Martin Salias’ Blog

This is my first post as a Southie, and it is written after finishing my first whole day at this new roles.

Did Microsoft finally get rid of me?

For the people who already knows me, I’m still working as an Architect for Corporate Accounts at Microsoft Argentina and Uruguay, still part time, but I’m devoting the rest of the regular working hours to Southworks, and keeping some of my personal activities (from familiar duties and community work to Wii Fit training) for the rest of my day.

Who is this guy?

As most people don’t know me (famous geeks live in California or Redmond), here is a little of my background, especially targeted to my fellow southie s.

I was born in Buenos Aires and started my career in technology fixing irons and vaccum cleaners while I was in college. Soon my interest in electronics drove me to the first personal computers (TI 99, Sinclair 1000) and I started earning some money by writing programs for small shops. When I finished college I started working at Talent, on the development team of the Talent MSX, where I wrote tons of assembler and C code and had the chance of working really close to the hardware and deal with device drivers, BIOS and even languages and compilers from Logo to dBase II.

Some friends convinced me to join their startup as the main (and only) developer and thus Merino Aller started, where I stayed about 15 years going from a 3 people company to a 50+ one with operations around Latinamerica. During this time I focused more and more on architecture and the development process and by participating in the flourishing online community I started doing presentations and then consulting on my own, up to the point where my independent activities won over my role on Merino, so I slowly transferred my duties (over a 2 year period) and finally become independent.

I had the chance to work and present around Latinamerica, US, Canada and Europe, and I worked for very different organizations, from Microsoft Consulting to the United Nations, in different markets such as airlines, telecommunications, law firms and of course several software companies.

All the way I tried to share the experience I learned from commiting drones of mistakes, so I become a partner of Level Extreme, a company in Canada which runs the community site www.UniversalThread.com, and I become Editor in Chief of UT Magazine first, for about 5 years, and then started a second publications called Level Extreme .NET Magazine, which is fully dedicated to .NET.

Some internal Microsoft system had a bug 2003 and I was awarded as an MVP, and it seems they never fixed it, as I’m still getting some weird stuff every year since then. My activities in the local community were quite close to the Microsoft User Group where I took a role as moderator on their distribution lists, and lately I become the MUG vicepresident.

My involvement with Agile practices started before they had that name, around mid 90´s when I increasingly started automating component testing to avoid regressions and started looking closely at team dynamics.

What am I supossed to do at Southworks?

First of all, have fun. Which is easy because the spirit here is really good and I have the pleasure of working close to the Maestro, Angel Java López, an old-time and inspiring friend.

Then, my role will involve working on projects and trying to help on the company continuous improvement initiative, using my scars to help younger people not to get burned in some situations, and of course, trying to help them having fun too. We are all on this job because we love it, after all.