Compendium of Wondrous Links vol I
As a way of collecting interesting reads across the Internet, I plan to keep a relatively regular posts with some articles and posts that I’ve read, mostly related to development, software and tech world in general. Here it goes the first edition. Your Progress As A Programmer Is All Up To You Theory and practice Short and simple, but nice Every line of code is always documented Nice ways to use version control to our advantage when navigating through unknown code When random isn’t random enough or why randomness is a more complicated problem than… Read More
Online community biases
There are a lot of discussion online about a huge number of different topics. That’s fantastic news, I’d love to had a learning tool that powerful when I was in school. To share some of my interests, and have other people to talk about “cool stuff” and learn from them. Online communities have speed up personal and technological growth intensely, allowing people from around the world to share knowledge and to feel close. But, on the other hand, these kind of communities get naturally and subtlety biased. While this is normal, and probably unavoidable, anyone… Read More
Some characteristics of the best developers I worked with
I had a conversation last November on the PyConEs, when I was on a conversation stating that I am working with truly brilliant people in DemonWare, and then someone asked me: “Do you have problems agreeing in what to do? Normally great developers have problems reaching consensus on tech discussions”. My answer something like: “Well, in my experience, truly awesome developers know when to have a strong argument and they usually are ok reaching an agreement in a reasonable time”. So, I wanted to, as sort of follow-up, summarise what are the characteristics… Read More
Agile important bits
There is a lot of Agile talking and I think it has reached a point where it is, if not standard, at least a common way of doing software. But, even if there is a lot talking about Agile methodologies, and companies telling that the are doing Agile, are they really doing it? I’m not so sure. When relating to Agile, I always come back to the source, which is the Agile manifesto. I really like its simplicity. Let me copy it here We are uncovering better ways of developing software by… Read More
In defense of resting
I have been watching recently some documentaries about software development, including the classic Triumph of the nerds (available in YouTube in three episodes, 1, 2 and 3) and Indie Game: The Movie. They are both very good and I’d recommend them not only to developers, but to people interested in technology and/or entrepreneurship in general. But they are very good exponents into something very present on the software scene, which is presenting crunch mode, working insane hours, in some sort of glamourised way. It is part of the usual storytelling and, and probably,… Read More
Magical thinking in Software Development
I guess we all Python developers heard this kind of argument from time to time: Python is slower than C++/Java/C# because is not compiled. Other than the usual “blame the others” when working with other companies (usually big corporations than thinks than using anything except C# or Java is laughable), you can also see a lot of comments in technical blogs or places like Hacker News or Reddit with similar, simplistic arguments. You can recognise them on the usual rants about how technology X is The Worst Thing That Ever Happened™ and… Read More
Wrong Side of Memphis 