What do you do when you have several things you think you should be doing, but aren’t sure which of them you should do next, either right now or at some other point in the near future? This is what is called task paralysis. And it happens to all of us, at one point or another. You look up from your screen and you suddenly realize there are sticky notes filled with things you need or want to do on your desk, from checking out that presentation about market places to reviewing a pull request. ... Read more

I have been thinking about excellence for the past couple of months, since I’ve starting working full time again. Excellence in writing code, designing systems, and formulating problems. Last week I had the opportunity to attend a talk titled Relatively Painless Technical Excellence from J.B. Reinsberger. It was one of the best talks I’ve heard on agile and software engineering. I have to start by saying I didn’t have much expectations about it, and I was positively surprised by the content. ... Read more

Pokémon Go has been released for roughly six weeks now, and it’s already a phenomenon that is moving people. Literally. Whether you’re trying to get an egg hatched, searching for new Pokémon to capture, or just looking for the next gym battle to conquer your turf, and territory, people are out and about with their Pokédex in hand walking the Earth. It’s a must, if you want to become the world’s most premier Pokémon master; and according to the number of users of the app, almost every young adult and child with a smartphone does. ... Read more

The art of writing was invented, I suppose, so that we could communicate with the future, i.e. record the past and present, and in the process create history. Software programs, on the other hand, are written for the purpose of defining the future. One that is meant to be interpreted by machines. The tapping of a keypad turns a blank page into a blueprint. It starts with one file, and can quickly grow larger. ... Read more

I travelled recently, and while I waited at a terminal for my connecting flight, I noticed something intriguing about air travelling: Airline. Let’s start with definitions. Airline is the language used by airlines to communicate with their customers. As an investigator/scientist at heart, I could not help but to take it upon myself the selfless duty of documenting this obscure language. And so I paid close attention throughout my trip, and made an effort to document and analyse it as much as I could, and I now share with the world my efforts in translating some of the most important terms in Airline into plain English. ... Read more