For a while I’ve been involved in programming, mostly writing and testing the code, either by myself and with other people. But a few years ago my main responsability switched from programming to review other people’s code since my role changed from content producer to gatekeeper. Initially I had my reservations, I didn’t want to do it, it was simpler to keep programming and producing daily value. But after a while, it started to click in me, by reading code I would need to understand what they are trying to do, and I would be learning all the time and getting more knowledge over the system. Read more...

In the 90s, when I’ve started seen computers and similar things, we use to go to the files and check them using a text editor. In most of the cases such files were unreadable binary files, but from time to time it was usual to find text-based files with readable content in them. source: https://github.com/modusbox/datasonnet-flat-file-examples/blob/master/src/test/resources/mapping-tests/flat-file-to-xml.ds/example/inputs/payload.txt order12345,"04/11/2020 14:35:00" "Kym Chillcot","6904 Vera Trail","White Plains",NY,10633,"(845) 568-0141","kchillcot0@washingtonpost.com" shipment1,"04/21/2020 09:10:00" "Ava McGunley","5488 Katie Plaza","Las Vegas",NV,89105,"(702) 594-4721",amcgunley2@forbes. Read more...

Recently we’ve been working with flat files, the reason is mainly that legacy systems export and import data in that format or in some sort of propietary binary format. So, flat files, the interesting thing about these flat files is that they have an complex structure that doesn’t fit into the model of all the existing libraries we’ve tried to use to parse it. What do we do then? We implement our own flat-file parsing/writing components Remember back in the day when we had to implement all our stuff to read data and not rely on an already implemented and popular libray? Read more...

For a long time I’ve been a Linux user of different distributions, mainly for development or testing new things. During the last few years Ubuntu was the usual selection, it’s a Debian derivative and has most of the packages that you can think of. But as time passes by, things change, needs change. Ubuntu was not really a nice fit for my needs: Simplicity Stability Robustness As a frequent Docker user Alpine has always been stable, reliable and incredibly small. Read more...

This is still a draft

A while ago I had a personal site in some obscure Russian hosting site, I don’t even remember if I have paid for that hosting or if it was something with ads. Nevertheless, since then the idea of having a public and personal website has always attracted me. So, once the motivation is set, a new site is gonna be created, this is how we can proceed to create a personal website: Read more...

In this occasion we will see a situation that unexpectedly generated a great design, by purpose and by accident as well. Here we've had a customer with a legacy system that stored all its data in a local data source, this is a very old system, written in Fortran, that handles huge amounts of data and it's rarely updated. As we can already expect, this is not a simple system to integrate with external participants, and that was exactly what they needed. Read more...

A while ago I've sent a question to James Coplien, one of the loudest voices of software development processes, methodologies and design.Hello mister Coplien. After some meetings regarding working processes and working methodologies for software, we've reached a point on asking what are the alternatives to the most know approaches (waterfall and agile processes).Our group consists of people actively working on software development, testers, students, and college teachers. So, from our limited experience, we couldn't list too many approaches; we ended up with a commitment of digging into the topic and share our findings in our next meetings. Read more...

It has been recently announced that Bitbucket will be leaving Mercurial support in 2020 [1], defaulting to Git from then on. A lot of things come to mind when reading the announcement, mostly because Mercurial has been my first distributed revision control system or at least the first one I understood. It's fairly simple to use, concise and with a simple interface, but sadly has fallen in popularity. Git has won in other fields where popularity is more important that correctness and simplicity. Read more...

A lot of times development is not straightforward, you hit a corner and don't know what else to do to fix a problem. During those periods I've seen many developers do the following things: Start the debugger right away and go step by step into the problemSketch all possible scenarios that would lead to the problem, then println-debug each scenarioTake a walk for 10 mins to think about the problem While all these approaches have worked for me, I tend to ignore the debugger use more and more over time. Read more...