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AI and the Economics of Legacy Software

A few weeks ago, I started thinking about a software project that I had almost completely forgotten. In 2013, Juanjo Meroño and I built LooWID, an open source video conferencing platform based on WebRTC. Some time later, Edu Rey joined us to help with the UI, giving the project an important qualitative leap in its user experience and making the product feel much more complete. We developed it for several years, adapting it to the rapidly changing browser and WebRTC ecosystem, until around 2018–2019 we eventually stopped maintaining it.The code remained public. The product remained there. But the technology around it moved on. Years later, I wondered what would happen if we tried to bring it back—not by trying to make the old application run again, but by asking AI to help us rebuild the product. The original project is still available on GitHub , and the result of the experiment is LooWID Remastered . From legacy code to a working product I used OpenCode as the main development agent. ...
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From AI-Assisted Development to AI-Assisted Operations

In a previous article, I wrote about how AI is Changing the Economics of Prototyping . When prototypes become realistic enough to experience an entire system, they also become powerful tools for stakeholder alignment and project discovery. That experience made me think about a part of IT where we spend an enormous amount of time: operations . As an IT director, one of the things I want to explore more systematically is where our teams spend time on operational tasks that are difficult to automate. Not the obvious repetitive tasks that can easily become scripts or workflows, but those tasks that happen once in a while, are difficult to document completely, and require someone with enough experience to understand what is actually going on. A recent Odoo migration was a perfect example. I needed to migrate an Odoo Community installation from version 14 to version 18. I had installed the original system several years ago, but I had very little experience with this kind of migration. The...
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AI Is Changing the Economics of Prototyping

From imagining software to experiencing it before it exists For more than two decades, Agile has transformed the way software is built. Its principles emerged in response to a world where requirements evolved continuously, long development cycles created unnecessary risk, and organisations needed mechanisms to learn while delivering value. By breaking work into small, working increments, Agile enabled teams to reduce implementation risk, gather feedback early and continuously refine their products. Prototyping has followed a similar objective. Long before generative AI, paper sketches, wireframes, clickable mock-ups and interface design tools were widely used to explore ideas, capture requirements and help stakeholders understand a problem before committing to implementation. These techniques have always been valuable because they encourage discussion at a stage where change is still inexpensive. The limitation was never the concept of prototyping itself. It was the cost of realism. B...
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Two Decades of Sakai at UdL: Thoughs, Challenges, and the Road Ahead

It’s been a long time since I last wrote an article, but the recent gathering with fellow members of the Spanish Sakai community inspired me to share a few thoughts on our years of using Sakai at the University of Lleida (UdL) and its future. Two Decades of Sakai at UdL: A Commitment to Innovation Since September 13, 2004, the University of Lleida (UdL) has maintained a strong relationship with the Sakai platform. Over the past 20 years, UdL has focused on advancing ICT support for teaching and learning. From its initial launch with an early version of Sakai (1.0rc2), the platform has been a key tool in meeting the university’s educational needs. UdL chose Sakai to replace WebCT, opting for an open-source solution that aligned with its commitment to free software at the time. In the early years, UdL played an active role in developing Sakai. A notable contribution was the internationalization of the platform, making it easy to translate without modifying the source code. This effort he...
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LooWID

More than two years ago Juanjo Meroño and I started the project LooWID ( www.loowid.com ). As many of you already know it's an open source videoconference platform based on WebRTC that allow users to join in small rooms and share webcam, screen and audio and share files directly from browser to browser. Eduardo Rey has been also involved designing and implementing the interface and that helped a lot to have a nice platform. It has been an good experience since we moved to make it open source instead of offering just as a service. Before we opened the project we tried to get feedback from friends and family and there were some interesting results. We asked them to fill a survey to guess what business model would be the best for LooWID. We were concerned that we should offer it as free but we needed to find a way to fund the infrastructure, and perhaps if the project grows contract an small team to work on it.  We were asking about the way the project must be funded. There were...
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Sakai Video Plugin Test Fest

Finally we got an stable version of Sakai video chat plugin based on WebRTC . We had to solve some details to work in a cluster environment but finally we can offer you a release candidate. Now, our intention is to know if that feature can be included on the main Sakai code, for this reason we prepared a TEST fest to achieve to purposes: - Get any bug we missed. -  Enable the Sakai community to test that functionality. That would help Sakai CLE members to decide if it would be interesting to put in the trunk on not. We prepared a Sakai site at University of Murcia's QA server with the instruction to complete a test of functionalities of video calls. If you want to participate, you must create an account at here , and join to the Test Video Chat Test site. There, you will find the instructions we wrote there. You will see that in that site you will find a sign-up tool to coordinate the availability of people to test each other.
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Synchronize Sakai content with an Android device

The Sakai CLE offers a WebDAV service to connect from your computer to the contents of a Sakai site as if they were folders in your computer. Normally all WebDAV clients can edit directly files and folders.    Today, mobile devices like smartphones , tablets or ultrabooks allow us to work directly with these files everywhere, although working always on-line maybe is not the best. We must keep in mind that it's easy to lose the network connection so will make it impossible to work on these documents. You must look for a tool that allows you to work directly with documents in your device and synchronize with the server to avoid having to download, edit and reload the document manually each time.   There is a free tool called WebDAV File Manager for Android, developed by Shigadroid , that allows to work with WebDAV services letting you to synchronize...
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