It's been more than a year since I started my new endeavor here in Spain, moving from Brazil and starting a whole new life - both personal and professional. Time for a little retrospective. More precisely, a retrospective about the agile practices here at the company. When I first started out back in January '08 the company thought they were agile. NOT! They did adopt some XP practices but just to give you an idea, I'm gonna focus on just one: stand-up meetings.

I recently wrote an article on our company blog where I explained how we evaluate Machine Learning models at RecordPoint – if you haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend you do so before proceeding. Since its publishing, I received a number of comments asking me to clarify the concepts presented with concrete examples. The original article is light on code by design as the audience for the company blog isn’t always that technical.

I solved a few of the problems on Project Euler in the past, both in Java and Ruby, and thought it would be useful to redo them in Clojure, thus improving my skills on the language’s core functions and libraries. Today I’ll share problem 4. Go ahead and read it but here’s the meat of it: “Find the largest palindrome made from the product of two 3-digit numbers." From this statement we can tell two things: (1) we’ll need a function that can tell whether a number is a palindrome or not and (2) that the largest palindrome is given by the product of two numbers between 100 and 999, inclusive.

Last week our current client - ninemsn - ran the 3rd edition of their HackDay. It’s akin to Atlassian’s ShipIt days so if you’re not familiar with the concept, you should check their page but here’s the gist: We’re given 24 hours to work on whatever we like as long as it’s related somehow to the business We’re also free to use any technology we want

I said final classes are evil and that post got some attention with interesting comments. Maybe because of the title and the tone I wrote it, a few comments didn't get my real intention and perhaps I should have been more explicit about it. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. :) Anyway, I thought I'd expand a little more on that subject, explaining my motivation to write that post and going through the topics I think were raised by my dear readers.

Update: Go ahead and read this post in its entirety - including the comments. Then, read my other post where I expand the subject a little more. -- Every now and then I still do some Java coding. And I actually like it. I spent several years of my career developing primarily in Java and am very keen about the language. I've been a fierce defender of it these days, specially with the wave of popularity of other languages such as Ruby and Groovy.

Dependency injection - DI -  is a great thing. Really. The hability to tweak implementations without touching your code is awesome and the DI frameworks, like spring, saves you a lot of coding. No more service locators stuff.

But, and there is always a but, you're left with a bunch of XML configuration. And I hate it. Not that XML files are bad... the thing is that everything nowadays has its own set of XML configurarion files. And Spring is not different.

Hoje fiz a versão beta da nova prova de arquiteto da Sun e eis algumas impressões:

- É longa e cansativa... fato justificável se levar-mos em consideração o fato de ser uma prova em estado beta. Ela possui mais questões que a versão final. São 153 questões no total, em 4h e 30min.

Nesse primeiro post vou falar um pouco sobre meu novo trabalho. Na verdade, sobre um problema que encontramos lá.

Dentre diversas coisas que estamos fazendo, como migrações por exemplo, estou ajudando na elaboração da arquitetura que irá abrigar as novas aplicações desenvolvidas na empresa.

A year and four months ago I joined Atlassian to pursue a very exciting opportunity: to deliver realtime collaborative editing to Confluence. I have talked about it last year at EuroClojure and this year at QCon Brazil. Even Cognitect wrote a few words about it. In a nutshell this involved writing Clojure code all day to build an awesome service we call Synchrony. Synchrony is capable of realtime data synchronisation - not just collaborative editing - and as such its applications are many!

Early last week I had the chance to attend the Symposium on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology organised by UNSW. I wasn’t aware that UNSW was so heavily involved in the community until this event and have since learned about their interest group which has been going on for a while. The talks had a healthy mix of research and industry case studies with subjects ranging from the technical challenges of current blockchain implementations to the legal implications of distributed ledger technology.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you read my summary of Day 1 first. Morning Panel Day 2 started with a morning panel with: Paul Fox from Blockchain.capital Leon Gerard Vandenberg from RightsFusion Pty Ltd & Solara Oliver Harvey from ASIC Ross Buckley from UNSW Law The panelists took turns in giving their views around blockchain, investments and regulation, leading into a Q&A at the end. I was running late to this session and believe I may have missed Ross’ individual slot.

I’m extremely happy to let everyone know my book, Clojure Reactive Programming, has finally been published! You can get it at the publisher’s website or on Amazon. I had a great time writing it and I truly hope you find it useful! I’ve met a few authors here and there and I heard more than once that a book is never really finished. I now know what they mean. The book doesn’t cover everything I wanted to write about due to time and space limitations.

A bit late for a EuroClojure 2014 post but I suppose “better late than never” applies here. The best part of every conference is the networking. Meeting new and interesting people is priceless and I did plenty of that - mostly over Polish beer and food. Polish beer isn’t the greatest but if you must have it, better stick to Żywiec. It’s widely available and was the one which didn’t give me a headache :) - I’ve been told there are amazing microbreweries though I didn’t get a chance to try any while in Krákow.

Last night I attended the Adobe User Group here in Sydney. That might strike some of you as a big surprise given my relationship with Adobe is pretty much limited to fiddling with Photoshop/Lightroom to get my photos looking nice. However the reason for which I attended the meetup is that Sean Corfield - a prolific member of the Clojure community - gave a presentation on how he introduced and migrated most of his backend code at World Singles from CFML to Clojure - hence my interest.

Last night we held the first ever meetup for the Sydney Clojure User Group! When I decided to start running the meetups I had no idea we’d end up with 37 people on the first night! What a great turn out! As for the content, here’s what you missed: Running Clojure apps on Heroku - Lincoln Stoll (@lstoll) Linc works for Heroku but ended up not spending a whole lot of time talking about that - instead he showed us how to build a simple web application using Compojure, a small Clojure web framework.

As I promised in my previous post, here are the highlights of what Ola Bini had to say about Clojure/conj. Clojure/conj is the largest gathering of clojure programmers, hackers and enthusiasts, with a single track of talks spanning three days. Ola selected his favorite talks and summarised each one of them. The actual slides for each one of the talks can be found on github. You can find Ola’s slides here.

Update: We now have a [Meetup.com page][9]. Head over there to learn about our next meetups as well as to RSVP to them. We’ll discontinue usage of the wiki for registering attendees, in favor of the new site. Everything else on this post however still holds. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll have noticed I started running internal Clojure meetups/hack nights at ThoughtWorks here in Sydney a while ago. While being closed, we’ve already had one international speaker - [Ola Bini][7] - come and share his experience as an attendee at [Clojure/conj][8].

A year and four months ago I joined Atlassian to pursue a very exciting opportunity: to deliver realtime collaborative editing to Confluence. I have talked about it last year at EuroClojure and this year at QCon Brazil. Even Cognitect wrote a few words about it. In a nutshell this involved writing Clojure code all day to build an awesome service we call Synchrony. Synchrony is capable of realtime data synchronisation - not just collaborative editing - and as such its applications are many!

In the beginning Nearly 4 years ago I founded the Sydney Clojure User Group. I had been playing with Clojure for a little while and started a small study group to learn more. Initially this group was private and held at the ThoughtWorks office. After a couple of meetups and conversations I decided to open up the group to the public and then realised we weren’t the only ones interested in Clojure and, even more important, interested in meeting like-minded people, share experiences and help each other.

I’m extremely happy to let everyone know my book, Clojure Reactive Programming, has finally been published! You can get it at the publisher’s website or on Amazon. I had a great time writing it and I truly hope you find it useful! I’ve met a few authors here and there and I heard more than once that a book is never really finished. I now know what they mean. The book doesn’t cover everything I wanted to write about due to time and space limitations.

This past weekend - 19-20th of December - a group of highly motivated individuals gave up their Friday night and their entire Saturday simply to learn how to code in Clojure! It was the first ever ClojureBridge edition in Sydney and if you haven’t heard of it before, its goal is to increase diversity in the Clojure community. It does so by offering free workshops targeted at beginners. You should totally read Julian Gamble’s post about the event for details.

A bit late for a EuroClojure 2014 post but I suppose “better late than never” applies here. The best part of every conference is the networking. Meeting new and interesting people is priceless and I did plenty of that - mostly over Polish beer and food. Polish beer isn’t the greatest but if you must have it, better stick to Żywiec. It’s widely available and was the one which didn’t give me a headache :) - I’ve been told there are amazing microbreweries though I didn’t get a chance to try any while in Krákow.

I released bouncer in April last year and since then it has had a small but steady growth in usage. So much so that I received some community feedback in the form of emails and pull requests which is simply great! The latest and most substantial pull request, submitted by Vadim Platonov, added the ability to customise validation messages in anyway you like, as you can see in the section Internationalization and customised error messages of the README.

I’m sitting in the Lobby of the Hilton in Boston and since my flight back to Australia isn’t for a few hours I thought I’d write my experience report while everything is still fresh in my mind. CUFP - Commercial Users of Functional Programming - is a Workshop-like conference targeting the practically-minded functional programming community. As it’s stated on their website, “The CUFP workshop is a place where people can see how others are using functional programming to solve real world problems […]".

This post is part of a series about Chris Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures. You can see all posts in the series by visiting the functional-data-structures category in this blog. Recently I had some free time to come back to Purely Functional Data Structures and implement a new data structure: Red-black trees. Red-black trees Red-black trees are a type of self-balancing binary search tree. Back when I first learned the balancing algorithm used in operations such as insert and delete, I remember it being a particularly tricky one.

Long gone are the days when systems needed to do only one thing at a time. Concurrency is the word but it often leads to complex code, dealing with locks, mutexes etc… There are several different abstractions which allows us to both model and think about asynchronous code in a more sane fashion: futures, promises and events/callbacks are but a few of them. I won’t get into the merits - or lack thereof - of these alternatives in this post but rather focus on a different alternative: Communicating Sequential Processes - CSP.

I hinted at LambdaJam Australia back in my 2012 Highlights post and the dates are fast approaching so I thought appropriate to blog about it once more. YOW! LambdaJam is a conference targeted at intermediate and advanced functional programmers and is organised in talks, jams and workshops. Talks are the traditional format and are 30 minutes long; Workshops aim to introduce a specific subjects to attendees in great detail and are up to two hours long; Jams are hands-on sessions.

Last week while attending Clojure/West in Portland I came across a paper called Why calculating is better than scheming. In a nutshell, this paper is a critique to Abelson and Sussman‘s classic textbook SICP - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, used by MIT for many years to teach their introductory programming course. If you haven’t read SICP, you should. It’s an amazing book. It uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, as the vehicle to present fundamental programming concepts.

This post is part of a series about Chris Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures. You can see all posts in the series by visiting the functional-data-structures category in this blog. Last year I started reading a book called Purely Functional Data Structures. It’s a fascinating book and if you’ve ever wondered how Clojure’s persistent data structures work, it’s mandatory reading. However, all code samples in the book are written in ML - with Haskell versions in the end of the book.

Today I’m releasing bouncer, which was extracted from a project I’ve been working on. It’s a validation library for Clojure apps and it lets you write code like this: (def person {:name "Leo"}) (validate person :name required :age [required number]) If you’d like to see more examples and a detailed guide check out the github repository. The README should get you started. This post however isn’t only about announcing bouncer. It’s also about the motivation and implementation details behind it.

This is Part IV of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors Part III - Monoids Part IV - Monads (this post) A quick recap In Part I we learned about Functors, which are things that can be mapped over using a normal function - fmap is used for that.

This is Part III of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors Part III - Monoids (this post) Part IV - Monads Monoids Simply put, Monoids describe types containing a binary function and an identity value. When applied to the identity value and a random value x, said function leaves its argument x untouched, returning it as a result.

This is Part II of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors (this post) Part III - Monoids Part IV - Monads Applicative Functors In Part I I talked a little about Haskell type signatures and introduced Functors, which provide a way to map standard functions over values which are wrapped inside a Functor - we used fmap for that.

Today I join the already bloated group of people who wrote monad tutorials. It’s a bit of a ritual, really. Different than most tutorials though I aim to take a different approach. The good news is that I won’t be comparing monads to burritos :) People say one needs to have his/her own epiphany in order to understand Monads and reading explanations from others is of little help. My goal is to disprove that.

