Leo’s Tech Blog

Ephemeral tweets. Running “cron” on cloud. Fly.io machines.

Part I: Why I want ephemeral tweets

Cargo Cult and Branch Names

I’ve seen (and worked on) projects which tell you to name branches with a chore or fix or feat prefix. Why is that?

If branches are short lived, I don’t get the point. Whatever goes after the prefix is the key part, which describes the branch. I don’t see…

Apple learns from Android

Posted by Leo Soto on April 6th, 2014.

[Alternative title: “Copying Ideas Has Always Been Fine”]

From an email by Steve Jobs in 2011:

[…] Strategy: catch up to Android where we are behind (notifications…

Agile, “Corrupted” and Proud

Posted by Leo Soto on March 31st, 2014.

Bob Martin defends the coupling between culture and practices in his latest blog post. According to him:

“You know the culture you are in by observing the practices of the people around…

The Future of Bitcoin

TL;DR: In my opinion, Bitcoin success depends mainly on beating credit cards, paypal and alike as a way to buy stuff online. It’s unclear whether it will beat them. Read more to see why.

The real goal

Posted by Leo Soto on May 23rd, 2013.

People who practiced waterfall methodologies were, at the time, looking for very local goals. For example: Rigorous, long, detailed, unambiguous specs were a desired result for braindead big-design-up-front people. A thorough manual test…

Patents, Litigations and the Russian Mafia

Posted by Leo Soto on October 22nd, 2012.

I just found this very interesting statement buried at the end of a somewhat unrelated article by Paul Graham:

“I once explained this to some founders who had…

It’s always a tradeoff

Posted by Leo Soto on August 11th, 2012.

I started my professional life in a company where I was the main force pushing for unit testing. Years later I worked in a company where TDD and Pair programming was the strict norm. Today I work in Continuum where we…

Convert MPG videos to MP4 (to edit them in iMovie)

Posted by Leo Soto on July 19th, 2012.

I just filmed a couple of clips to edit them later in iMovie. Surprisingly, the MPG files generated by my (consumer, low end) camera were not importable in iMovie.

Some OSX Command Line Stuff

Posted by Leo Soto on July 17th, 2012.

A couple of neat tricks that I use from time to time:

• $ mdfind: How could I be a Mac user for almost 3 years without knowing that you could use spotlight from the command line!?

Frameworkitis

Posted by Leo Soto on June 27th, 2012.

I think I have said before (either here or on twitter) that I’m starting to hate the oversimplified models that are pushed to us in Business School. Qualitative 2x2 matrices are their favorite tools: you focus on two binary dimensions of…

Chicago boys and the “imaginary” Microsoft monopoly

Posted by Leo Soto on June 22nd, 2012.

When you are a Chilean and you hear about something from Chicago school of economics, that rings close to you. Basically because what we call the “Chicago Boys” shaped our…

On hiring developers and the MBA mindset

Posted by Leo Soto on June 21st, 2012.

As part of my MBA studies I’m reading a paper about agency theory which contains the following paragraph:

“Even when screening is very costly, however, it may still be…

The MBA Developer?

Posted by Leo Soto on June 21st, 2012.

I’m currently doing an MBA. Yep, Master in Business Administration. Probably the last thing I would have thought I would study, but I love to be surprised by life. Long story short, I got a scholarship to do a Global MBA, which has…

Beware: Mobile Safari’s phone detection changes the DOM and can mess your CSS styles

Posted by Leo Soto on November 17th, 2011.

This is just a quick tip which hopefully can make someone save a few hours of pain: If you have a webpage which works…

Java Day Presentation: “Ruby, Programando para Humanos” (Spanish)

Featured

Posted by Leo Soto on June 15th, 2011.

Introducción a Ruby

Java Day Presentation: “El lado cool de Java” (Spanish)

Posted by Leo Soto on June 15th, 2011.

El Lado Cool de Java

The source code for the demos can be seen here

Originally published at techblog.leosoto.com on June 15, 2011.

Speaking at “Java Day”, sponsored by INACAP Osorno

Posted by Leo Soto on June 11th, 2011.

What!? Didn’t I hate Java?

Well. not exactly. I do think that it is used for a lot of tasks in which a more powerful language should be used instead…

The “Flex Compiler Shell Daemon” now works on Mac OS X”

Posted by Leo Soto on March 13th, 2011.

As an open source developer, it always make you happy when someone finds your code useful for his needs. Specially with those small utilities you develop for personal…

Essential Git commands

Posted by Leo Soto on February 5th, 2010.

Django-Jython 1.1.1 released

Posted by Leo Soto on January 18th, 2010.

Sounds like we are doing one release per month! Django-Jython 1.1.1 is now available, almost exactly one month after 1.1.0. Which is something I didn’t expect this time, as I’ve been really busy with my thesis…

Django-Jython 1.1.0 released!

Posted by Leo Soto on December 16th, 2009.

I’m proud to announce a new release of django-jython: 1.1.0.

We are practicing “release often” this time and as you can see on the release notes the only big change is compatibility…

Will Flash ever be fixed?

Posted by Leo Soto on December 7th, 2009.

I’ve done my share of Flash/Flex development. It’s great: You can build very cool UIs and know they will run in the same way on all the browsers. There is a (mostly) sane component model to create your own widgets…

On Culture

Posted by Leo Soto on December 3rd, 2009.

I’m back again to talk about the “Continuum’s compensation package”, given some feedback I’ve received.

True, most of points outlined there are much easier when the “whole company” consists of ~10 people. But that…