even using a nice mock library for .Net called Moq.

Of course I am starting to see the pays off of pursuing this goal :)

Best regards (and have fun!)

Adriano

Another day in a developer's life....

Yesterday was a frustrating day.
By the morning I started to work (pairing with a really smart friend) on an apparently simple task: to automate the process of starting an internet explorer (ie) instance, navigate to a specific page stored on the local machine, wait for some processing to finish (notified by the page) and grab the results. Having some years of experience with Microsoft technologies, mainly developing COM components, and aimed with (lack of) humbleness I started to write a jscript script to drive IE through automation, after all how hard could that that be? Indeed, the first part was really easy:

var browser = new ActiveXObject("InternetExplorer.Application");
browser.Visible = true;
browser.Navigate("http://programing-fun.blogspot.com");

I run the just finished prototype and the browser opened, navigating to the desired page. I was really happy (and thinking how I am smart). So far, so good. But things started to get weird really fast. Even having a good grasp on IE's object model (I don't know it by heart) I failed miserably to retrieve a reference to a page element:

var browser = new ActiveXObject("InternetExplorer.Application");
browser.Visible = true;
browser.Navigate("http://programing-fun.blogspot.com");
while (browser.Busy) {
WScript.Sleep(10);
}
var element = browser.Document.getElementById("some-id");

After some time we decided to give up on using jscript and switched to C#, so I created a Windows Form application to host WebBrower control (hum... someone said IE?) but we kept seeing strange behavior. For instance, the page we were trying to load hosts a Silverlight application but IE insisted that we should install Silverlight; WTF? I do have Silverlight installed !!!

Well, at that time I was not felling so smart anymore; and since it was almost lunch time we decided to continue latter. When I got back to work I was determined to get it working so I did what any reasonable developer does in such situations: I decided to do something else :) and I ended up watching a screencast about how to improve the experience for users that don't have Silverlight installed; hum.. interesting. 

The presenter suggested to disable the Silverlight add-on (instead of uninstalling it). Great! Maybe the add-on was just disabled (due to some stricter security configuration when launching IE through automation).

Why I haven't thought about this before? I started my application (C#) as fast as I could and a new browser appeared (in the same way as before), then I went to the add-on configuration dialog and voilà! There was no Silverlight add-on listed (how could I enable/disable it?).

So the problem was that, for some reason, IE was not even considering Silverlight add-on to be installed (but that was what IE was trying to say me all the time no?).

Then I launched IE manually (clicking on its icon on desktop) and opened the same add-on configuration dialog. This time I could see that Silverlight (and a lot of other add-ons) were installed and enabled.

Well, now I was starting to fell better :). But I still had to understand why I was getting different behaviors depending on how I launched IE. After some head screeching followed by some thinking and some extra searches I do figured out the issue, but that's the subject of a future post :)

Have fun! 

Adriano

Benefits of working from home - Epilogue

After 9 posts in this subject (BTW, I have written this post long ago) I am going to finish it... and the big question is:

Did it worth?

Well, to answer this question I pondered on various aspects: It allowed me to move to a smaller city, closer to my wife's parents, a less violent, less expansive city, etc; it gave me the chance to spend more time with my family and a lot more benefits!

So, IMO it really worth the move! Even missing some "usual work style", I am pretty happy working with very smart people, in a really cool product, applying really nice development methodologies and last, but not least, being able to organize my own time :).


I don't know how long I'll be working with these stunning guys, but I do hope I could be there for a long time ;). There's just so many things to learn yet!

That's it ;)

See you all.

Adriano

First impressions of Windows 7

Hi,

As a computer addicted I decided to download Windows 7 Beta 1 (32 bits) and give it a try (if you are interested, just search for "Windows 7 Beta1" in your favorite search engine and I am sure you'll find your way :)

In this post I want to present my first impressions about it. Please, note that I am not an expert in this subject and also that this is just my opinion based on my perception without any pretension regarding "data" accuracy.



I need to admit that I am impressed about it. My first impression is that it is way faster than Vista when running on the same machine; at least it is pretty responsive. Bellow you can find a list of items that caught  my attention and won my respect (at least for now):

• Fast Installation: ~ 20 min for a full install.
  
  
• Few prompts during installation.
  