Recently I upgraded the clojure project I’m working on to Leiningen 2 in order to start using nrepl - since swank-clojure is now deprecated. Little did I know this would lead me to a small debugging adventure. Heroku I use Heroku as my deployment platform and my project had been running on it for a few weeks without any issues. I also use Heroku’s PostgreSQL solution. However, by upgrading to Leiningen 2, my project started throwing some weird exceptions during deployment - it couldn’t connect to my database any longer.

Last night I attended the Adobe User Group here in Sydney. That might strike some of you as a big surprise given my relationship with Adobe is pretty much limited to fiddling with Photoshop/Lightroom to get my photos looking nice. However the reason for which I attended the meetup is that Sean Corfield - a prolific member of the Clojure community - gave a presentation on how he introduced and migrated most of his backend code at World Singles from CFML to Clojure - hence my interest.

Last night we held the first ever meetup for the Sydney Clojure User Group! When I decided to start running the meetups I had no idea we’d end up with 37 people on the first night! What a great turn out! As for the content, here’s what you missed: Running Clojure apps on Heroku - Lincoln Stoll (@lstoll) Linc works for Heroku but ended up not spending a whole lot of time talking about that - instead he showed us how to build a simple web application using Compojure, a small Clojure web framework.

I solved a few of the problems on Project Euler in the past, both in Java and Ruby, and thought it would be useful to redo them in Clojure, thus improving my skills on the language’s core functions and libraries. Today I’ll share problem 4. Go ahead and read it but here’s the meat of it: “Find the largest palindrome made from the product of two 3-digit numbers." From this statement we can tell two things: (1) we’ll need a function that can tell whether a number is a palindrome or not and (2) that the largest palindrome is given by the product of two numbers between 100 and 999, inclusive.

As I promised in my previous post, here are the highlights of what Ola Bini had to say about Clojure/conj. Clojure/conj is the largest gathering of clojure programmers, hackers and enthusiasts, with a single track of talks spanning three days. Ola selected his favorite talks and summarised each one of them. The actual slides for each one of the talks can be found on github. You can find Ola’s slides here.

Update: We now have a [Meetup.com page][9]. Head over there to learn about our next meetups as well as to RSVP to them. We’ll discontinue usage of the wiki for registering attendees, in favor of the new site. Everything else on this post however still holds. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll have noticed I started running internal Clojure meetups/hack nights at ThoughtWorks here in Sydney a while ago. While being closed, we’ve already had one international speaker - [Ola Bini][7] - come and share his experience as an attendee at [Clojure/conj][8].

Last Tuesday we held ThoughtWorks' Australia first Clojure meetup here in Sydney. It was a lot of fun so I thought I'd share a few words about it. The format was rather simple. First, we had a brief introduction to the language syntax by breaking down a couple of snippets and understanding how each bit worked. For instance, this is one of those snippets: ;;word count (reduce #(if (%1 %2) (assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2))) (assoc %1 %2 1)) {} (clojure.

Yesterday I organized our first CodingDojo here at the company and I'm glad to say it was a great success! The problem chosen was the Karate Chop, from Dave Thomas' Code Kata. As it was also my first time organizing a Dojo, we took some time to get things straight, explain everyone the rules and start coding. Nothing that would compromise the experience, though. The rules were basically the ones of a RandoriKata and as a mechanism for switching pairs we chose the TimeBox with a limit of 5 minutes.

Long gone are the days when systems needed to do only one thing at a time. Concurrency is the word but it often leads to complex code, dealing with locks, mutexes etc… There are several different abstractions which allows us to both model and think about asynchronous code in a more sane fashion: futures, promises and events/callbacks are but a few of them. I won’t get into the merits - or lack thereof - of these alternatives in this post but rather focus on a different alternative: Communicating Sequential Processes - CSP.

So I had just finished writing this feature. I was confident it’d work - after all I had a good level of tests around it. It sounded like yet another successful deployment. One week in and something starts breaking. It was hard to track down but at the end I realised it was caused by having concurrent processes running in parallel. That’s what happened in a recent production release at our current client.

Early last week I had the chance to attend the Symposium on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology organised by UNSW. I wasn’t aware that UNSW was so heavily involved in the community until this event and have since learned about their interest group which has been going on for a while. The talks had a healthy mix of research and industry case studies with subjects ranging from the technical challenges of current blockchain implementations to the legal implications of distributed ledger technology.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you read my summary of Day 1 first. Morning Panel Day 2 started with a morning panel with: Paul Fox from Blockchain.capital Leon Gerard Vandenberg from RightsFusion Pty Ltd & Solara Oliver Harvey from ASIC Ross Buckley from UNSW Law The panelists took turns in giving their views around blockchain, investments and regulation, leading into a Q&A at the end. I was running late to this session and believe I may have missed Ross’ individual slot.

A bit late for a EuroClojure 2014 post but I suppose “better late than never” applies here. The best part of every conference is the networking. Meeting new and interesting people is priceless and I did plenty of that - mostly over Polish beer and food. Polish beer isn’t the greatest but if you must have it, better stick to Żywiec. It’s widely available and was the one which didn’t give me a headache :) - I’ve been told there are amazing microbreweries though I didn’t get a chance to try any while in Krákow.

I hinted at LambdaJam Australia back in my 2012 Highlights post and the dates are fast approaching so I thought appropriate to blog about it once more. YOW! LambdaJam is a conference targeted at intermediate and advanced functional programmers and is organised in talks, jams and workshops. Talks are the traditional format and are 30 minutes long; Workshops aim to introduce a specific subjects to attendees in great detail and are up to two hours long; Jams are hands-on sessions.

I was in São Paulo last week - the 3rd and 4th of November - for RubyConf Brazil. For those who don’t know, RubyConf Brazil is the evolution of Rails Summit Latin America, where I had the privilege to speak in 2009. This year though, all bets were off. Fabio Akita and Locaweb put together a great event, with over 700 attendees and about 30 speakers split in two streams and two awesome days.

{% img /assets/images/rs2009.jpg %} Rails Summit finished a few days ago and I have only one word to describe it: Awesome! I met some really cool people, discussed a whole bunch of technical subjects and managed not to get so nervous in my first presentation ever - I'm not counting internal presentations I've done for my team... My slides and source files can be found here. Feel free to contact me with questions if you got any.

I'll be speaking at this year's Rails Summit Latin America in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It will be a good opportunity to meet some amazing people and visit friends back home! :) Overall I'll be spending 12 days in Brazil, with 2 of them dedicated to the conference. The other 10 I'll be in Rio de Janeiro visiting my family and friends. I strongly advise you to spend some time in Rio too, if at all possible.

As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.

Tomorrow I'll be once more heading London for this year's QCon. As usual, the schedule looks amazing and I'll try to keep you all posted about what's going on there. Oh and if any of you guys is going and wanna meet up for a geek talk and a couple of beers, just send me a message. Cheers! :)

I'm back in Madrid again after the RailsConf and I think it's time to say something about it. :) First off, the infrastructure provided by the conference was really great. The rooms, WiFi connection, food... Really well organized. Now to the sessions, highlights: Tutorials (Tuesday) - Meta-programming Ruby for fun and profit (Neal Ford, Patrick Farley) The old and good techniques that made Ruby so powerful. Here Neal and Patrick walked us through the main tricks to meta programming like open classes - and conditionally open them - , dynamically define methods, sending messages to objects and how Ruby can help test your Java code in a much easier way.

The title says it already. On monday I'll be going to Berlin to attend this year´s RailsConf. This will be my first one and of course my expectations are pretty high! As usual, after the conference I'll try and give a summary of what happened there, providing as much content as I can. Anyone else's going??? :) C u there!

Behold latin american railers! This year we will have the Rails Summit Latin America on October, 15th and 16th, in São Paulo, Brazil. It's by far the biggest Rails event we've ever had, including many of the speakers that were present at RailsConf. Fábio Akita is also one of the speakers and provides more details on his blog. If you're a assumed rails geek don't miss the opportunity to hear from the big names and to know a beautiful country like Brazil.

As some of you know I went to the European Ruby Conf in Prague, this year. The event was awesome and it's good to know they finally made available the majority of the slides, here. They also published Matz's keynote, and more videos from the conference are being edited right now, so stay tuned to their home page! Enjoy!

Most of last QCon's presentations are available for download here. Highlights to Ola Bini's on JRuby(pdf) and Randy Shoup's on eBay's architectural principles(pdf). And while we're talking about JRuby, it's impressive how it's becoming a recurrent and big subject. Fast. It had its own small space at big event like QCon and in the last Euruko in Prague, we had a presentation by the JRuby Core Developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.

On friday I'll be heading Prague for the European RubyConf. Anyone is going? :) Almost 300 attendees already registered for the event. And a few very interesting people will be speaking there like Matz and DHH (this one, through skype). Besides that, the organization staff is scheduling 2 parties, friday and saturday, for the attendees. Networking comes to mind, doesn't it? I think it will be a great opportunity to meet interesting and bright people.

Today was the first day of the conference and it started with a tutorial about DSL's with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons. We also had as attendants Ola Bini, core developer of JRuby, and others. My expectations were pretty high and the presentation didn't let me down. I'll try to put here toghether my impressions and some notes I took while I was there. Marting Fowler started discussing what DSL's are and giving some examples that many of us use in our day to day Job.

Next week I'll be at QCon, in London, so if any of you are going to the conference and would like meet up for a couple of beers and a tech talk, please don't hesitate to drop a message. For those of you who have never heard of QCon before, it is a really nice event to play along with some of the most popular names in the software engineering community.

Recently I wrote an internal blog post at work titled On the traps of working from home. While the content isn’t new it was triggered by the recent events around COVID-19 and the fact that all of a sudden the whole company was working from home, distributed across multiple timezones. I was worried that we may default to having more meetings instead of better communication and writing this post was my attempt to share how I tend to deal with distractions.

Recently I wrote an internal blog post at work titled On the traps of working from home. While the content isn’t new it was triggered by the recent events around COVID-19 and the fact that all of a sudden the whole company was working from home, distributed across multiple timezones. I was worried that we may default to having more meetings instead of better communication and writing this post was my attempt to share how I tend to deal with distractions.

Today was the first day of the conference and it started with a tutorial about DSL's with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons. We also had as attendants Ola Bini, core developer of JRuby, and others. My expectations were pretty high and the presentation didn't let me down. I'll try to put here toghether my impressions and some notes I took while I was there. Marting Fowler started discussing what DSL's are and giving some examples that many of us use in our day to day Job.

A bit late for a EuroClojure 2014 post but I suppose “better late than never” applies here. The best part of every conference is the networking. Meeting new and interesting people is priceless and I did plenty of that - mostly over Polish beer and food. Polish beer isn’t the greatest but if you must have it, better stick to Żywiec. It’s widely available and was the one which didn’t give me a headache :) - I’ve been told there are amazing microbreweries though I didn’t get a chance to try any while in Krákow.

Aqui no trabalho atualmente temos uma grande barreira com relação ao software livre. Pensei em escrever aqui alguma coisa sobre as barreiras que as empresas colocam quando o assunto é esse porém o Cleuton já fez isso, e ficou muito bom. Vale a visita!

This post is part of a series about Chris Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures. You can see all posts in the series by visiting the functional-data-structures category in this blog. Recently I had some free time to come back to Purely Functional Data Structures and implement a new data structure: Red-black trees. Red-black trees Red-black trees are a type of self-balancing binary search tree. Back when I first learned the balancing algorithm used in operations such as insert and delete, I remember it being a particularly tricky one.

This post is part of a series about Chris Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures. You can see all posts in the series by visiting the functional-data-structures category in this blog. Last year I started reading a book called Purely Functional Data Structures. It’s a fascinating book and if you’ve ever wondered how Clojure’s persistent data structures work, it’s mandatory reading. However, all code samples in the book are written in ML - with Haskell versions in the end of the book.

I’m extremely happy to let everyone know my book, Clojure Reactive Programming, has finally been published! You can get it at the publisher’s website or on Amazon. I had a great time writing it and I truly hope you find it useful! I’ve met a few authors here and there and I heard more than once that a book is never really finished. I now know what they mean. The book doesn’t cover everything I wanted to write about due to time and space limitations.

A bit late for a EuroClojure 2014 post but I suppose “better late than never” applies here. The best part of every conference is the networking. Meeting new and interesting people is priceless and I did plenty of that - mostly over Polish beer and food. Polish beer isn’t the greatest but if you must have it, better stick to Żywiec. It’s widely available and was the one which didn’t give me a headache :) - I’ve been told there are amazing microbreweries though I didn’t get a chance to try any while in Krákow.

