Best Books of 2009

Date Arrow  February 24, 2010

Every year I’m doing the same post (well, in 2006 I completely forgot to do it) that starts more or less with the same phrase: “every year I like to read at least 6 new tech books, and to learn a new programming language.”
Last year’s language was Go, and the books, well, here we [...]

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HTTP Headers, Web Apps and Mobile Safari

Date Arrow  October 30, 2009

I found today that Mobile Safari, the browser bundled with the iPhone, has a very strange and annoying behaviour when it comes to web apps. In fact, when you “install” web applications with the <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" /> tag in the “Home Screen”, the USER_AGENT header sent to the server is different to the [...]

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iPhone Apps without Objective-C

Date Arrow  October 29, 2009

Yes, it’s possible. Even if Objective-C is one of my preferred programming languages, in any case I think it’s worth mentioning that, 2 years after the official iPhone SDK has been announced, the iPhone development landscape has really grown up, and many, many different options are available today. This article provides a very high-level enumeration [...]

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On the Importance of Yerba Mate in the Software Development Process

Date Arrow  October 26, 2009

This paper will highlight the results of an extensive research conducted since the mid 90’s, on the effects of the consumption of beverages based in the plant known as Ilex paraguariensis, in the framework of software development process activities in South America and some small parts of Europe.
This paper will provide an introduction to the [...]

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Olé, olé, olé

Date Arrow  February 15, 2009

I just stumbled into this amazing TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert via James Duncan Davidson (@duncan in Twitter) and I want to share it with you with some very personal thoughts below.

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The Dirty Little Secret of iPhone Development

Date Arrow  December 23, 2008

This is happening right now, at a web agency near you.
The dot-com boom of the 90’s spawned a brand new generation of coders and software developers, including me, by the way. While before that time the term of “software developer” might have been reserved to system programmers fluent in C, COBOL, C++ or other languages, [...]

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A Watch – from an OOP perspective

Date Arrow  July 13, 2008

A watch might be one of the most common types of objects, but it remains also one of the earliest pieces of human craftmanship to show an extreme level of complexity, all contained in a small amount of space. Since the late 1700s, artisan watchmakers in Switzerland and elsewhere have shown their pride and skills [...]

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Amazing Xcode

Date Arrow  May 29, 2008

Xcode is amazing. Of all the IDEs I’ve used (and this is, as always, a personal opinion, having used Visual Studio since version 6, Eclipse, Kdevelop and others) it’s the one I prefer. And today I found another reason to like it.
I’ve noticed this: when I use Xcode on a single-processor machine (such as a [...]

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ImageMagick

Date Arrow  May 28, 2008

ImageMagick is a cool toolkit; not only it’s a complete set of command-line applications, ported to Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting hundreds of different image formats, it’s also a C++ library that you can use in your own applications!
On Mac OS X, I installed it via MacPorts using the all-time classic:
sudo port install ImageMagick
Then I [...]

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On the Need of Minimalist Polyglots

Date Arrow  May 12, 2008

Many companies, at some point of their history, ask themselves a simple question: what programming language should I use? The answer to this question is tricky, and has big, big consequences, for every single line of code of your future products will be written, read and suffered by it. This single choice defines the level [...]

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