  
• No problems with device drivers at all (Video, audio, keyboard, etc)
  
• Some devices already have preliminary versions for Windows 7
  I guess that this is more a result of not introducing deeper changes to the driver model (Vista introduced really deep changes there).
  
  
• There are some compatible antivirus already.
  
  
• Looks really fast on a relatively old hardware
  
  
• I really liked the UI changes (even being minor changes).
   
  
• Just a few UAC prompts
• Using it for some time I have seem UAC prompts only for software installation.
  
  
• IE 8 is not as fast as I'd like it to be. (But I've already installed firefox)

 Bellow you can see a screen shot.

Well, that's it for now.


Adriano

Benefits of working from home - Part IX- Infrastructure

In this post I described how using my computer in my home office was the first time that I'm getting a direct return on my investment.

In this post I'll take a look in the other side of the coin: the investment in infrastructure.

When my home computer used to be only that, i.e, my home computer, I had no hard requirements to keep it up to date. I could simply update it each 5 years or more if I wanted to; also, my internet connection need not to be very fast; the same applies for my desk; it could be very ordinary as I didn't spent a lot of time in my computer.

Of course, being a computer/programmer addicted as I am, shortened my computer's update cycle for something between 2 ~ 3 years, and 

internet connection, you know: you never get enough bandwidth ;)

By the other hand, using my computer to work pushes it to its limits... and of course, each minute I spend looking at the hour glass represents a minute less with my family (or my Wii :) so I want to wait the lesser amount of time possible in front of it.

Just to put some numbers, the first time I run db4o build on my machine it took more or less 1 hour to run to completion (mostly running tests). I just couldn't believe that. My machine was not a top one but it was not so old/slow either. After a lot of tweaking I managed to get the build running in 15 minutes but that required some $$$ (nowadays, even with a new machine tests take 20 ~ 25 minutes to run due to lots of new tests).

Also, I never considered (or had the requirement to) run 2 VMs, 2 Visual Studio (one in one VM and another in the host OS), Eclipse and some other apps at the same time. So now, 2Gb of memory doesn't look that much anymore.

Another important aspect that will have great impact on your productivity/health is the overall quality of your office furniture: remember when you used to complain about your boss not willing to spend a few extra dollars on a good chair for you? I certainly remember myself complaining with mine :( Of course you don't need to go out and get the best chair in the world, but make sure you'll not get a "not so good" one only to save a few extra bucks either (If you are going to spend more than 4 hours seated I do recommend you to get a very good one - for instance, this one).

Well, that's not the end yet; telecommuting meant also that I became my own IT department ;). Not that I have any problem fixing my computer, installing software or whatsoever; the really big point is that all these maintenance work takes time (and time is money) and also that the burden to keep everything working is on me (to be fair, I'd rather be the one in charge for this task than to let someone else doing it anyway).

Last, but not least, consider having "hardware" backup; I mean, what are you going to do if next morning when you turn your computer on it don't actually turns on? Of course you do have backups of your important data (don't you?), but what about your hardware? How long it will take to be fixed? Are you willing to spend time on fixing it? Or do you have another computer that can be used so you can continue to work while someone else fixes it for you.

In the end of the day, you'll need to put some money on your office / infrastructure, so don't forget to take this into account.

That's it.

Bear with me ! We are approaching the end :)

See you

Adriano

Benefits of working from home - Part VII - Alone in the office

With this post I'll stop talking about the advantages of working from home and start to discuss some of the drawbacks related to this way of work.

(sorry for the subject, I just couldn't resist :)

Note that some points that I first took as an advantage may appear again, but this time, with a focus on possible disadvantages; this doesn't mean I've changed my mind (what I would say is perfectly normal); its just the other side of the same coin.

I'll start with the most problematic one (at least in my case), working from home meant to loose almost all contact with my friends and coworkers. I remember it perfectly when I was being interviewed (through skype) and I was asked how I felt about working alone, 8 hours per day; honestly, at that moment I did think it would not be an issue, but sometimes it is a little bit lonely.

Since I was not bound to an office anymore, after 4 months we (I and my wife) decided that the time to move to a quieter, safer, less violent place had come, so we moved from São Paulo to Londrina; you see, most of my friends still live in São Paulo and even having some (good) old friends (and my wife's parent) here in Londrina I somewhat miss personal contact.

Another important aspect of working from home is that all discussions (at least in my case) are done through some IM software (be it skype/msn/etc) and this is considerably harder to do than when you are engaged in a face-to-face talking.