I’ve been learning Scala for my current client project and I find writing to be a great tool to test my understanding of any given topic. This means there might be a few Scala posts coming up soon as I keep learning interesting things. Today I’ll be exploring a few different ways in which you can compose programs. I’ll be using Scalaz in this post. The examples that follow all deal with Vehicles - more specifically makes and parts:

I’m sitting in the Lobby of the Hilton in Boston and since my flight back to Australia isn’t for a few hours I thought I’d write my experience report while everything is still fresh in my mind. CUFP - Commercial Users of Functional Programming - is a Workshop-like conference targeting the practically-minded functional programming community. As it’s stated on their website, “The CUFP workshop is a place where people can see how others are using functional programming to solve real world problems […]".

This post is part of a series about Chris Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures. You can see all posts in the series by visiting the functional-data-structures category in this blog. Recently I had some free time to come back to Purely Functional Data Structures and implement a new data structure: Red-black trees. Red-black trees Red-black trees are a type of self-balancing binary search tree. Back when I first learned the balancing algorithm used in operations such as insert and delete, I remember it being a particularly tricky one.

I hinted at LambdaJam Australia back in my 2012 Highlights post and the dates are fast approaching so I thought appropriate to blog about it once more. YOW! LambdaJam is a conference targeted at intermediate and advanced functional programmers and is organised in talks, jams and workshops. Talks are the traditional format and are 30 minutes long; Workshops aim to introduce a specific subjects to attendees in great detail and are up to two hours long; Jams are hands-on sessions.

Last week while attending Clojure/West in Portland I came across a paper called Why calculating is better than scheming. In a nutshell, this paper is a critique to Abelson and Sussman‘s classic textbook SICP - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, used by MIT for many years to teach their introductory programming course. If you haven’t read SICP, you should. It’s an amazing book. It uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, as the vehicle to present fundamental programming concepts.

This post is part of a series about Chris Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures. You can see all posts in the series by visiting the functional-data-structures category in this blog. Last year I started reading a book called Purely Functional Data Structures. It’s a fascinating book and if you’ve ever wondered how Clojure’s persistent data structures work, it’s mandatory reading. However, all code samples in the book are written in ML - with Haskell versions in the end of the book.

Today I’m releasing bouncer, which was extracted from a project I’ve been working on. It’s a validation library for Clojure apps and it lets you write code like this: (def person {:name "Leo"}) (validate person :name required :age [required number]) If you’d like to see more examples and a detailed guide check out the github repository. The README should get you started. This post however isn’t only about announcing bouncer. It’s also about the motivation and implementation details behind it.

This is Part IV of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors Part III - Monoids Part IV - Monads (this post) A quick recap In Part I we learned about Functors, which are things that can be mapped over using a normal function - fmap is used for that.

This is Part III of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors Part III - Monoids (this post) Part IV - Monads Monoids Simply put, Monoids describe types containing a binary function and an identity value. When applied to the identity value and a random value x, said function leaves its argument x untouched, returning it as a result.

This is Part II of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors (this post) Part III - Monoids Part IV - Monads Applicative Functors In Part I I talked a little about Haskell type signatures and introduced Functors, which provide a way to map standard functions over values which are wrapped inside a Functor - we used fmap for that.

Today I join the already bloated group of people who wrote monad tutorials. It’s a bit of a ritual, really. Different than most tutorials though I aim to take a different approach. The good news is that I won’t be comparing monads to burritos :) People say one needs to have his/her own epiphany in order to understand Monads and reading explanations from others is of little help. My goal is to disprove that.

Recently I upgraded the clojure project I’m working on to Leiningen 2 in order to start using nrepl - since swank-clojure is now deprecated. Little did I know this would lead me to a small debugging adventure. Heroku I use Heroku as my deployment platform and my project had been running on it for a few weeks without any issues. I also use Heroku’s PostgreSQL solution. However, by upgrading to Leiningen 2, my project started throwing some weird exceptions during deployment - it couldn’t connect to my database any longer.

Last night I attended the Adobe User Group here in Sydney. That might strike some of you as a big surprise given my relationship with Adobe is pretty much limited to fiddling with Photoshop/Lightroom to get my photos looking nice. However the reason for which I attended the meetup is that Sean Corfield - a prolific member of the Clojure community - gave a presentation on how he introduced and migrated most of his backend code at World Singles from CFML to Clojure - hence my interest.

This will come as no surprise to my closest friends, but I am a long time game development admirer. Although I've never done anything professionally I did spend some time in the past studying this amazingly interesting field - it's my dark hobby. As hardware evolves and gamers demand more and more reality from their consoles, the game development industry is one of the few that basically didn't suffer with the latest economic crisis.

I’ve been working fulltime with Git for a while now and I’ve noticed a pattern of commands that emerge every so often, but not often enough that would make me remember them. That’s why I decided to post them here so I know where to look in the future. And of course they can turn out to be useful to someone else too. So without further ado, here they are:

For those who don't know Git is a version control system developed by Linus Torvalds. It's main difference from other tools like SVN and CVS is the fact that it's distributed. Recently I gave a workshop about Git here at the company where I walked through the most common cases I usually see when working in a team and thought about posting a summary of the commands used in the workshop.

- Overall results First off, I'd like to thank everyone who voted on this poll. With a total of 236 votes, here is the summary of the first two questions: - Are you currently working with or researching about language alternatives for the JVM? - e.g. JRuby, Scala, Groovy {% img /assets/images/scala_improvements.png %} Tooling. The majority of comment urge for better tooling and IDE support. That simple. - Others

I’m sitting in the Lobby of the Hilton in Boston and since my flight back to Australia isn’t for a few hours I thought I’d write my experience report while everything is still fresh in my mind. CUFP - Commercial Users of Functional Programming - is a Workshop-like conference targeting the practically-minded functional programming community. As it’s stated on their website, “The CUFP workshop is a place where people can see how others are using functional programming to solve real world problems […]".

Last week while attending Clojure/West in Portland I came across a paper called Why calculating is better than scheming. In a nutshell, this paper is a critique to Abelson and Sussman‘s classic textbook SICP - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, used by MIT for many years to teach their introductory programming course. If you haven’t read SICP, you should. It’s an amazing book. It uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, as the vehicle to present fundamental programming concepts.

This is Part IV of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors Part III - Monoids Part IV - Monads (this post) A quick recap In Part I we learned about Functors, which are things that can be mapped over using a normal function - fmap is used for that.

This is Part III of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors Part III - Monoids (this post) Part IV - Monads Monoids Simply put, Monoids describe types containing a binary function and an identity value. When applied to the identity value and a random value x, said function leaves its argument x untouched, returning it as a result.

This is Part II of my Monads tutorial. Make sure you read the previous parts: Part I - Functors Part II - Applicative Functors (this post) Part III - Monoids Part IV - Monads Applicative Functors In Part I I talked a little about Haskell type signatures and introduced Functors, which provide a way to map standard functions over values which are wrapped inside a Functor - we used fmap for that.

Today I join the already bloated group of people who wrote monad tutorials. It’s a bit of a ritual, really. Different than most tutorials though I aim to take a different approach. The good news is that I won’t be comparing monads to burritos :) People say one needs to have his/her own epiphany in order to understand Monads and reading explanations from others is of little help. My goal is to disprove that.

This is just another one of those boring weekends where I felt the need to hack on something. If you follow Google Chrome's blog you're probably aware of this little nifty feature they started to implement in their latest builds: HTML5 voice recognition. And that's when it struck me: "Hey, what if I use that and tweet with my voice instead of typing?" The result of this hacking session is LoudParrot, a sample Rails app that shows how to do just that.

Last week our current client - ninemsn - ran the 3rd edition of their HackDay. It’s akin to Atlassian’s ShipIt days so if you’re not familiar with the concept, you should check their page but here’s the gist: We’re given 24 hours to work on whatever we like as long as it’s related somehow to the business We’re also free to use any technology we want

UPDATE: As pointed to me in this commment, sym links aren’t necessary for Waxsim anymore. Check Jonathan Penn’s fork on github. After coming back from my holidays in China - which were awesome - I had no downtime at ThoughtWorks and started at a brand new client/project - a much needed change from what I had been working on lately. It’s an iOS project, more specifically an iPad app and that’s pretty much all I can tell you about it.

UPDATE: As pointed to me in this commment, sym links aren’t necessary for Waxsim anymore. Check Jonathan Penn’s fork on github. After coming back from my holidays in China - which were awesome - I had no downtime at ThoughtWorks and started at a brand new client/project - a much needed change from what I had been working on lately. It’s an iOS project, more specifically an iPad app and that’s pretty much all I can tell you about it.

UPDATE: As pointed to me in this commment, sym links aren’t necessary for Waxsim anymore. Check Jonathan Penn’s fork on github. After coming back from my holidays in China - which were awesome - I had no downtime at ThoughtWorks and started at a brand new client/project - a much needed change from what I had been working on lately. It’s an iOS project, more specifically an iPad app and that’s pretty much all I can tell you about it.

This will come as no surprise to my closest friends, but I am a long time game development admirer. Although I've never done anything professionally I did spend some time in the past studying this amazingly interesting field - it's my dark hobby. As hardware evolves and gamers demand more and more reality from their consoles, the game development industry is one of the few that basically didn't suffer with the latest economic crisis.

I said final classes are evil and that post got some attention with interesting comments. Maybe because of the title and the tone I wrote it, a few comments didn't get my real intention and perhaps I should have been more explicit about it. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. :) Anyway, I thought I'd expand a little more on that subject, explaining my motivation to write that post and going through the topics I think were raised by my dear readers.

- Overall results First off, I'd like to thank everyone who voted on this poll. With a total of 236 votes, here is the summary of the first two questions: - Are you currently working with or researching about language alternatives for the JVM? - e.g. JRuby, Scala, Groovy {% img /assets/images/scala_improvements.png %} Tooling. The majority of comment urge for better tooling and IDE support. That simple. - Others

The motivation for this post came from a couple of messages I've seen on the jruby's google group and because I think it's pretty cool to share how we tackled this problem. - A little bit of context We, as a vast amount of people out there, have legacy Java code. A lot. In our case this legacy is pretty much crucial to our business. We can't just trash it and start from scratch.

I've just watched a video from Google IO where Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons went through some of the aspects that involves the development of an application for the cloud - focusing on the JVM. In terms of the Google App Engine, you don't have access to a relational database, thing I found out when I first tried it. Instead you get a Big Table. Martin put out a good analogy and you can just think of it as a nested hash map.

Wanna help improve JRuby? Make sure you read this post by Charles Nutter first. There he explains how to run Ruby specs with JRuby. Start with fixing Ruby specs is a great way to get acquainted with the code. And it’s also a important task in order to make sure JRuby is the most complete and compatible ruby implementation out there. But before you get your hands dirty, it will be a lot easier if you can actually debug JRuby’s source while fixing any specs - or bugs/features for that matter.

As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.

As many of you know the new language supported at GAE now is Java, as officially announced on their blog. As a Ruby/Rails developer you might not be interested on it but here is a reason you should be: JRuby. It was only a matter of time until we saw some people deploying JRuby on Rails apps on GAE, like Ola Bini's mini blog app. Guess that was the first one really, as he was beta testing the service in secret.

Update: Go ahead and read this post in its entirety - including the comments. Then, read my other post where I expand the subject a little more. -- Every now and then I still do some Java coding. And I actually like it. I spent several years of my career developing primarily in Java and am very keen about the language. I've been a fierce defender of it these days, specially with the wave of popularity of other languages such as Ruby and Groovy.

This is a very useful tip I shared a while ago at the office and turned out to be extremely useful.

If you work with java and use eclipse as an IDE you know that eclipse has something called WTP, which stands for Web Tools Platform. It's a set of tools and API's to aid in the development of web and JEE projects.

That means that if you have a WTP project in your workspace, you can deploy, run and debug it straight from the IDE. But what happens if your project is not of a WTP nature?

Back at the office we have a coupe of really old Java project. WTP didn't exist back then but we do use Eclipse as our IDE of choice.

So, how do we debug a deployed project that we don't actually deploy from the IDE? As long as you have the source, it is quite simple:

When testing it's pretty common to see the need for mocking a certain object, say, a Data Access Ojbect. This way you don't need to depend on a database and you can focus on the actual logic implemented by the method being tested. For that you have several alternatives like creating the Mock class by hand or - and this is the more common - use one of the various mocking libraries out there.

