During a normal day of work one gets into a lot of different tasks related to programming, documenting, writing, reading and so on. Multiple formats are handled by our fingers each day, and multiple things are done over and over and over. One of these things is editing, editing has been for a long time for me, essential. Editing text in different kind of files has had a lot of testing from my side, my requirements are quite simple: Read more...

Email is not dead, is not even a zombie. If something is well alive and working in all areas I can think of; given that, many of not all applications have to know how to (at least) send mails properly to all the different SMTP servers and providers there are. Now in my current job we deal mainly with Java-based projects in which JavaMail is the major, sometimes we deal with legacy systems with old implementations, sometimes we deal with new projects that have to communicate to old SMTP servers. Read more...

As software writers, we spend much time reading code, writing code, browsing it, searching things on it, breaking it, fixing it, etc. All for the sake of a good behavior in a component/module we try to build. During this process there are several opportunities in which you need something, a tool, that helps you find and do things quickly, and perhaps an IDE is an overkill when you have several things opened. Read more...

Disclaimer: Draft from a long time ago. Back in December of 2009 I was preparing my thesis work for my graduation, and somehow a very funny guy called me saying that we have talked a while ago about a job offer in a software development company. At the beginning I was thrilled, I hadn't worked in a professional way by that moment, I couldn't talk nor understand English properly and I was very insecure about my skills against the European standards. Read more...

A while ago when I was giving Slackware Linux the first tries I came across this tiny, very functional and very powerful text editor, JED. JED is a minimalistic text editor for the shell that emulates Emacs in most of its useful functionality, is not as powerful as Emacs itself but it has just enough for me. Syntax highlighting Key bindingsBuffers for editionContextual shell menusVery lightweight And some other featuresIt might not be an IDE, but it's my favorite tool for editing text via SSH, or when I'm doing something small and I just want to do it as fast as I can. Read more...

A while ago I listened about Ruby on Rails on a podcast (FLOSS Weekly-episode), in that conversation I heard many of the concepts that later on I would find in books, frameworks and projects. But among all design decisions mentioned there, Convention Over Configuration was the one that triggered something in my head. In a short summary COC is a principle that describe a work approach in which most decisions in are defined by conventions and not by manual setups, such as URL-mapping in a web application, see Rails RESTFul URLs. Read more...

During the last few years I've started reading many books in all areas I'm interested on. Not only technology related, but also drama, history, and even comics. Reading was not pleasant for me for a while. I tried and tried during my teenage to be interested in books, because my brothers were avid readers, but I couldn't. I couldn't share their taste or interest for books, not even the intensity they have for them. Read more...

I'm a huge fan of conferences, I like documentaries and any kind of media that teaches something. And as a software developer I must say that there are lots of good resources for us to learn, to keep updated in technologies, concepts and general practices. One of the best presentations I've seen so far is Alan Kay's keynote at OOPSLA 97, I don't know if there are any transcripts of it, but it is very valuable to listen what the man has to say, recommended. Read more...