Git Field Guide

Git has become an indispensable tool of software development, regardless of which language or framework your team uses it. But in the other hand, it isn’t a tool that you can adopt, learn and be effective from day 1 - it takes time and guidance to master it, both in the command line the integrations and practices most teams have adopted. I’ve put up together a guide on how I see and use git on my day to day work, that can be used as a starting both for both newcomers who are trying to grok or more experienced professionals who want to make a more effective use of it on they work.

Experimenting with explicit contracts with Ruby

A few months back, José Valim started a conversation on overusing mocks and coupling between components. That made me interested on revisiting how I design my code and it has changed my approach to testing a bit in one of our current Ruby projects. A Tale of Two Adapters Back in November, I worked on integrating a payment gateway from scratch into one of our client projects, through a gem that abstracts the HTTP interface of this external service.

Books from 2015

2015 was the first year that I had a New Year’s Eve resolution to do: to read more books. I’m used to read a lot of blog posts and articles online but I wasn’t reading much outside of it (and most of what I was reading was strictly related to Rails and Front end anyway), so I set a goal of 12 books, technical or not, for 2015. I’ve got it Close Enough™ - 10 books in 12 months, and half way through the eleventh one.

Software is a multiverse

Predicting the future is hard, yet programmers like to repeat that Framework X or Language Y is the future of programming, the savior of all large scale projects and complex refactorings, and everything else is outdated, unfashion and awful (I’ve seen this with most client side frameworks, a dozen of programming languages and a couple of times when someone decided to dig deep on functional programming). But as our small history on dealing with computers can show us, reality doesn’t work like that.

Revising talks on code and craft

Over the last couple weeks I decided to get back to watching videos from conference talks, old and new, to deal with matters of the heart and help with some of the ongoing discussions in the current project I’m working on. I’ve always been a fan of non technical presentations that talked about we can improve the ways we make software and deal with code rather than just dumping new technologies and going through README sections.