This is quite funny. A friend, Perl addicted, is now learning Ruby. He really enjoys the language but made a interesting observation: Ruby is a language for lazy programmers! Well, I have to agree... You know, I love saving keystrokes and achieving more by writing less. And this is so true with Ruby. Let me give a really simple example, comparing with java - don't get me wrong... I love java, specially the platform, but it fits well here since I've always been a Java guy.

Today was the first day of the conference and it started with a tutorial about DSL's with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons. We also had as attendants Ola Bini, core developer of JRuby, and others. My expectations were pretty high and the presentation didn't let me down. I'll try to put here toghether my impressions and some notes I took while I was there. Marting Fowler started discussing what DSL's are and giving some examples that many of us use in our day to day Job.

I never paid too much attention on testing database stuff. While working with java, the closest I got to something workable was using the test case abstractions provided by the Spring framework. It ensures that each test method runs in its own transaction that is rolled back after the test's execution.

Fair enough. I used the setUp() method on my TestCase to configure some records so I could work with them, removing all of them in the tearDown() method. It was quite simple and worked.

But I always felt something strange with this solution. First of all, I had to add another framework just for that. - Actually I was using spring for dependency injection, but if I wasn't, it wouldn't be a nice option. And another thing that bothered me, is that you cannot guarantee that your database is in a known state.

After I started to work with Ruby - and Rails - I discovered the testing fixtures. It is a really nice way to set up your testing data without having to worry about your database state. - If you don't know what I'm talking about, follow the above link first.

Then I received a message from a co-worker saying he was having some trouble in using DBUnit with Hibernate, and asked for some help. I've heard of DBUnit before but never tried it myself. It was a very good opportunity to take a better look into it.

The basic idea after all is very similar to that of the Rails Fixtures: You have some sort of external file - XML in this case - where you set up the testing data. So the framework takes care of erasing the database, inserting your test data and returning it to its original state.

So far so good, DBUnit's default Classes works with JDBC, DataSources and JNDIDatasources, but not with Hibernate. The effort to put them working together is minimal and is documented in their web site.

I decided to share how this can be done with hibernate and in the end, you would have a test case similar to this one:

Dependency injection - DI -  is a great thing. Really. The hability to tweak implementations without touching your code is awesome and the DI frameworks, like spring, saves you a lot of coding. No more service locators stuff.

But, and there is always a but, you're left with a bunch of XML configuration. And I hate it. Not that XML files are bad... the thing is that everything nowadays has its own set of XML configurarion files. And Spring is not different.

Isso é um fato. Cada linha de XML que eu escrevo me faz pensar em formas de evita-las. E isso não é simples.

Ultimamente, desde o Java 5, tem se trocado o XML pelas annotations. Tá bom, fica bonitinho né? Até que fica. Em alguns casos, até mais organizado. O Hibernate desde a versão 3 faz uso das annotaions da JPA como alernativa ao seu XML de configuração. E esse sim é um belo caso de sucesso!

São apenas algumas anotações na classe para mapea-la e pronto, adeus xml! Mas como sempre, as anotações já estão sendo exageradas por aí. Basta decidir configurar uns 3 frameworks - e provavelmente dois deles são descenessários no seu projeto - usando anotações e as suas classes ficarão uma zona! E muito mais ilegíveis que um arquivo XML!

As anotações são recursos muito poderosos e devem ser usadas de forma consciente. Use as que realmente valem a pena, como as que vou falar agora, que fazem parte da nova release do Spring framework, a 2.5 RC1.

Hoje fiz a versão beta da nova prova de arquiteto da Sun e eis algumas impressões:

- É longa e cansativa... fato justificável se levar-mos em consideração o fato de ser uma prova em estado beta. Ela possui mais questões que a versão final. São 153 questões no total, em 4h e 30min.

Nesse primeiro post vou falar um pouco sobre meu novo trabalho. Na verdade, sobre um problema que encontramos lá.

Dentre diversas coisas que estamos fazendo, como migrações por exemplo, estou ajudando na elaboração da arquitetura que irá abrigar as novas aplicações desenvolvidas na empresa.

As in many web apps out there, this week I needed a date range picker. I shopped around and while I did find a couple of good options they were (a) too clunky and (b) didn't prevent you from selecting invalid ranges. The latter being the one I was really interested in. So I coded up something simple that worked and looked nice and decided to share around. It's the jquery-daterange-picker.

What's the difference between your application's javascript code and its java/ruby/python/whatever code? Think about it for a second. Done? Well, the answer is: none! In today's web applications your javascript code is no different from the rest of your code base but yet we treat it with disregard - and we're all to blame. We often see developers investing time writing all sorts of automated tests around their code base but fail to do the same for their javascript - and yet they get surprised when their client can't click on a button on their web app that depends on that ajax call that has been manually tested once when the page was first released.

Today I read a nice post - in Portuguese - by Fábio Akita on how to manage multiple ruby versions on your machine. I've tried it once with some tool I can't even remember the name but failed miserably. But this time things look very different. The tool here is the rvm - short for Ruby Version manager - and it works just great. Let's cut to the chase and imagine that you, like me, want to run/develop/test your code on both ruby 1.

Yesterday I've done something I should do more often: Revisit some code written a while ago for our current project and make it better. Let's face it. We all write crappy code the 1st time. The difference is in what we do about it afterwards. We might decide it's good enough and keep moving, or we could (and should!) stop and refactor it! The code I revisited worked as a refactoring exercise and it's initial version is shown below: class Jphoto .

I'll be speaking at this year's Rails Summit Latin America in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It will be a good opportunity to meet some amazing people and visit friends back home! :) Overall I'll be spending 12 days in Brazil, with 2 of them dedicated to the conference. The other 10 I'll be in Rio de Janeiro visiting my family and friends. I strongly advise you to spend some time in Rio too, if at all possible.

- Overall results First off, I'd like to thank everyone who voted on this poll. With a total of 236 votes, here is the summary of the first two questions: - Are you currently working with or researching about language alternatives for the JVM? - e.g. JRuby, Scala, Groovy {% img /assets/images/scala_improvements.png %} Tooling. The majority of comment urge for better tooling and IDE support. That simple. - Others

The motivation for this post came from a couple of messages I've seen on the jruby's google group and because I think it's pretty cool to share how we tackled this problem. - A little bit of context We, as a vast amount of people out there, have legacy Java code. A lot. In our case this legacy is pretty much crucial to our business. We can't just trash it and start from scratch.

I've just watched a video from Google IO where Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons went through some of the aspects that involves the development of an application for the cloud - focusing on the JVM. In terms of the Google App Engine, you don't have access to a relational database, thing I found out when I first tried it. Instead you get a Big Table. Martin put out a good analogy and you can just think of it as a nested hash map.

Wanna help improve JRuby? Make sure you read this post by Charles Nutter first. There he explains how to run Ruby specs with JRuby. Start with fixing Ruby specs is a great way to get acquainted with the code. And it’s also a important task in order to make sure JRuby is the most complete and compatible ruby implementation out there. But before you get your hands dirty, it will be a lot easier if you can actually debug JRuby’s source while fixing any specs - or bugs/features for that matter.

As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.

The rcov_plugin project is a rails plugin for rcov that adds some useful rake tasks to your application. And since I'm currently working in a JRuby project it made sense to use this plugin. The thing is, among other stuff, an rcov report from a JRuby project includes some files that shouldn't be there at all, plus you also need to change the way you call rcov as such. Thus, I thought I'd contribute these changes to the plugin and my pull request was approved this morning - just install the latest version and you should be good to go.

As many of you know the new language supported at GAE now is Java, as officially announced on their blog. As a Ruby/Rails developer you might not be interested on it but here is a reason you should be: JRuby. It was only a matter of time until we saw some people deploying JRuby on Rails apps on GAE, like Ola Bini's mini blog app. Guess that was the first one really, as he was beta testing the service in secret.

Update: Follow up link to this issue on JRuby's Jira, here As I told in my last post, it was time to give JRuby a serious try. So I took one of our rails projects at work and decided to migrate it to JRuby and see what happens. We heavily use the XML capabilities of DB2 and this was a huge problem. Every query would work just fine through the activerecord-jdbc-adapter - part of the JRuby Extras .

Most of last QCon's presentations are available for download here. Highlights to Ola Bini's on JRuby(pdf) and Randy Shoup's on eBay's architectural principles(pdf). And while we're talking about JRuby, it's impressive how it's becoming a recurrent and big subject. Fast. It had its own small space at big event like QCon and in the last Euruko in Prague, we had a presentation by the JRuby Core Developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.

- Overall results First off, I'd like to thank everyone who voted on this poll. With a total of 236 votes, here is the summary of the first two questions: - Are you currently working with or researching about language alternatives for the JVM? - e.g. JRuby, Scala, Groovy {% img /assets/images/scala_improvements.png %} Tooling. The majority of comment urge for better tooling and IDE support. That simple. - Others

I hinted at LambdaJam Australia back in my 2012 Highlights post and the dates are fast approaching so I thought appropriate to blog about it once more. YOW! LambdaJam is a conference targeted at intermediate and advanced functional programmers and is organised in talks, jams and workshops. Talks are the traditional format and are 30 minutes long; Workshops aim to introduce a specific subjects to attendees in great detail and are up to two hours long; Jams are hands-on sessions.

So I couldn't resist and bought myself a MacBook Pro! It's my first week with my new toy and I'm really enjoying it. But I need to do something useful with it so I started to prepare it to be my new development platform, starting with Ruby/Rails + MySQL: Here is where the fun begins! After I installed both Rails and MySQL, I fired up a terminal an typed:

I recently wrote an article on our company blog where I explained how we evaluate Machine Learning models at RecordPoint – if you haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend you do so before proceeding. Since its publishing, I received a number of comments asking me to clarify the concepts presented with concrete examples. The original article is light on code by design as the audience for the company blog isn’t always that technical.

As you may already know, Merb turned 1.0 a while ago and I decided to resume my studies to learn the framework. So I just built a new app with a few resources and fired the migration scripts: $ rake db:automigrate And this is what I got: Loading init file from /Users/leo/projects/merb/my-first-app/config/init.rb Loading /Users/leo/projects/merb/my-first-app/config/environments/development.rb ~ Connecting to database... /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/dm-core-0.9.6/lib/dm-core/adapters/data_objects_adapter.rb:137:in `initialize': wrong number of arguments (8 for 1) (ArgumentError)

A year and four months ago I joined Atlassian to pursue a very exciting opportunity: to deliver realtime collaborative editing to Confluence. I have talked about it last year at EuroClojure and this year at QCon Brazil. Even Cognitect wrote a few words about it. In a nutshell this involved writing Clojure code all day to build an awesome service we call Synchrony. Synchrony is capable of realtime data synchronisation - not just collaborative editing - and as such its applications are many!

In the beginning Nearly 4 years ago I founded the Sydney Clojure User Group. I had been playing with Clojure for a little while and started a small study group to learn more. Initially this group was private and held at the ThoughtWorks office. After a couple of meetups and conversations I decided to open up the group to the public and then realised we weren’t the only ones interested in Clojure and, even more important, interested in meeting like-minded people, share experiences and help each other.

I should have published this post still in 2015 but as I was on holidays traveling around Australia I didn’t really have the time to do it. Better late than never, right? (also Linode - the provider hosting this site - has been under a severe DDoS attack so the site just came back up today) 2015 has been a unusually quiet year in this blog. Thankfully that is because I have been extremely busy in many other areas.

Another year is about to end and as it is tradition in this blog it’s time to look at the year’s highlights! Functional Programming I have been advocating Functional Programming and Clojure for a while now and 2014 has been good to me. It was the first year where I was paid to work almost entirely in functional languages. Most of it was in Scala and a little less in Clojure.

Thanks, ThoughtWorks After 4 years and 8 months I have made the hard decision to change jobs: Friday, 19th of December, was my last day at ThoughtWorks. In this time I have made many friends and have grown a lot as a professional. Consulting presents so many new challenges that often times the technical problems you are trying to solve are the easiest part of the whole project. I am thankful for that.

