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.