Future as a developer and the ever changing picture
A few weeks ago I came by a couple of articles my Marco Arment that share the theme of the current status of accelerated change within the development community as a way of stressing up, and being difficult to be up to date. After all, one gets tired of learning a new framework or language every size months. It gets to a point where is not funny or interesting anymore. It seems like two different options are presented, that are available for developers after some time: Keep up, meaning that you adopt rapidly each new… Read More
Requests per second. A server load reference
As there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what Big Data, there are also not really a good baseline to know “how much is high load”, specially from the point of view of people with not that much experience in servers. If you have some experience dealing with servers, you will probably know all this. So, just for the sake of convenience, I am going to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to set a few numbers and explain how to calculate how many requests per second a server can hold…. Read More
You can’t make One Perfect Final Decision
How to Make Technology Choices Truly awesome post by Steven Lott. The expectation of finality is the most disturbing: the expectation that someone can make OnePerfectFinalDecision. No technology choice is ever final. Today’s greatest ever state-of-the-art, kick-ass-and-take-names SDK may evaporate in a cloud of lawsuits tomorrow. Today’s tech giant may collapse. Today’s platform of choice may be tomorrows weird anachronism. … If you are really, really lucky, you may get big enough to have scalability issues. Having a scalability issue is something we all dream about. Until you actually have a specific scalability issue, don’t try… Read More
Vim as IDE. Are you getting the wrong parts?
There are a lot of discussion about how to make Vim “an IDE”. Vim is a great text editor, but when we are developing, there are lots of extra tools that are very useful. Code completion. Easy navigation through files and classes. Source control integration. Syntax checking. Navigation that understand the semantics. Integrated debugger. My problem with IDEs (and I have used a few over the years) is that they give you a lot of support, but at the cost of increasing the complexity. They are slow for a lot of common… Read More
Notifications and emails
We all now that email, being a technology created a long time ago and developed organically into some sort of lingua franca of Internet persona and communications, has a series of problems. No easy ones. Manage the email is a problem of its own, and there are lots of articles about it on the Internet. One of the most annoying is the notifications. We all receive too much email that are only reminders of something relatively interesting in a different app. That could be a new comment on a blog post, an… Read More
My favourite scientists
There are many figures in science that are fascinating. Not only from the point of view of the importance of their discoveries, but also from the person behind the figure, as well as their times and common beliefs. For example, Isaac Newton is a complex and fascinating figure. He is without a doubt one of the greatest physics of all time, but he was also a difficult personality and made things like taking an effort in obscuring Robert Hooke research on gravitation. But among all the scientists from the ages, there are… Read More
Vim speed is not really the point
I am a Vim user. And a Vim fan. I was fiddling around for some time, you know, just knowing the basics, because it is convenient to do small changes on servers without having to worry about installing anything. Just the basics, insert mode, some search, save, and a couple more things. Then, around two years ago, I decided to give it a try as my main editor, after watching a presentation of a co-worker (my boss, actually) about how to use Vim (he has been using Vim for around 20 years) At… Read More
GitHub for reviewing code
A couple of weeks ago we started (in my current job) to use GitHub internally for our projects. We were already using git, so it sort of make sense to use GitHub, as it is very widespread and used in the community. I had used GitHub before, but only as a remote repository and to get code, but without much interaction with the “GitHub extra features”. I must say, I was excited about using it, as I though that it will be a good step forward in making the code more visible… Read More
Password Extravaganza: Open discussion about security
In recent times, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about security on Internet. And I mean my personal security on Internet. There has been some recent examples of leaked passwords on some common websites (LinkedIn, I am talking about you!), and I get the impression that the way I was handling passwords on the past was no longer good enough. Luckily, I never had problems, but I thought that I needed review my habits and to take it more seriously. As with everything that is new, when I open my first email… Read More
ffind
A sane replacement for command line file search I tend to use the UNIX command line A LOT. I find it very comfortable to work when I am developing and follow the “Unix as IDE” way. The command line is really rich, and you could probably learn a new different command or parameter each day and still be surprised every day for the rest of your life. But there are some things that sticks and gets done, probably not on the most efficient way. In my case, is using the command `find` to… Read More
Wrong Side of Memphis 