This past weekend - 19-20th of December - a group of highly motivated individuals gave up their Friday night and their entire Saturday simply to learn how to code in Clojure! It was the first ever ClojureBridge edition in Sydney and if you haven’t heard of it before, its goal is to increase diversity in the Clojure community. It does so by offering free workshops targeted at beginners. You should totally read Julian Gamble’s post about the event for details.

I finally got some free time so sit down and write this post. I was travelling with my girlfriend around the state of Victoria, Australia - mostly around the Great Ocean Road. I had an amazing time and it’s a trip I highly recommend anyone do. As for this year’s highlights, let’s get started: Clojure clj-syd - the Sydney Clojure User Group - continues going strong and this is in great part thanks to the amazing community behind it.

Keeping the tradition of end-of-year blog posts, here are my year highlights for 2012: Clojure I started clj-syd - the Sydney Clojure User Group - back in January and it has seen a major uptake. We consistently get an average of 25 people each month and there’s no shortage of talks and topics to discuss. It’s a great crowd and I’m proud to have started it and of being part of it.

It’s that time of the year to look back at what you’ve done and either be happy about it or… well not. :) To me anyway 2011 was a great year but I won’t bore you with the details so I’ll just jump straight into a couple of highlights! The biggest one of course was the project we developed to help the Queensland flood victims back in January - which brings me to the next topic:

I recently wrote an article on our company blog where I explained how we evaluate Machine Learning models at RecordPoint – if you haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend you do so before proceeding. Since its publishing, I received a number of comments asking me to clarify the concepts presented with concrete examples. The original article is light on code by design as the audience for the company blog isn’t always that technical.

Last week our current client - ninemsn - ran the 3rd edition of their HackDay. It’s akin to Atlassian’s ShipIt days so if you’re not familiar with the concept, you should check their page but here’s the gist: We’re given 24 hours to work on whatever we like as long as it’s related somehow to the business We’re also free to use any technology we want

I decided to change my blog's hosting provider and this is the first post using the new service. Please if you see any abnormal behaviour around here don't hesitate to contact me either at leonardoborges@leonardoborges.com or leonardoborges.rj@gmail.com Thanks!

Following the staggering success of the online version of RottingNames - where by success I mean the handful of metal heads constantly using the app :) - I released the iPhone version for free . You can now generate crazy and fun names anywhere! Go get it! I've been meaning to post this for a while but I was waiting to have some free time and add a few new features to the app, which I just realised won't happen any time soon given the priorities I have at the moment.

Learning new programming languages is fun. And if it's your 2nd, 3rd...Nth programming language you will eventually look for features you already know and love. Coming from Ruby - but after having done my fair amount of Java for many years, among other things - I end up looking for features like blocks, open classes and syntax sugar like automatic generation of attribute accessors. These are hard to let go of.

Here at Mirai we're looking for passionate software engineers. And if it's not clear, by passionate I mean people who actually enjoy their job, aren't afraid of trying new things, likes to research/study, is up to date to what's happening around them and is a true team player. Interested? Hold on, click here to find out more about the offer, as well as instructions on how to apply. Doubts? Send them to jobs@hotelsearch.

Nesse primeiro post vou falar um pouco sobre meu novo trabalho. Na verdade, sobre um problema que encontramos lá.

Dentre diversas coisas que estamos fazendo, como migrações por exemplo, estou ajudando na elaboração da arquitetura que irá abrigar as novas aplicações desenvolvidas na empresa.

There are several ways you can measure your rails application's performance. The techniques range from filling your code with "puts" statements - :p - to fancy ones like NewRelic - which is quite nice, I must say. But what many people don't know is that rails ships with a handful of scripts to help you out. One of which is called profiler, located under your application's scripts/performance directory. By default it uses the standard ruby profiler but if you want more speed - and additional reporting options - , consider installing the ruby-prof gem.

Last Tuesday I gave a short presentation on the whole Clouds Against the Floods thing at the Ruby on Rails Oceania User Group here in Sydney. Those guys are awesome and they recorded the talk - thanks guys! If you'd like to download the slides, they're available on Slideshare. Enjoy! ;)

Last friday I've done a small presentation about Dependency Injection and how it can improve the testing environment of a project. You can find it in the presentations page. Hope you like it.

Last Tuesday I gave a short presentation on the whole Clouds Against the Floods thing at the Ruby on Rails Oceania User Group here in Sydney. Those guys are awesome and they recorded the talk - thanks guys! If you'd like to download the slides, they're available on Slideshare. Enjoy! ;)

Last friday I've done a small presentation about Dependency Injection and how it can improve the testing environment of a project. You can find it in the presentations page. Hope you like it.

Recently I wrote an internal blog post at work titled On the traps of working from home. While the content isn’t new it was triggered by the recent events around COVID-19 and the fact that all of a sudden the whole company was working from home, distributed across multiple timezones. I was worried that we may default to having more meetings instead of better communication and writing this post was my attempt to share how I tend to deal with distractions.

This is basically a compilation of a few tools/habits that I use to keep focused and at a high level of productivity when working alone. Works great for me and I hope there are useful tips for you as well. Music This is one of my favorites. When working alone I hate having noisy people around, which happens quite often if you work in an open office space like me.

This will come as no surprise to my closest friends, but I am a long time game development admirer. Although I've never done anything professionally I did spend some time in the past studying this amazingly interesting field - it's my dark hobby. As hardware evolves and gamers demand more and more reality from their consoles, the game development industry is one of the few that basically didn't suffer with the latest economic crisis.

Learning new programming languages is fun. And if it's your 2nd, 3rd...Nth programming language you will eventually look for features you already know and love. Coming from Ruby - but after having done my fair amount of Java for many years, among other things - I end up looking for features like blocks, open classes and syntax sugar like automatic generation of attribute accessors. These are hard to let go of.

This is basically a compilation of a few tools/habits that I use to keep focused and at a high level of productivity when working alone. Works great for me and I hope there are useful tips for you as well. Music This is one of my favorites. When working alone I hate having noisy people around, which happens quite often if you work in an open office space like me.

At least, dumb for the companies hiring them. The old dream is still for sale out there: Build a "I do everything framework" and hire a bunch of dumb programmers - monkeys? - and you shall make money easily! Just put some button pressers and a full featured enterprise system will be waiting on the other side of this "machine"! C'mon, I thought this dream was over! We've had enough proofs that this doesn't work!

I solved a few of the problems on Project Euler in the past, both in Java and Ruby, and thought it would be useful to redo them in Clojure, thus improving my skills on the language’s core functions and libraries. Today I’ll share problem 4. Go ahead and read it but here’s the meat of it: “Find the largest palindrome made from the product of two 3-digit numbers." From this statement we can tell two things: (1) we’ll need a function that can tell whether a number is a palindrome or not and (2) that the largest palindrome is given by the product of two numbers between 100 and 999, inclusive.

This is just another one of those boring weekends where I felt the need to hack on something. If you follow Google Chrome's blog you're probably aware of this little nifty feature they started to implement in their latest builds: HTML5 voice recognition. And that's when it struck me: "Hey, what if I use that and tweet with my voice instead of typing?" The result of this hacking session is LoudParrot, a sample Rails app that shows how to do just that.

Since I started working with Ruby about 4 years ago, I've used quite a few text editors and ide's: RadRails, gedit + plugins, TextMate and Vim. TextMate is the one I've used the most and it's been ok for a long time. Until you realize you need half a dozen bundles to make it really useful for ruby development. Obviously the same goes for Vim and gedit. Oh, and forget about refactoring.

Last Tuesday I gave a short presentation on the whole Clouds Against the Floods thing at the Ruby on Rails Oceania User Group here in Sydney. Those guys are awesome and they recorded the talk - thanks guys! If you'd like to download the slides, they're available on Slideshare. Enjoy! ;)

This is just a quick post to let you know that AppConstants can now be used as gem! Just add it to your Gemfile and 'bundle install' it: #in your Gemfile gem "app_constants" #in the console $ bundle install $ rails generate app_constants #then follow the instructions on-screen instructions It can also be used without Rails. Check out full instructions on the GitHub repository. Feedback welcome :)

I think by now everyone's heard of the hard time the guys up in Queensland, Australia are having because of the recent floods. People have lost their lives and many others have lost their homes and businesses, product of years of hard work. As a result of this massive disaster the Queensland Government decided to run a telethon to encourage donations to help the flood victims. The Telethon aired last Sunday, 09/01/11, on Channel 9 and lasted for 2 hours.

It's been now over a week since we moved to Sydney and everything is just great. We're still house hunting but I got a feeling we'll have a home soon. :) In the meantime, this morning I got a feature request on github to allow AppConstants to interpret YAML files with embedded code like this: I haven't needed it myself but thought it would be a nice addition so my latest commit does exactly that.

Back in January I announced a small but useful plugin called AppConstants, that basically provides a central place where you can store environment specific constants. And since I started using Rails 3 in the past week, I thought I'd make it Rails 3 compatible. The code is really simple and - as I expected - the upgrade process was quite straight forward. I'm not gonna write a guide here on how to upgrade your plugins to Rails 3 - there is plenty about that around the web - but instead, just show the steps I went through to upgrade mine.

It’s funny how every Rails application I - and possibly you - work on ends up needing some sort of per-environment global constants. Examples may include the application url - It might be used in account activation emails and thus should be different between the development and production environments. Or perhaps your application depends on external services that, depending on the environment, are available in different URIs. There are a couple solutions out there but my needs were simple and straightforward, thus I developed a small rails plugin that is the simplest thing that could possibly work: AppConstants.

In one of my Rails projects I'm using Sphinx to provide full-text search capabilities. To integrate both worlds I chose Thinking Sphinx, which is just great and so far has met all of my expectations. Also, as I previously mentioned, I'm using RVM to manage my ruby installations on both my development and production machines and this setup is what motivated this post. I use Monit to monitor the services running on my production server - nginx, mysql, php - and as of the first deploy of this application, it only made sense to also monitor Sphinx.

I'll be speaking at this year's Rails Summit Latin America in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It will be a good opportunity to meet some amazing people and visit friends back home! :) Overall I'll be spending 12 days in Brazil, with 2 of them dedicated to the conference. The other 10 I'll be in Rio de Janeiro visiting my family and friends. I strongly advise you to spend some time in Rio too, if at all possible.

Update: The service is now down while we move it from the VPS provided by Rails Rumble to our own. I'll let you know once it's up. Last weekend Philip, Pedro and myself got together for this year's Rails Rumble. We haven't had really decided what to do until a few days before the competition, but I had this really simple idea and decided to go with it. Seems people liked it, given a few positive comments we received.

The motivation for this post came from a couple of messages I've seen on the jruby's google group and because I think it's pretty cool to share how we tackled this problem. - A little bit of context We, as a vast amount of people out there, have legacy Java code. A lot. In our case this legacy is pretty much crucial to our business. We can't just trash it and start from scratch.

As you probably know, since rails 2.1 you can write test methods in the following format: test "hotel should return its permalink" do #your test code here end Which is great, as the test name becomes much more clear. But you can't simply run this test easily from the command line. You'd have to run something like: $ ruby your_test_file.rb -n test_hotel_should_return_its_permalink It annoys me. And it's not practical either to make the test fail just so you can get the test's real name.

The rcov_plugin project is a rails plugin for rcov that adds some useful rake tasks to your application. And since I'm currently working in a JRuby project it made sense to use this plugin. The thing is, among other stuff, an rcov report from a JRuby project includes some files that shouldn't be there at all, plus you also need to change the way you call rcov as such. Thus, I thought I'd contribute these changes to the plugin and my pull request was approved this morning - just install the latest version and you should be good to go.

As many of you know the new language supported at GAE now is Java, as officially announced on their blog. As a Ruby/Rails developer you might not be interested on it but here is a reason you should be: JRuby. It was only a matter of time until we saw some people deploying JRuby on Rails apps on GAE, like Ola Bini's mini blog app. Guess that was the first one really, as he was beta testing the service in secret.

There are several ways you can measure your rails application's performance. The techniques range from filling your code with "puts" statements - :p - to fancy ones like NewRelic - which is quite nice, I must say. But what many people don't know is that rails ships with a handful of scripts to help you out. One of which is called profiler, located under your application's scripts/performance directory. By default it uses the standard ruby profiler but if you want more speed - and additional reporting options - , consider installing the ruby-prof gem.