It's enough for the first "not so good" series... let me play a little bit of "Star Wars" on my Wii ;)

See you.

Adriano

Benefits of working from home - VI - Mange my time

Hi,

Have you ever needed to ask (embarrassed) your boss to let you leave early so you could go to the doctor or to address some personal issue?

Well, not have to do this is another benefit of working from home :) as (usually) you are in charge of managing your own time!

Of course this is not an "all or nothing situation". Even when I had a "traditional" job my bosses were kind (or intelligent) enough (I bet they were both :) to let me deal with my personal issues during my working time if that were necessary.

My point is that nowadays all I have to do is to get organized so I don't miss any meeting, pair session and/or a dead line and everything is fine :). It's even better as I can choose the best time (a time in which I'll get less traffic, that is not to hot, etc.) to do my personal stuff.

Thats it! Even though being far from a comprehensive list of the advantages of working from home, I finally reached the last (but not least) advantage I wanted to blog about. In the next posts I'll talk about some drawbacks.

Do you have any other advantages in mind? Please, share with us!

Best,

Adriano

Benefits of working from home - Part V - Show me the money

Wow.

I've always the feeling that my investment in computer hardware/software was somewhat a waste of money; you see, usually I get a pretty descent machine and stick with it for at least 3 years; so every 3 years I spend a lot of money to get a new one and I didn't get a direct return from my investment (not to mention that most of the day it keeps turned off), and to be fair, I should take internet connection fees into account.

Since I started working from home I may say that this is the first time I am getting a direct¹ (and measurable) return from this investment. It's even better, now it's easier to justify new hardware, software and other gadgets to the financial department, i.e, my wife :).

In other words, now my computer generates income and I feel compelled to invest more money to keep it up to date.

Adriano

¹ I mean, direct, because I always studied a lot in my home computers so, at least indirectly, they always gave me a financial return (even tough it is hard to measure how much return I got).

Benefits of working from home - Part IV - DIY

Hi!

How many times a developer approached you to ask something he/she could have easily find by himself have he/she bothered to spend 10 minutes to do a google search?

And let's be fair, how many times you feel compelled to do the same? I have to confess that even being a firm believer of "search before asking" principle, sometimes I do find myself doing the opposite: asking before looking for information.

And this lead us to this post subject: Working from home gave me more incentive to do "the right thing™" :), i.e, to look for solutions prior to asking the guy next to me - after all there's no such thing as the "guy next to me" :)

At db4o we do exchange lots of information/knowledge but since we are not at the same room (and in most cases we are at different timezones also) it's more practical to do a quick search and try to fix/solve issues by myself. Only after spending some time in my own research I think about asking the gurus.
 
This attitude (searching before asking) leads to a better understanding of the subject and other developers will not be interrupted to explain. Of course (IMHO) there are times (and subjects) that requires someone with more knowledge to guide other developers.

Anyway, I do believe that the process of explaining some subject may help you to get more insight about it and I do appreciate helping other teammates to improve their knowledge (Nowadays I'm learning more than helping :).

What do you think?


Adriano

Benefits of working from home - Part III - Time efficiency

In my last post I was talking about not being required to commute to work and I pointed some related benefits.

Today, I'm going to talk about some more benefits (directly related to the previous one), so let's go.

As I explained in the previous post I used to spend 2 hours in traffic; well, since I started working from my home this was not an issue any more and not wasting my time on traffic jams made it possible to do other things (like sleep more, post more frequently, etc. :) and spend less money with gas, but (IMHO), more important than all, it made it possible to spend more time with my family.

Prior to joining db4o, I used to wake up at 7:00, take a short breakfast and drive to my work so I rarely joined my wife/daughter at breakfast. At lunch time I was not with them again (since it would take me 1 hour to go to home and another one to get back).

Now, even though I usually wake up at the same time, instead of having a (lonely) fast breakfast and going to my work I just go down to my office and start working (usually I put may email/web reading up to date) then 1 hour latter my daughter wakes up and we (I, my wife and my daughter) can have breakfast together. Them, at lunch time, we can have lunch together again :)

Pretty nice!

At the end of the day when my daughter returns from school I'm finishing my working day and we can spend a little more time together.

