terça-feira, 6 de novembro de 2012

Generation Videogame and IT professionals


Earlier this year I spent about 5 hours at Game On, an international games exhibition at MIS (Museum of Image and Sound) in Sao Paulo.


The big deal at "Game On" was that  we could play games, from great classics to FIFA 2012. As a big fan of video games and over 30 years old, I spent most of my time with the old  classics and I came across a situation suddenly, which inspired me to write this story.






I was playing good old Pitfall, an Atari classic created by Activision, where in the mid-80s, my brother and I spent hours in front of the TV hanging from ropes, jumping on the heads of scorpions and crocodiles. While I was playing, a boy of about 12 years old get to play, I, started talking excitedly about the game as the kid played on through about five screens until he "dies" and, of course, needs to resume the game from the beginning. To my amazement, the boy turns to me and says "How come I have to restart everything ?, I do not want to play anymore" and, he left.

As I said, I am a big fan of video games and recently finished playing God of War 3, a first-class game, perfect gameplay, graphics, soundtrack, script. It just too much. But, when I was interacting with that boy about  Pitfall, I remembered God of War 3 and a situation that I have been experiencing in recent weeks.

For those unaware in GOW 3, and in most games of the new generation, and despite all technological progress I realized that they provide a great disservice to society. Why? Because of their several checkpoints and autosave features that make the character's life much easier when the all mighty Kratos (the good guy in the game) crashes. The game resumes where it left off indefinitely, just that simple; and what is more frightening, failing successively in the same challenge, the game invites you to overcome the challenge by changing the difficulty level to something lower. Absurd. And worst, if the problem persists, our young players just give up and take him a second game among the stack of games they won from Dad - ie I tired of it - I quit.

Gentlemen, I do not want to generalize or create stereotypes, but, this video game generation has taken it's  professional life to Kratos in God of War - invincible, impatient, spoiled, without compromise, gives up easily, and when faced with some difficulty, simply abandons the game and runs to the next.

I recently conducted a thorough selection process for the hiring over 15 professionals - most of them senior developers, and to my surprise one day I will see a worthy without training in the area and reportedly had just over 4 months of contact with database software and according to him, solved all the problems of your company and therefore was leaving because there is no more junior - ok John Nash wrote his theory of games to 21, to 15 Mozart had composed over 20 symphonies and to 13 Bob Fisher played the match of the century, but the fact is that our colleagues have no patience career, who incidentally never seen an "expert" in javascript fighting for the post of development manager?!?





And what about those who at the first signs of difficulty (whether technical problems, peer relationship, client and / or boss) is send to the next job without the slightest compromise with your projects, your employer and your worst customer!






Well my friends, the fact is that we need to live well all stages of our careers, building it solidly, by obtaining technical knowledge and especially experience. I understand that this is the only way we will have a long and prosperous corporate life, how would said our old friend volcano - the wise dr. Spok.


Best regards...

segunda-feira, 5 de novembro de 2012

Tool Aid in Financial Mathematics

Hello Guys, here is a post slightly off what I usually post here .. but as the purpose of the blog is to share knowledge, c'mon ...

Inspired by a work of  financial mathematics discipline on the postgraduate course in Business Administration from FGV I'm doing, I decided to implement a small application that helped me enhance learning some concepts, I really hope and also be able to help other colleagues ..

Our job was to analyze one, among many other systems of financing for the purchase of vehicles - those with loss of sight benefits, and confront it with some applications financial institutions offer us. 

The application (which so far have not found a name for baptism), is designed to solve these calculations and present the results graphically. However .. after it's done I realized that I could improve it a little bit more, including intelligence so that it will be able to solve many of the problems of compound interest, amortization systems - PRICE, and many others that the imagination of our teachers sue .. 

Using The application 

The system is quite simple, it works with classical variables of financial mathematics and the dreaded HP 12C - PV (present value), FV (future value), etc.. Notice that we have two locations for input rates of yield, or interest rate, which I labeled, savings and fixed income because it was the one I used in my work, but that is what matters least, I mean, the labels, the interesting thing is that we have two interest rate / yield to compare.

Figure 1 - system in action -  graphic  bars
When you start, notice that all the values has already been inserted , I did so during implementation and ended up leaving that way to become my job easier, but any value can be modified easily. With parameters duly completed click "Processar" button and graphics are rendered, as well as some information about the behavior of applications are reported in the text box to the left. Realize that we have a third graph - the legend, "Financiamento" which represents the initial value of the deposit (or application) and the fixed installments (PMTs). This graph will always be a line, but the applications may be bars - as in Figure 1 or rows as shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 - system in action - line graphs
As I said, I evolve the app a bit more for it help us with calculations of compound interest - investment analysis without payments (withdrawals) during the investment, etc.. To use it in this way simply assign zero value to the alleged financing (FV) and parcels (withdrawals) fixed. Figure 3 illustrates a classic case of classroom R$ 1000.00, applied for 3 months at 10% per month (here also has 20% fixed income), here is the result:

Figure 3 - compound interest without withdrawals
Figure 4 shows one slightly different scenario where we have to include taken along the investment.

Figure 4 - compound interest on withdrawals
Installing application

Ok.. if someone find it interesting and want to test, it is quite simple. It is a ordinary windows application installation, a piece of cake.. 

First try this file  CAB installer , which is smaller and theoretically simpler. Just unzip it in a folder and click on any file "FGV-MtmFinanceira.exe." It may not work for lack of a configuration file on your machine.

If not work, try this: Install . Do dowload the file, unzip it and run setup.exe. After installation, you should see a cup of coffee on your desktop. 

Alternatively visit here ...  which has both installation options side by side. 

Final Thoughts 

As I said the idea emerged during development of a school homework, either that have no name, so it must have some small adjustments to be made ​​as well as new features to be included. 

Ps: .. icon cup of coffee was used due to 5 or 6 cups.. I drunk ​​while coded the application ... 

Well, this is it guys .. if anyone has any criticism or suggestions they will be very welcome .. I hope this joke is helpful to someone.. 

best wishes,
Caio Azevedo