REXML is the standard XML processing library for Ruby. It's on Ruby's core and is terribly slow. Yeah, I know it's pretty simple to use, got a nice interface and, again, it's just there. And it is a good library, for most things. But if you, as me, came to a point that processing XML is taking 50% of the time to render a rails action, it's time to change.

I'm back in Madrid again after the RailsConf and I think it's time to say something about it. :) First off, the infrastructure provided by the conference was really great. The rooms, WiFi connection, food... Really well organized. Now to the sessions, highlights: Tutorials (Tuesday) - Meta-programming Ruby for fun and profit (Neal Ford, Patrick Farley) The old and good techniques that made Ruby so powerful. Here Neal and Patrick walked us through the main tricks to meta programming like open classes - and conditionally open them - , dynamically define methods, sending messages to objects and how Ruby can help test your Java code in a much easier way.

The title says it already. On monday I'll be going to Berlin to attend this year´s RailsConf. This will be my first one and of course my expectations are pretty high! As usual, after the conference I'll try and give a summary of what happened there, providing as much content as I can. Anyone else's going??? :) C u there!

So I couldn't resist and bought myself a MacBook Pro! It's my first week with my new toy and I'm really enjoying it. But I need to do something useful with it so I started to prepare it to be my new development platform, starting with Ruby/Rails + MySQL: Here is where the fun begins! After I installed both Rails and MySQL, I fired up a terminal an typed:

REXML, the XML library uses by many ruby apps, including rails, has a vulnerability that requires an immediate patch on whatever rails version you're using. Details and instructions on the official rails weblog, here. But basically, this is what you need to do: gem install rexml-expansion-fix Then, require rexml-expansion-fix in your rails's app environment.rb file.

Behold latin american railers! This year we will have the Rails Summit Latin America on October, 15th and 16th, in São Paulo, Brazil. It's by far the biggest Rails event we've ever had, including many of the speakers that were present at RailsConf. Fábio Akita is also one of the speakers and provides more details on his blog. If you're a assumed rails geek don't miss the opportunity to hear from the big names and to know a beautiful country like Brazil.

This week we started to test mod_rails in a couple of projects where I work on. One in production. Of course it's too early for any conclusions, but I just wanted to share a couple of problems you might find when the installer tries to compile the Apache module. In our case, and I believe it is the case of many servers out there, we have a custom Apache installation, what makes the installer not find it and/or not find the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) sometimes.

As some of you know I went to the European Ruby Conf in Prague, this year. The event was awesome and it's good to know they finally made available the majority of the slides, here. They also published Matz's keynote, and more videos from the conference are being edited right now, so stay tuned to their home page! Enjoy!

It's been some time since my last post but here I am! Where? In Spain, of course! Having a great time, I must say. I arrived last week in Madrid and the past 2 weeks before that I spent basically packing my stuff. There is still some paperwork going on but everything is flowing well. Besides this little feedback, I was reading this week's issue of the excellent series This Week In Ruby, from my friend Antonio Cangiano.

Passenger(mod_rails) has been released. The idea is to ease the pain on rails applications deployment. I tested myself and in less than five minutes I had my application working behind Apache! I'm not going to say much here besides the fact that it seems like a really good option for rails deployment and people have been talking about it already, including DHH. But I do recommend a read on the architecture overview document.

Update: Follow up link to this issue on JRuby's Jira, here As I told in my last post, it was time to give JRuby a serious try. So I took one of our rails projects at work and decided to migrate it to JRuby and see what happens. We heavily use the XML capabilities of DB2 and this was a huge problem. Every query would work just fine through the activerecord-jdbc-adapter - part of the JRuby Extras .

Most of last QCon's presentations are available for download here. Highlights to Ola Bini's on JRuby(pdf) and Randy Shoup's on eBay's architectural principles(pdf). And while we're talking about JRuby, it's impressive how it's becoming a recurrent and big subject. Fast. It had its own small space at big event like QCon and in the last Euruko in Prague, we had a presentation by the JRuby Core Developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.

On friday I'll be heading Prague for the European RubyConf. Anyone is going? :) Almost 300 attendees already registered for the event. And a few very interesting people will be speaking there like Matz and DHH (this one, through skype). Besides that, the organization staff is scheduling 2 parties, friday and saturday, for the attendees. Networking comes to mind, doesn't it? I think it will be a great opportunity to meet interesting and bright people.

I think I've been really lucky lately. In my new job I'm getting to work with many interesting things and OpenID is just one of them. We are investing high in Ruby on Rails and we have now a few internal applications in development stages. Our manager wanted the ability to let people log in to our rails applications(for now) using their OpenID accounts. It was a funny task, as I knew very little about OpenID.

[2008/04/30] Update: The ibm_db gem has been updated to support the new Rails 2.0 style migration. Now you can just use t.xml and it will work. Look here for more info. Thanks to Mario Briggs for pointing me to the update. --- In my new job we work with XML data natively stored on DB2. I have done some test with Rails and DB2 a few weeks ago and it's pretty interesting, specially the easiness that Rails deals with XML.

Following the Rails 2.0 hype, I've been playing around with it and decided to share a first impression: Scaffolding is gone! But wait, before you knock your head against the wall, let me tell you something: I lied :) Scaffolding is not really gone. It's just changed a bit. How can I tell? Well, as a good developer I thought: "I'll just create a scaffold with the new version and see what's different"

Well, we all know how hard, or at least cumbersome, it can be to set up a production environment to deploy your applications. Besides all the hardware stuff like storages, links, routers you are still left with a huge amount of software configuration to handle. This often includes configuring things like clusters, load balancing and services monitoring - Including notification of interested parts in case of any failure. Pieces of software you have to tie up and make them work together.

But hey, ruby lovers, you may have a better way to get this going! Released by ThoughtWorks, RubyWorks is, as quoted from their website, a production application stack for Ruby On Rails applications. I decided to give it a try and I really enjoyed it.

First of all I didn't want to mess with my actual configuration so I installed a new vm with Virtual Box. It has Ubuntu 7.10 on it, with 256MB of memory.

After installing RubyWorks - instructions on their website -, you get a new skeleton rails app up and running, being served by 4 mongrels that defaults to production environment! Impressed? There is more. A HAProxy is also set up in front of your mongrel servers acting as a load balancer.

Well, you probably want to monitor all that stuff huh? A monit web interface is waiting for your call on port 2812! It monitors all your mongrel servers - four by default - and your HAProxy, allowing you to measure CPU and Memory usage, among other things.

The coolest thing here is that all these softwares you would have to setup by hand are already working together, ready for production! Well, is it?

Going a little deeper, I deployed a database backed application to test this stack's performance.

I used Siege to stress the app and I am very happy with the results! I compared it with a single mongrel running on production env and no proxy at all.

It is worth mentioning that having 4 mongrels running took my vm to 77% of memory usage, while a single mongrel took it to 38%.

I'm back in Madrid again after the RailsConf and I think it's time to say something about it. :) First off, the infrastructure provided by the conference was really great. The rooms, WiFi connection, food... Really well organized. Now to the sessions, highlights: Tutorials (Tuesday) - Meta-programming Ruby for fun and profit (Neal Ford, Patrick Farley) The old and good techniques that made Ruby so powerful. Here Neal and Patrick walked us through the main tricks to meta programming like open classes - and conditionally open them - , dynamically define methods, sending messages to objects and how Ruby can help test your Java code in a much easier way.

{% img /assets/images/rs2009.jpg %} Rails Summit finished a few days ago and I have only one word to describe it: Awesome! I met some really cool people, discussed a whole bunch of technical subjects and managed not to get so nervous in my first presentation ever - I'm not counting internal presentations I've done for my team... My slides and source files can be found here. Feel free to contact me with questions if you got any.

As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.

Yesterday I've done something I should do more often: Revisit some code written a while ago for our current project and make it better. Let's face it. We all write crappy code the 1st time. The difference is in what we do about it afterwards. We might decide it's good enough and keep moving, or we could (and should!) stop and refactor it! The code I revisited worked as a refactoring exercise and it's initial version is shown below: class Jphoto .

This is just another one of those boring weekends where I felt the need to hack on something. If you follow Google Chrome's blog you're probably aware of this little nifty feature they started to implement in their latest builds: HTML5 voice recognition. And that's when it struck me: "Hey, what if I use that and tweet with my voice instead of typing?" The result of this hacking session is LoudParrot, a sample Rails app that shows how to do just that.

Since I started working with Ruby about 4 years ago, I've used quite a few text editors and ide's: RadRails, gedit + plugins, TextMate and Vim. TextMate is the one I've used the most and it's been ok for a long time. Until you realize you need half a dozen bundles to make it really useful for ruby development. Obviously the same goes for Vim and gedit. Oh, and forget about refactoring.

Last Tuesday I gave a short presentation on the whole Clouds Against the Floods thing at the Ruby on Rails Oceania User Group here in Sydney. Those guys are awesome and they recorded the talk - thanks guys! If you'd like to download the slides, they're available on Slideshare. Enjoy! ;)

This is just a quick post to let you know that AppConstants can now be used as gem! Just add it to your Gemfile and 'bundle install' it: #in your Gemfile gem "app_constants" #in the console $ bundle install $ rails generate app_constants #then follow the instructions on-screen instructions It can also be used without Rails. Check out full instructions on the GitHub repository. Feedback welcome :)

I think by now everyone's heard of the hard time the guys up in Queensland, Australia are having because of the recent floods. People have lost their lives and many others have lost their homes and businesses, product of years of hard work. As a result of this massive disaster the Queensland Government decided to run a telethon to encourage donations to help the flood victims. The Telethon aired last Sunday, 09/01/11, on Channel 9 and lasted for 2 hours.

It's been now over a week since we moved to Sydney and everything is just great. We're still house hunting but I got a feeling we'll have a home soon. :) In the meantime, this morning I got a feature request on github to allow AppConstants to interpret YAML files with embedded code like this: I haven't needed it myself but thought it would be a nice addition so my latest commit does exactly that.

Back in January I announced a small but useful plugin called AppConstants, that basically provides a central place where you can store environment specific constants. And since I started using Rails 3 in the past week, I thought I'd make it Rails 3 compatible. The code is really simple and - as I expected - the upgrade process was quite straight forward. I'm not gonna write a guide here on how to upgrade your plugins to Rails 3 - there is plenty about that around the web - but instead, just show the steps I went through to upgrade mine.

Learning new programming languages is fun. And if it's your 2nd, 3rd...Nth programming language you will eventually look for features you already know and love. Coming from Ruby - but after having done my fair amount of Java for many years, among other things - I end up looking for features like blocks, open classes and syntax sugar like automatic generation of attribute accessors. These are hard to let go of.

What? In Ruby you have basically two ways of defining private methods: I see a small problem with both approaches. In the first one, and the most obvious, is that you need to duplicate the method name as well as add an extra method call - private - just to change its visibility. The second approach avoids this but adds the risk of accidentally putting a method that is intended to be public under the private section of the source file, which can render an annoying debugging session.

Today I read a nice post - in Portuguese - by Fábio Akita on how to manage multiple ruby versions on your machine. I've tried it once with some tool I can't even remember the name but failed miserably. But this time things look very different. The tool here is the rvm - short for Ruby Version manager - and it works just great. Let's cut to the chase and imagine that you, like me, want to run/develop/test your code on both ruby 1.

Yesterday I've done something I should do more often: Revisit some code written a while ago for our current project and make it better. Let's face it. We all write crappy code the 1st time. The difference is in what we do about it afterwards. We might decide it's good enough and keep moving, or we could (and should!) stop and refactor it! The code I revisited worked as a refactoring exercise and it's initial version is shown below: class Jphoto .

I'll be speaking at this year's Rails Summit Latin America in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It will be a good opportunity to meet some amazing people and visit friends back home! :) Overall I'll be spending 12 days in Brazil, with 2 of them dedicated to the conference. The other 10 I'll be in Rio de Janeiro visiting my family and friends. I strongly advise you to spend some time in Rio too, if at all possible.

Update: The service is now down while we move it from the VPS provided by Rails Rumble to our own. I'll let you know once it's up. Last weekend Philip, Pedro and myself got together for this year's Rails Rumble. We haven't had really decided what to do until a few days before the competition, but I had this really simple idea and decided to go with it. Seems people liked it, given a few positive comments we received.

