Esteban Gutiérrez

Diputados de la Asamblea Legislativa del Distrito Federal, la ALDF, han propuesto la compra iPads para ahorrar millones de pesos al año en papel y evitar la tala de árboles.

La idea, sin lugar a dudas parece un acto heróico de los diputados — la modernización de la burocracia a través del uso de nuevas tecnologías y de paso cuidar los pocos árboles que nos quedan. Sin embargo en nuestro sistema legal es ridículo plantear que un solo dispositivo tecnológico sea la solución a un problema y no considerar desde un inicio una estrategia integral.

Durante los años que trabajé en gobierno, leí en más de una ocasión justificaciones de adquisición de equipo de cómputo por "reducción de uso del papel". Por el otro lado, nunca llegaron a mis manos documentos solicitando la baja de impresoras — algo absurdo.

Una estrategia integral que permitiría la reducción en el consumo del papel y de la burocracia debe de atacar dos frentes:

• La utilización de la firma electrónica en los tres niveles del gobierno.
• Y una política administrativa que fomente el uso de materiales reciclados y la eliminación de equipos de impresión.

Por un lado, la firma electrónica le daría la certeza jurídica necesaria a los procesos realizados a través de medios electrónicos. Y por el otro, la eliminación de impresoras junto con el uso de materiales reciclados daría congruencia al discurso.

Lo demás, simplemente sería la consecuencia de esos pequeños cambios.

I have spent the last twenty years of my life writing code — among other things. I learned about a dozen of computer languages from C to Java, Fortran, Perl to Python, crossing through few Lisp dialects and other scripting and query languages. In other words, I have made my career writing code since the age of 13.

But yesterday I had to resign to one of the most challenging projects I recently had. No names or culprits. It turns that I had to resign because of the system:

Mexico lacks from a real software industry. Talent is not an issue I have met great coders and I'm not speaking only about Miguel de Icaza — the most famous mexican hacker, great programmers are everywhere but nobody sees them.

Mexican programmers live by the rule of the "good enough" — banks and government have good salary standards and most are above the national average. Most of them just don't see any reason to leave and start a company.

During the 80s the software industry in Mexico was mostly dominated by large system integrators for the government and only one company who developed software for accountants had a great success. It was until the 90s that software factories became popular and offered their services to medium-size enterprises to solve basic CRM needs and operation of their legacy systems.

At the same time there was no Computer Science degree in Mexico, only few engineering degrees with computer related curricula but nothing specialized in software development methodologies or strong background in math and algorithms. IIMAS was and is the only think-thank in CS but is oriented to research.

The dot-com boom had not a great impact in Mexico but it helped few mexicans to flee to the US or Canada when they needed as many programmers as they could. Fortunately I was among them.

The great days of the dot-com didn't change anything either here.

Some large software companies found in Mexico a fertile ground: poorly written code and large problems to solve: SAP, PeopleSoft, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. offered their services and made 7 digits profits from the same clients. They didn't had to write large amounts of code, they only needed to adapt it locally. Talent was disregarded again.

More than forty years of computers in Mexico and what we see is the lack of an industry that needs nothing else than support for the talent.

Government has not given any step forward encourage more education on CS or the creation of software start-ups. PROSOFT, a government fund for development of the software industry only helps the old model of software factories and creativity is not a concern.

I had to resign because of all this. I learned the lesson: If you want to do something big in this country you have to do it by yourself.

Lots of things have been said about Twitter here and there — the best social network ever; — it will change the way TV is done; — you cannot live without it. Most of it is a lie.

Twitter is only a network of information and in its deepest sense it can't change anything. Thats up to the people.

Maybe is one of the largest public networks of information, but not the largest one. During more than two centuries people has found ways to make announcements to a wide audience: classifieds. In the Internet age, Craiglist does it well, at the cheapest price: free. But now Twitter does it free and really fast.

Nothing new.

The analytics team of Twitter has an amazing number: 13 billion nodes. Thats a large amount of information, but not even close to what cellular phone carriers are used to. The only difference here is that Twitter stream of information is public.