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Showing posts from July, 2015

My first official Linux kernel patch

Well, that took some time. Quite an exacting process… which makes you get a new perspective of how Linux is made, and what it takes to keep loose collaboration at a high quality level. And interesting too how such a simple patch evolved. First it made me think of the bike shed …

git mental model

Finally I managed to get a mental model of git that allows me to do everything without needing to google around. And this is a quick memory dump. There are other git cheatsheets, but this is mine.

Modelo mental de git

Por fin conseguí hacerme un modelo mental de git que me permite hacer de todo sin necesidad de google ni esquemas ni Stack Overflow ;P. Y ésta es mi chuleta / "volcado de memoria". Parece que no hay muchas cosas así en español; a ver si le sirve a alguien. La idea era mantenerlo muy corto y al grano — como una chuleta, vaya. Asumo que sabes de qué va en general git y qué son cosas como un puntero y una lista simplemente enlazada. Si hay interés lo expandiré en algo más "tutorial".

6 tips to survive Codility tests

Well, it happened. When applying for a job, I got sent to a Codility test. And even though I guess I already had some good practice with them, I managed to do badly in stupid ways – ways that 2 years ago I had already thought about and even taken notes on. Just, in the heat of the moment I forgot about those rules of thumb. And in fact I think these hints should be given by Codility themselves – because if not you are practically ambushed, even more so if you didn't take the time to thoroughly explore how they work. So here are my hints-to-self. The summary is: don't think of this as a coding interview; this is rather about getting something working, ASAP.

Swapping bottom left and right panes (content and patch summary/file tree) in gitk

Gitk (as of git 2.4.2) has its bottom left and right panes the other way round to what I like: the bottom right shows the file tree or the patch summary, while the bottom left shows the contents of what is selected on the right. Isn't that kinda non-standard? There is no official way to swap those panes, so here's a little hacky patch to do it.

Towards functional

(another entry in the "let the greats make my points" series …) At some point I was getting uncomfortably close to the expressive possibilities of plain old C , and started learning C++. But C++ always had to me this air about it connecting it to UML excesses, to baroque Design Patterns for things that might have been expressed with a handful of words, to "big, spongy frameworks" (as Yegge said?)… the kind of things that made me wary of going into J2EE to begin with, some long time ago. 

Great minds think alike…

… or, "using quotes by well-known people to put forward possibly unpopular points" ;P Sometimes I have a fully formed opinion to write about; lots of times I don't, but I have an intuition of where I want to go. And those times seeing what some of the "greats" in the field think can be a bit of a beacon.