Building software since 8, got a PhD in Software Engineering and experience in research and industry across 4 countries
Last week I started discussing how I am working on improving my approach to diagrams generation, so that it could become acceptable for a Software Engineer. Currently I write a textual description of my entity-diagrams and I generate the corresponding images using Erd. Erd is a fantastic tool written in Haskell which parses its own DSL […]
As part of my current job at Groupon I have to create diagrams: those nice pictures which make project managers happy. I write basic UML diagrams (State diagrams and Activity diagrams) together with Entity-Relationship diagrams (yes, the ones for the DB). Yes, people want these pictures and I have to create them What Is Wrong […]
When I was working at TripAdvisor we had this internal book club. We started by reading Effective Java, this very famous book from Joshua Bloch. It is interesting and all but I think this book was so successful that most of his advices are now part of the Java culture: most of Java developers know them and sort […]
Recently I have been writing a RESTful service using Spark, a web framework for Java (which is not related to Apache Spark). When we planned to write this I was ready to the unavoidable Javaesque avalanche of interfaces, boilerplate code and deep hierarchies. I was very surprised to find out that an alternative world exists also for the […]
I am hearing a lot of persons interested in open-source and giving back to the community. I think it can be an exciting experience and it can be positive in many different ways: first of all more contributors mean better open-source software being produced and that is great, but it also means that the persons […]
Lately I have spent a lot of thoughts on building repeatable processes that can be trusted. I think that there lies the difference between being an happy hacker cracking out code for the fun of it and an happy hacker delivering something you can count on. What makes you a professional it is a […]
Recently I worked on improving the testing and the Continuos Integration (CI) configuration for a few open-source projects. In particular, I have spent some time on WorldEngine, a world generator written in Python, which uses a C++ extension named plate-tectonics. There have been several issues, the main two are: the deployment of the application […]
Unit tests: there are people out there surviving without, but in many cases you want to have this life insurance. Something to protect you from slipping an error, something to accompany your software also when you will have long forgotten it and someone else will have to figure out how to maintain that legacy […]
I happened to have a few hours free and I was looking for some coding to do. I thought about VLC, the media player which I have enjoyed so much using over the years and I decided that I wanted to contribute in some way. To start helping in such a complex process there are […]
In the last year I faced many surprises when running some well tested code on my dev-servers or my laptops. It is curious (and scaring) how code that has been widely used in production (sometimes for years) can still hide portability issues so that the first time you try that piece of software in slightly different conditions […]
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