- Overall results First off, I'd like to thank everyone who voted on this poll. With a total of 236 votes, here is the summary of the first two questions: - Are you currently working with or researching about language alternatives for the JVM? - e.g. JRuby, Scala, Groovy {% img /assets/images/scala_improvements.png %} Tooling. The majority of comment urge for better tooling and IDE support. That simple. - Others

Do you know? I didn't. And started to get annoyed by using these terms interchangeably and not really knowing the difference. There are a few. And they are subtle. I don't think most of us would ever have problems with it but it's the kind of information you'll be glad to know when having those weird behaviors in your code on a Friday at 6:01 pm, just before pushing to production.

Wanna help improve JRuby? Make sure you read this post by Charles Nutter first. There he explains how to run Ruby specs with JRuby. Start with fixing Ruby specs is a great way to get acquainted with the code. And it’s also a important task in order to make sure JRuby is the most complete and compatible ruby implementation out there. But before you get your hands dirty, it will be a lot easier if you can actually debug JRuby’s source while fixing any specs - or bugs/features for that matter.

As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.

As you probably know, since rails 2.1 you can write test methods in the following format: test "hotel should return its permalink" do #your test code here end Which is great, as the test name becomes much more clear. But you can't simply run this test easily from the command line. You'd have to run something like: $ ruby your_test_file.rb -n test_hotel_should_return_its_permalink It annoys me. And it's not practical either to make the test fail just so you can get the test's real name.

There are several ways you can measure your rails application's performance. The techniques range from filling your code with "puts" statements - :p - to fancy ones like NewRelic - which is quite nice, I must say. But what many people don't know is that rails ships with a handful of scripts to help you out. One of which is called profiler, located under your application's scripts/performance directory. By default it uses the standard ruby profiler but if you want more speed - and additional reporting options - , consider installing the ruby-prof gem.

As you may already know, Merb turned 1.0 a while ago and I decided to resume my studies to learn the framework. So I just built a new app with a few resources and fired the migration scripts: $ rake db:automigrate And this is what I got: Loading init file from /Users/leo/projects/merb/my-first-app/config/init.rb Loading /Users/leo/projects/merb/my-first-app/config/environments/development.rb ~ Connecting to database... /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/dm-core-0.9.6/lib/dm-core/adapters/data_objects_adapter.rb:137:in `initialize': wrong number of arguments (8 for 1) (ArgumentError)

This post is just to clarify some confusion I've noticed reading some posts around the web. There is some misunderstanding of the differences between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 regarding threads. And the difference between them and JRuby. So I decided to write this small summary: Ruby 1.8 - Supports only Green Threads This means that the ruby interpreter has its own scheduler. No matter how many threads you create in your ruby program, there will be only one native thread on your OS.

REXML is the standard XML processing library for Ruby. It's on Ruby's core and is terribly slow. Yeah, I know it's pretty simple to use, got a nice interface and, again, it's just there. And it is a good library, for most things. But if you, as me, came to a point that processing XML is taking 50% of the time to render a rails action, it's time to change.

I'm back in Madrid again after the RailsConf and I think it's time to say something about it. :) First off, the infrastructure provided by the conference was really great. The rooms, WiFi connection, food... Really well organized. Now to the sessions, highlights: Tutorials (Tuesday) - Meta-programming Ruby for fun and profit (Neal Ford, Patrick Farley) The old and good techniques that made Ruby so powerful. Here Neal and Patrick walked us through the main tricks to meta programming like open classes - and conditionally open them - , dynamically define methods, sending messages to objects and how Ruby can help test your Java code in a much easier way.

The title says it already. On monday I'll be going to Berlin to attend this year´s RailsConf. This will be my first one and of course my expectations are pretty high! As usual, after the conference I'll try and give a summary of what happened there, providing as much content as I can. Anyone else's going??? :) C u there!

So I couldn't resist and bought myself a MacBook Pro! It's my first week with my new toy and I'm really enjoying it. But I need to do something useful with it so I started to prepare it to be my new development platform, starting with Ruby/Rails + MySQL: Here is where the fun begins! After I installed both Rails and MySQL, I fired up a terminal an typed:

REXML, the XML library uses by many ruby apps, including rails, has a vulnerability that requires an immediate patch on whatever rails version you're using. Details and instructions on the official rails weblog, here. But basically, this is what you need to do: gem install rexml-expansion-fix Then, require rexml-expansion-fix in your rails's app environment.rb file.

So you found yourself in the need to override a method but still count on it's old behaviour? No problem! Override it with your new code, call super and.... Uh oh!! Suddenly this turned into a problem... Let me give some more context. I was testing Ferret (and the acts_as_ferret plugin) in a project to provide full text search capabilities to our models. One of the things the plugin does is to add a new method to ActiveRecord, called find_with_ferret.

Behold latin american railers! This year we will have the Rails Summit Latin America on October, 15th and 16th, in São Paulo, Brazil. It's by far the biggest Rails event we've ever had, including many of the speakers that were present at RailsConf. Fábio Akita is also one of the speakers and provides more details on his blog. If you're a assumed rails geek don't miss the opportunity to hear from the big names and to know a beautiful country like Brazil.

This week we started to test mod_rails in a couple of projects where I work on. One in production. Of course it's too early for any conclusions, but I just wanted to share a couple of problems you might find when the installer tries to compile the Apache module. In our case, and I believe it is the case of many servers out there, we have a custom Apache installation, what makes the installer not find it and/or not find the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) sometimes.

As some of you know I went to the European Ruby Conf in Prague, this year. The event was awesome and it's good to know they finally made available the majority of the slides, here. They also published Matz's keynote, and more videos from the conference are being edited right now, so stay tuned to their home page! Enjoy!

It's been some time since my last post but here I am! Where? In Spain, of course! Having a great time, I must say. I arrived last week in Madrid and the past 2 weeks before that I spent basically packing my stuff. There is still some paperwork going on but everything is flowing well. Besides this little feedback, I was reading this week's issue of the excellent series This Week In Ruby, from my friend Antonio Cangiano.

Passenger(mod_rails) has been released. The idea is to ease the pain on rails applications deployment. I tested myself and in less than five minutes I had my application working behind Apache! I'm not going to say much here besides the fact that it seems like a really good option for rails deployment and people have been talking about it already, including DHH. But I do recommend a read on the architecture overview document.

Update: Follow up link to this issue on JRuby's Jira, here As I told in my last post, it was time to give JRuby a serious try. So I took one of our rails projects at work and decided to migrate it to JRuby and see what happens. We heavily use the XML capabilities of DB2 and this was a huge problem. Every query would work just fine through the activerecord-jdbc-adapter - part of the JRuby Extras .

Most of last QCon's presentations are available for download here. Highlights to Ola Bini's on JRuby(pdf) and Randy Shoup's on eBay's architectural principles(pdf). And while we're talking about JRuby, it's impressive how it's becoming a recurrent and big subject. Fast. It had its own small space at big event like QCon and in the last Euruko in Prague, we had a presentation by the JRuby Core Developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.

This is quite funny. A friend, Perl addicted, is now learning Ruby. He really enjoys the language but made a interesting observation: Ruby is a language for lazy programmers! Well, I have to agree... You know, I love saving keystrokes and achieving more by writing less. And this is so true with Ruby. Let me give a really simple example, comparing with java - don't get me wrong... I love java, specially the platform, but it fits well here since I've always been a Java guy.

On friday I'll be heading Prague for the European RubyConf. Anyone is going? :) Almost 300 attendees already registered for the event. And a few very interesting people will be speaking there like Matz and DHH (this one, through skype). Besides that, the organization staff is scheduling 2 parties, friday and saturday, for the attendees. Networking comes to mind, doesn't it? I think it will be a great opportunity to meet interesting and bright people.

Today was the first day of the conference and it started with a tutorial about DSL's with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons. We also had as attendants Ola Bini, core developer of JRuby, and others. My expectations were pretty high and the presentation didn't let me down. I'll try to put here toghether my impressions and some notes I took while I was there. Marting Fowler started discussing what DSL's are and giving some examples that many of us use in our day to day Job.

I think I've been really lucky lately. In my new job I'm getting to work with many interesting things and OpenID is just one of them. We are investing high in Ruby on Rails and we have now a few internal applications in development stages. Our manager wanted the ability to let people log in to our rails applications(for now) using their OpenID accounts. It was a funny task, as I knew very little about OpenID.

[2008/04/30] Update: The ibm_db gem has been updated to support the new Rails 2.0 style migration. Now you can just use t.xml and it will work. Look here for more info. Thanks to Mario Briggs for pointing me to the update. --- In my new job we work with XML data natively stored on DB2. I have done some test with Rails and DB2 a few weeks ago and it's pretty interesting, specially the easiness that Rails deals with XML.

Following the Rails 2.0 hype, I've been playing around with it and decided to share a first impression: Scaffolding is gone! But wait, before you knock your head against the wall, let me tell you something: I lied :) Scaffolding is not really gone. It's just changed a bit. How can I tell? Well, as a good developer I thought: "I'll just create a scaffold with the new version and see what's different"

Well, we all know how hard, or at least cumbersome, it can be to set up a production environment to deploy your applications. Besides all the hardware stuff like storages, links, routers you are still left with a huge amount of software configuration to handle. This often includes configuring things like clusters, load balancing and services monitoring - Including notification of interested parts in case of any failure. Pieces of software you have to tie up and make them work together.

But hey, ruby lovers, you may have a better way to get this going! Released by ThoughtWorks, RubyWorks is, as quoted from their website, a production application stack for Ruby On Rails applications. I decided to give it a try and I really enjoyed it.

First of all I didn't want to mess with my actual configuration so I installed a new vm with Virtual Box. It has Ubuntu 7.10 on it, with 256MB of memory.

After installing RubyWorks - instructions on their website -, you get a new skeleton rails app up and running, being served by 4 mongrels that defaults to production environment! Impressed? There is more. A HAProxy is also set up in front of your mongrel servers acting as a load balancer.

Well, you probably want to monitor all that stuff huh? A monit web interface is waiting for your call on port 2812! It monitors all your mongrel servers - four by default - and your HAProxy, allowing you to measure CPU and Memory usage, among other things.

The coolest thing here is that all these softwares you would have to setup by hand are already working together, ready for production! Well, is it?

Going a little deeper, I deployed a database backed application to test this stack's performance.

I used Siege to stress the app and I am very happy with the results! I compared it with a single mongrel running on production env and no proxy at all.

It is worth mentioning that having 4 mongrels running took my vm to 77% of memory usage, while a single mongrel took it to 38%.

Although the title might look dramatic, it's pretty close to what I've been through. I have set up a Ubuntu 64 bits on my laptop last week to do some tests with Ruby and DB2. Oh man, it is not complicated, is it? It shouldn't be, actually. Too sad that I found this so late! It's a post from a friend, Antonio Cangiano, describing the most common problems you may find trying to set up this environment (Linux + Ruby + DB2).

I was in São Paulo last week - the 3rd and 4th of November - for RubyConf Brazil. For those who don’t know, RubyConf Brazil is the evolution of Rails Summit Latin America, where I had the privilege to speak in 2009. This year though, all bets were off. Fabio Akita and Locaweb put together a great event, with over 700 attendees and about 30 speakers split in two streams and two awesome days.

I’ve been learning Scala for my current client project and I find writing to be a great tool to test my understanding of any given topic. This means there might be a few Scala posts coming up soon as I keep learning interesting things. Today I’ll be exploring a few different ways in which you can compose programs. I’ll be using Scalaz in this post. The examples that follow all deal with Vehicles - more specifically makes and parts:

I hinted at LambdaJam Australia back in my 2012 Highlights post and the dates are fast approaching so I thought appropriate to blog about it once more. YOW! LambdaJam is a conference targeted at intermediate and advanced functional programmers and is organised in talks, jams and workshops. Talks are the traditional format and are 30 minutes long; Workshops aim to introduce a specific subjects to attendees in great detail and are up to two hours long; Jams are hands-on sessions.

- Overall results First off, I'd like to thank everyone who voted on this poll. With a total of 236 votes, here is the summary of the first two questions: - Are you currently working with or researching about language alternatives for the JVM? - e.g. JRuby, Scala, Groovy {% img /assets/images/scala_improvements.png %} Tooling. The majority of comment urge for better tooling and IDE support. That simple. - Others

REXML, the XML library uses by many ruby apps, including rails, has a vulnerability that requires an immediate patch on whatever rails version you're using. Details and instructions on the official rails weblog, here. But basically, this is what you need to do: gem install rexml-expansion-fix Then, require rexml-expansion-fix in your rails's app environment.rb file.

