Boy, what a book!

This goes right into the list of books I would have wanted to read 10 years ago: a masterpiece on programming languages, with the author showcasing an excellent ability to write couple with extremely exhaustive — but never boring — content.

Long story short, the interpreter book should definitely be on your 2019 reading list unless you’ve already read it. If that’s the case, give the book another try, it’s probably worth it.

I just released the preview-3 version of ABS, a terse, pragmatic scripting alternative to Bash. This release is geared towards cleaning up bugs before 1.0, so I thought I’d spend some time going through the changes.

These days I got some spare time to work on the 2nd preview release of ABS, with loads of interesting features making into this version.

Over the past few days I took some time to work on a project I had in mind for ages, a scripting alternative to Bash: let me introduce you to the ABS programming language.

Something I’m extremely fascinated with is the power of simplicity: I’ve found myself fighting complexity far too many times, and always realized that when planning and developing a system, we’d achieve the best results when keeping things simple.

What’s more interesting, simple systems could be combined together to kind of form more structured organizations that would still benefit from their straightforward pillars.

Naturally, my curiosity evolved over time and I wasn’t keen on confining to the tech field — so once I saw this book, I thought I’d like to see if businesses have similar tendencies to the systems we build with code.

The idea behind equal web performance is that you should stop looking at metrics other than the 99th percentile: resources shoud be “equally” distributed across all of your clients so that a few clients don’t act as a bottleneck for the others.

Last week I was working on an application that has an idempotent API, meaning the same request can come in multiple times without generating errors or side effects: the request can be safely replayed, as it won’t affect the state of the server.

Since I was using MySQL as a storage engine behind this API, INSERT IGNORE was my first thought.

What a tragic mistake.

A few weeks ago I got to the office and noticed something peculiar: my XPS’ battery had around 7 remaining hours of life, while until the week earlier I had never seen it above 3 hours.

This is the (very short) story of how I supercharged my laptop’s battery without even knowing how to.

A few days ago I wanted to integrate gravatar in one of the applications I’v been working on, and realized gravatar still uses MD5 for hashing the user’s email.

This was a funny one! After weeks thinking the Chrome team might have messed up, I finally got frustrated and looked for a solution to one of the weirdest problems I had encountered: the DevTool’s console getting cleared unexpectedly.