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...

After a week trying this new setup for working, here the results. The rules: During mornings sitting will be the defaultDuring afternoons standing will be the defaultDuring lunch-time standing will be the default The control: Did it have any physical effect? A big physical effect, the body feels better, although there were some small pains after the first daysDid it have any food/drink related effect?Clearly, I consumed much less sugared drinks, not even coffee, and the body didn't ask for it. Read more...

After listening to some interesting thoughts from Linda Rising at Software Engineering Radio, I've started a periodical experiment, time-boxed to a week in order to check results. So this weeks is related to standing desk, not really a standing desk, but a platform that allows me to work while standing up. The rules: During mornings sitting will be the default During afternoons standing will be the defaultDuring lunch-time standing will be the default The control: Read more...

It's been a while since I've heard about DCI, and still to this day I'm thrilled with the approach and the concept behind it. It still lacks lots for experimentation in my case, but I find the paradigm really but really interesting. So in that matter, here a list of resources that can introduce the paradigm in a better way: Coplien: A good introduction James Coplien - The DCI Architecture: Supporting the Agile Agenda from Øredev Conference on Vimeo. Read more...

This is not a rant, really, just a some few things I would like to write down. HistoryWhen I started into development I've got the great suggestion to use revision control systems, the first one that I ever used was CVS, it really worked well for my own purposes, just had some issues with the sharing-between multiple machines. Then Subversion was the hot-thing and it was a bit better that Subversion, but still had some of the things that I disliked from CVS. Read more...

During the last seven years I've been working as a software developer, ocasional team leader, weird tester and lazy seller. The world of software development is so wide and moving that you never get tired of it, I happen to dislike some technology approaches, some practices, and even some programming languages. But something I come to appreciate from the profession itself, is the self-pacing nature of it. It's possible to have great teams where things move really fast and well, and is also possible to get into a slow-as-a-snail situation in which you can't even see the final outcome. Read more...

Most productive development environment (server-side): Java 8 + Spring Frameworks + SpringBootjOOq or HibernateMaven as build tool Eclipse or IntelliJ as IDEMost productive web development environment (single-page applications): React.js with WebPackTypescript Atom or Vim as editorNPM as build tool Most productive mobile development environment: Groovy as programming languageGradle build toolIntelliJ as IDE Most interesting programming model: Clojure/LispElixir/ErlangMost useful getting-things-done tool: Go programming languageDocker

A while ago I read in many places that you should write down what you learn, and that the best way to do it is by having a personal wiki. So I started doing that, but at the time the options I had were: Install a local server and then use MediaWiki or something similarInstall a standalone application that worked as a wikiUse a public service to create a personal wikiBut no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get use to it, I worked most of the time offline, and I didn't like to be doing configurations over and over (since I still use a variety of OSes). Read more...

From time to time you get used to the environment you work with, you feel confident about what you do and you think that your approaches are kind of safe an standard. That is something really naive for someone who is a developer, I have been/I am that person. During my first programming years I was exposed to Java and C++, these were the door-openers for my to the entire programming world. Read more...