When you are developing an application, is almost sure that you will have to deal with a relational database system. And if you are developing with a 'refactoring' point of view, your database structure will change from time to time. In many situations these changes have to be tracked and automatically applied for the different environments (development, integration, production) and I bet you are currently doing that manually, updating scripts and wiping databases back and forth. Read more...

Working on several projects at the same time is really exciting, you have to administer your time-sheet between tasks and work with different people. Hence the diversity, different technologies and environments. But there is something common between all those projects, dead code. Dead code can be classified in some few categories: Legacy code. Refactoring-result code. Patches.It's really frustrating for someone during development to see some code like this: What does the '0' mean? Read more...

After reading an interesting blog post from Robert Martin I started writing this nice algorithm in Ruby (I'm still learning it). As I'm a refactoring freak, here's the first version: Nasty right? Then the cleaned up release:

Un poco nostálgico para estos dias, pero me parece correcto definir este día como importante con respecto a mi vida. A pesar de que no soy una persona religiosa ni teológica, me he visto afectado por esta noticia: Muere el Hermano PabloCiertamente era una persona apreciada por mucha gente (no por mi persona) y sus palabras influenciaron a miles de personas alrededor del mundo. No es mi intención hacer apología de su trabajo, solamente quiero recalcar que su vida afectó la mía. Read more...

While working on some projects with different environments and behaviors, I started liking the notion of short-lived objects. Besides, I read a lot in several threads from StackOverflow > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/631919/short-lived-objects. I like this kind of objects because they are easy to control, debug, update, delete. The notion of having an long living object is state, but to keep that state among several instances and requests can be a real hell if you don't control it properly. Read more...

A few months ago I listened to FLOSS Weekly's episode about SQLite, and I wondered how this wonderful project was being managed. After checking for a while, I found that D. Richard Hipp has developed his own distributed SCM based on the very reliable SQLite. In a comparison with Git and Hg (which I have used), it is more than a SCM, it is a whole project-development space. Some of its features include: Read more...

After using the Play framework for a while, and reading several good articles, I started using some of the concepts that have been around the cloud for some time. One of them took my attention, the one claiming: "Never use strings in Java" Initially I found this really stupid, how can you program without strings? But after applying the concept for some months, it has showed me how wrong I was. Read more...

Among software development there are a lot of resources, a lot of people worth of looking at it, but to find out who is good enough to follow may take some time. That's why's I'm summarizing the people I enjoy reading/listening to in any topic related to software engineering and development in general. Robert C. Martin The 'Master Craftsman', I've read some of his books and are pure gold, his experience and knowledge are outstanding, and you can still see him coding! Read more...

Some basic but very useful burndown chart we used for building a house model.