In one of my Rails projects I'm using Sphinx to provide full-text search capabilities. To integrate both worlds I chose Thinking Sphinx, which is just great and so far has met all of my expectations. Also, as I previously mentioned, I'm using RVM to manage my ruby installations on both my development and production machines and this setup is what motivated this post. I use Monit to monitor the services running on my production server - nginx, mysql, php - and as of the first deploy of this application, it only made sense to also monitor Sphinx.

Dependency injection - DI -  is a great thing. Really. The hability to tweak implementations without touching your code is awesome and the DI frameworks, like spring, saves you a lot of coding. No more service locators stuff.

But, and there is always a but, you're left with a bunch of XML configuration. And I hate it. Not that XML files are bad... the thing is that everything nowadays has its own set of XML configurarion files. And Spring is not different.

Isso é um fato. Cada linha de XML que eu escrevo me faz pensar em formas de evita-las. E isso não é simples.

Ultimamente, desde o Java 5, tem se trocado o XML pelas annotations. Tá bom, fica bonitinho né? Até que fica. Em alguns casos, até mais organizado. O Hibernate desde a versão 3 faz uso das annotaions da JPA como alernativa ao seu XML de configuração. E esse sim é um belo caso de sucesso!

São apenas algumas anotações na classe para mapea-la e pronto, adeus xml! Mas como sempre, as anotações já estão sendo exageradas por aí. Basta decidir configurar uns 3 frameworks - e provavelmente dois deles são descenessários no seu projeto - usando anotações e as suas classes ficarão uma zona! E muito mais ilegíveis que um arquivo XML!

As anotações são recursos muito poderosos e devem ser usadas de forma consciente. Use as que realmente valem a pena, como as que vou falar agora, que fazem parte da nova release do Spring framework, a 2.5 RC1.

Nesse primeiro post vou falar um pouco sobre meu novo trabalho. Na verdade, sobre um problema que encontramos lá.

Dentre diversas coisas que estamos fazendo, como migrações por exemplo, estou ajudando na elaboração da arquitetura que irá abrigar as novas aplicações desenvolvidas na empresa.

What's the difference between your application's javascript code and its java/ruby/python/whatever code? Think about it for a second. Done? Well, the answer is: none! In today's web applications your javascript code is no different from the rest of your code base but yet we treat it with disregard - and we're all to blame. We often see developers investing time writing all sorts of automated tests around their code base but fail to do the same for their javascript - and yet they get surprised when their client can't click on a button on their web app that depends on that ajax call that has been manually tested once when the page was first released.

The rcov_plugin project is a rails plugin for rcov that adds some useful rake tasks to your application. And since I'm currently working in a JRuby project it made sense to use this plugin. The thing is, among other stuff, an rcov report from a JRuby project includes some files that shouldn't be there at all, plus you also need to change the way you call rcov as such. Thus, I thought I'd contribute these changes to the plugin and my pull request was approved this morning - just install the latest version and you should be good to go.

When testing it's pretty common to see the need for mocking a certain object, say, a Data Access Ojbect. This way you don't need to depend on a database and you can focus on the actual logic implemented by the method being tested. For that you have several alternatives like creating the Mock class by hand or - and this is the more common - use one of the various mocking libraries out there.

I never paid too much attention on testing database stuff. While working with java, the closest I got to something workable was using the test case abstractions provided by the Spring framework. It ensures that each test method runs in its own transaction that is rolled back after the test's execution.

Fair enough. I used the setUp() method on my TestCase to configure some records so I could work with them, removing all of them in the tearDown() method. It was quite simple and worked.

But I always felt something strange with this solution. First of all, I had to add another framework just for that. - Actually I was using spring for dependency injection, but if I wasn't, it wouldn't be a nice option. And another thing that bothered me, is that you cannot guarantee that your database is in a known state.

After I started to work with Ruby - and Rails - I discovered the testing fixtures. It is a really nice way to set up your testing data without having to worry about your database state. - If you don't know what I'm talking about, follow the above link first.

Then I received a message from a co-worker saying he was having some trouble in using DBUnit with Hibernate, and asked for some help. I've heard of DBUnit before but never tried it myself. It was a very good opportunity to take a better look into it.

The basic idea after all is very similar to that of the Rails Fixtures: You have some sort of external file - XML in this case - where you set up the testing data. So the framework takes care of erasing the database, inserting your test data and returning it to its original state.

So far so good, DBUnit's default Classes works with JDBC, DataSources and JNDIDatasources, but not with Hibernate. The effort to put them working together is minimal and is documented in their web site.

I decided to share how this can be done with hibernate and in the end, you would have a test case similar to this one:

Last Tuesday we held ThoughtWorks' Australia first Clojure meetup here in Sydney. It was a lot of fun so I thought I'd share a few words about it. The format was rather simple. First, we had a brief introduction to the language syntax by breaking down a couple of snippets and understanding how each bit worked. For instance, this is one of those snippets: ;;word count (reduce #(if (%1 %2) (assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2))) (assoc %1 %2 1)) {} (clojure.

It seems like it was yesterday that I wrote about my next big challenge: Moving to Australia to join ThoughtWorks. Since then a year has passed and I thought I'd share a little bit about what it's been like so far. The first thing you notice when joining ThoughtWorks is that you're surrounded by smart, opinionated people. It was once common for me to be the one fighting for automated testing, TDD, Ruby and overall finding new and better ways of doing what we do - but imagine how different it is to join a team that takes that for granted.

I think by now everyone's heard of the hard time the guys up in Queensland, Australia are having because of the recent floods. People have lost their lives and many others have lost their homes and businesses, product of years of hard work. As a result of this massive disaster the Queensland Government decided to run a telethon to encourage donations to help the flood victims. The Telethon aired last Sunday, 09/01/11, on Channel 9 and lasted for 2 hours.

Once more my life is taking a huge turn. I've been pretty quiet for the past month and honestly don't know how I managed to hold in my excitement. I've just accepted an offer from ThoughtWorks to be based at their australian offices, either in Sydney or Melbourne, depending on where my 1st project will be. For those of you who don't know, ThoughtWorks is a global IT consultancy that is really well known in the software development community.

This is basically a compilation of a few tools/habits that I use to keep focused and at a high level of productivity when working alone. Works great for me and I hope there are useful tips for you as well. Music This is one of my favorites. When working alone I hate having noisy people around, which happens quite often if you work in an open office space like me.

This is just another one of those boring weekends where I felt the need to hack on something. If you follow Google Chrome's blog you're probably aware of this little nifty feature they started to implement in their latest builds: HTML5 voice recognition. And that's when it struck me: "Hey, what if I use that and tweet with my voice instead of typing?" The result of this hacking session is LoudParrot, a sample Rails app that shows how to do just that.

I'm a big heavy metal fan. And so are most of my friends. As a result I launched RottingNames, a band name generator that will generate the most hilarious, nastiest and nonsense names the metal world is yet to discover - ok, that's probably a bit of an overstatement but the idea is good. However, a friend pointed out the code had a bug when running under - gasp - Internet Explorer.

So you found yourself in the need to override a method but still count on it's old behaviour? No problem! Override it with your new code, call super and.... Uh oh!! Suddenly this turned into a problem... Let me give some more context. I was testing Ferret (and the acts_as_ferret plugin) in a project to provide full text search capabilities to our models. One of the things the plugin does is to add a new method to ActiveRecord, called find_with_ferret.

This is quite funny. A friend, Perl addicted, is now learning Ruby. He really enjoys the language but made a interesting observation: Ruby is a language for lazy programmers! Well, I have to agree... You know, I love saving keystrokes and achieving more by writing less. And this is so true with Ruby. Let me give a really simple example, comparing with java - don't get me wrong... I love java, specially the platform, but it fits well here since I've always been a Java guy.

I think by now everyone's heard of the hard time the guys up in Queensland, Australia are having because of the recent floods. People have lost their lives and many others have lost their homes and businesses, product of years of hard work. As a result of this massive disaster the Queensland Government decided to run a telethon to encourage donations to help the flood victims. The Telethon aired last Sunday, 09/01/11, on Channel 9 and lasted for 2 hours.

Now several months after I announced my odyssey to obtain my Australian work visa, the time has finally come! I'll be flying to Sydney next week, April 15th, and as you can probably guess, I'm excited as hell! :) This starts an important new page both in my life and my career, but that's not what this post is about. It's about sharing the experience of living for over two years in Europe.

Next week the RuPy Conference 2009 will be held in Poznan, Poland and I was planning to talk there. My talk had been approved and everything was looking good - I was gonna talk about JRuby in the Enterprise - until my move to ThoughtWorks became a reality less than a month ago. This move led to a lack of support and time from my current company. I was counting on it to go there but since I'll be leaving soon, that wouldn't be possible.

{% img /assets/images/rs2009.jpg %} Rails Summit finished a few days ago and I have only one word to describe it: Awesome! I met some really cool people, discussed a whole bunch of technical subjects and managed not to get so nervous in my first presentation ever - I'm not counting internal presentations I've done for my team... My slides and source files can be found here. Feel free to contact me with questions if you got any.

Once more my life is taking a huge turn. I've been pretty quiet for the past month and honestly don't know how I managed to hold in my excitement. I've just accepted an offer from ThoughtWorks to be based at their australian offices, either in Sydney or Melbourne, depending on where my 1st project will be. For those of you who don't know, ThoughtWorks is a global IT consultancy that is really well known in the software development community.

So here I am! Alive and kicking!!! Just got back from vacation. Brazil was awesome and so was xmas in Norway! Lots of food in both places! Need a diet! :p Warming up for new year's now. But the reason for this post is the last comment on my Rails 2.0 scaffold post, quoted here: Hi Leonardo, I am extremely grateful for your info altruism. I thought maybe I could show my gratitude with a small donation but I don’t see anywhere on your site to do so.

UPDATE: By next friday I meant this friday, december 5th. Tks Pillip! :P This will be a really quiet month on my blog. The reason? Next friday I'm going to Brazil for vacation and right after, in the end of december, I'm going to extend my trip a bit and spend xmas in Norway. Just hope to come back alive from Brazil! My friends are promising a real blast!!!!! :D

Besides the fact that I am a software developer, I do eat. I even enjoy doing so. Specially when I'm traveling. That's why i decided to put up a new weblog only for this kind of stuff - it's called Travel tips - food & stuff. Basically for friends and whoever else might be interested. There I plan to share some nice restaurants I've been to. At least to start with.

It's been some time since my last post but here I am! Where? In Spain, of course! Having a great time, I must say. I arrived last week in Madrid and the past 2 weeks before that I spent basically packing my stuff. There is still some paperwork going on but everything is flowing well. Besides this little feedback, I was reading this week's issue of the excellent series This Week In Ruby, from my friend Antonio Cangiano.

Some of you may know. Some of you may not. Some of you may find weird. And most of you probably have no idea of what I'm talking about but the thing is: This is a year of big changes for me. I've been hired by Mirai, a Spanish company located in Madrid, to work as a Software Engineer. Yes, it does mean I'll be moving there. Sooner than later.

Next week I'll be at QCon, in London, so if any of you are going to the conference and would like meet up for a couple of beers and a tech talk, please don't hesitate to drop a message. For those of you who have never heard of QCon before, it is a really nice event to play along with some of the most popular names in the software engineering community.

At least, dumb for the companies hiring them. The old dream is still for sale out there: Build a "I do everything framework" and hire a bunch of dumb programmers - monkeys? - and you shall make money easily! Just put some button pressers and a full featured enterprise system will be waiting on the other side of this "machine"! C'mon, I thought this dream was over! We've had enough proofs that this doesn't work!

Well, talking with some friends, I decided that, from now on, I shall only write in english on this blog. Of course some of you may not like it. But I think it has more advantages than the other way around. I have some friends around the world, including people from the U.S., Spain, Italy, China, India and Australia. This way, they can also enjoy the content of this blog and help me improve it.

Pois bem, saí do Rio hoje rumo a Madrid, com escala em Lisboa. A essa hora já estaria por lá.... mas no momento estou no aeroporto de Lisboa esperando o próximo vôo, visto que perdi a conexão! Acontece até na europa! :p Em teoria o embarque é daqui a 1h:30min... Os portugueses são muito atenciosos btw! Até a próxima!