Well, as an interesting tv ad says:

Have a good breakfast: U$ 20,00; getting out to have a good meal: U$ 50,00; to be with your beloved ones at these moments: has no price! :)

See you!


Adriano

Benefits of working from home - Part II : No need to commute

In the previous post I just said I'd think aloud about advantages/drawbacks of working from home.

Let's take the half-full approach and present the advantages first starting with not needing to commute.

Well, before joining db4o I used to live in São Paulo - Brazil, so this point is pretty easy one ;)

Anyone that knows just a little bit about São Paulo knows that it has a very bad traffic! Usually, in the days that the traffic was not that bad, it used to took me no less than 1 hour from my house to my work place (and I was fortunate enough to not live that far from my job). So 2 hours of my life was spent in a car every day.

Also, not being required to commute (and so avoiding traffic jams) made my expenses with car maintenance drop a little bit and getting involved in a car crash less likely.

As a bonus of not commuting I don't have to find a place to park in a, usually, crowed place :)

So, IMHO this is a huge advantage.

The next post will be closely related to this one but I'll talk about my working time.

PS: Do you work from home? What are your opinion about the subject?

See you!

Adriano

Benefits of working from home - Part I - The dream job

As I posted here, some time ago (to be more precise, exactly one year ago) I joined db4o and started to work from my home; that was not an easy decision/move but (thanks God and some really good friends also) I took it.

Since one year has passed, I think it is a good time to review this journey and rethink whenever its paying off or not.

In the next posts I'll discuss (shortly) some advantages and some shortcomings (from my point of view, of course :) regarding working from home. The order in which these topics are presented has no particular meaning.

Keep in mind that my opinion is largely influenced by the place I live in, the environment I am inserted into and the kind of work I am involved with, so, what I see as an disadvantage you may well see as an advantage :). Don't worry, we are not supposed to agree on everything.

Another important point is that some teleworkers (as people that work from home are called) usually do work "part time" in a real office; that's not my case; I am working 100% of the time from my home and the nearest fellow is at least 100 Km (and the others are 1000 Km) away.

To start with, here are a couple of interesting articles to read.

Hope you find this information useful/fun :)

See you.

Adriano


[edit: added link to following posts]

1. This post
2. No need to commute
3. Time Efficiency
4. DIY
5. Show me the money
6. Manage your own time
7. Alone in the office
8. Working Time
9. Infrastructure
10. Epilogue
    

Here we come again :) - Part III - The end

Well, after some time researching and comparing prices I've ordered my new toy with the following configuration :

Component	Detail
Motherboard	GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DS3R
Processor	INTEL Core 2 Quad Q3300 2.66GHz 12MB 1.333MHz
Memoty	8 Gb - OCZ DDR2 800
Cooler	Cooler Master Vortex
Power	550W - Corsair
Keyboard	Microsoft Wireless Desktop 2000
Video Card	Geforce XFX 9600GSO 384MB
HD	750GB Samsung

I do hope that this machine can keep up with my needs ;) Also, I ordered a really big (at least for my standards) monitor .... Now I need to wait more or less one week to put my hands on this and starting installing (probably Windows Vista x64 and some Linux x64 distro also). OMG, I am to anxious! Adriano

Here we come again :) - Part II

Just a little bit more information on my new toy (the one I am planning to get)

Component	Detail
Motherboard	GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DS3R
Processor	INTEL Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66GHz 12MB 1.333MHz
Memoty	8 Gb - G.SKILL DDR2 800
Cooler	ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro
Power	550W - Seventeam
Keyboard	Microsoft Wireless Desktop 2000 Optico
Video Card	Geforce XFX 8600GT 256MB
HD	750GB SEAGATE

Even not being the fastest possible configuration it is a pretty good one :) Why did I need such a beast: Well, working as a software developer sometimes I find myself running Eclipse, Visual Studio as well a guest OS within Virtualbox (running VS and some other programs there also ;). So I do believe (I'm not a expert in hardware) that a 4 core processor will be helpful; in the same way, 8 GB of memory doesn't seem that much :) I considered to get a WD Raptor but it's too expansive here; also, I'll install 2 other HDs (that are sitting in my current machine) so I'll get some performance gains due to a more distributed load. Do you have a raid 0 configuration? How does it perform? Is it reliable? Right now I am considering to build a Raid 0 array also but I'm not sure. My past experience wih Raid 0 was not so good. Adriano