Recent content on César Olea

On March 2024 I was honored to be invited, along with my friends and
coworkers Rhett Roberts and Lloyd Roberts, to participate as keynote
speaker at the Brandon Dewitt Technology Keynote for the Association
for Financial Technology (AFT) spring summit. The opportunity to get
to know many of my peers in the broader fintech industry was a great
experience, and something I…
A while back I wrote about writing AWS lambdas with ClojureScript . There’s surprisingly little information on the topic, which could mean that people are able to figure out their way around the ClojureScript ecosystem (great!) or that few people are interested in writing AWS lambdas with ClojureScript. Recently the author of shadow-cljs published a repository on github explaining the steps he…

I've been working remotely for more than a decade now. In that time I've gone through vastly different setups, arriving to what I consider my ideal desktop setup for remote work. Over the years I've changed computers (desktops, laptops), operating systems (virtualized Windows under OSX, OSX, Linux, back to macOS), desktop environments and/or window managers (Gnome, KDE, i3, Gnome+i3) and I've…

A blast from the past. My co-worker, ex-co-blogger and all time
excellent friend Axel Valdez shared with me this video recorded at the
Super Happy Dev House event in Ciudad Obregón, México 2009. Apparently
it was recorded with potatoes also used to power a TI-89 to run Doom. 
The video is in Spanish, and I demo my program 'Everlasting Flame'
named for the namesake track in…

Multi-language computing has many challenges. During my day to day
activities I constantly switch between English and Spanish, and though
my whole OS and window manager is set up in English for consistency, I
frequently need to type accénted wórds and other characters ñ. 
 
I'm also a big (though novice) user of the agenda present in Emacs
orgmode. My problem is that…

 Expreso is a regional newspaper and they invited me and other
colleagues to participate in a segment called 'economics for all' as
the topic being discussed was how technology effects the economy. I
had a great time; there simply wasn't enough time to cover everything
that I wanted, so maybe there's opportunity for a v2? Thanks to
Expreso for hosting. The content is…

As a user of multiple browsers, a very common use-case is opening a
specific browser depending on the target URL. For example if you use
Google Workspaces at work you might want to open Google specific links
in Google Chrome, while keeping Firefox as your 'main' browser. In
macOS there's a very cool utility called Choosy that does exactly what
I'm describing, but I…

On July 7th 2021 LoanPro opened its new offices to the world. I was
part of that celebration and was invited to give a speech. To me it
was very exciting, and I saw it as the culmination of 9 years of
building. Not only the software platform, but also a viable software
development operation, a company with a culture where I'd like to
work. It is also the beginning of…

I was invited to participate in a recorded event organized by
 BEDU . The topic was centered around migrating your operation to cloud
computing, more specifically the AWS cloud. You can watch the
recording in YouTube . It's also embedded below. The content is in
Spanish. 
 
 
 

I’ve written before on what a gamechanger Emacs with native compiled lisp and PGTK frontend is. However it’s a bit of a hassle to install the toolchain and compile it yourself. 
 If you are running Ubuntu 20.04 as I am and you would like to get your hands on a deb package you can install, now’s easier than ever. You can build your own using my fork of konstare’s Docker…

For a long time I've been searching for an email client that would fit
my workflow. During my macOS days I was a happy Airmail customer,
though I can't say that it adapted to my workflow more than I adapted
to it. Then they decided to change to the subscription model and
charge for 'premium' features such as push notifications, and that's
when I decided to stop using it.…

There's some very exciting developments in the Emacs world: native
compilation of elisp and a 'pure' GTK frontend for Emacs. 
 
 
'Pure' GTK frontend
 
 
 
 Emacs is not a proper GTK application . There are many reasons for
 things being this way, but this fact prevents Emacs from benefiting
 from recent developments in GTK, for example hardware…
Deprecation notice! 
 This article has been superseeded by writing AWS lambdas with shadow-cljs . Most of the information contained here should still work, but I don’t recommend following this approach as shadow-cljs presents a much better development story. Still some of the information presented here is still valid and valuable, such as the use of core.async. 
 Rationale 
 When…

 TL;DR for my org-roam configuration, jump to Setting up a Zettelkasten in Emacs or checkout my Emacs configuration in Github. For a practical
use case jump to Putting it all together . 
 
 
 This article is not an in-depth look at the Zettelkasten method. For a
proper explanation there’s no better source than
 https://takesmartnotes.com . 
 Any creative…
DNS is an integral part of the Internet and a very important
application layer protocol. Still, developers building Web
applications usually don’t think about DNS and expect it to “just
work”, or don’t take it into account when designing their systems. 
 Well, not anymore. Read on for an explanation of what makes DNS tick,
how to debug DNS issues and…
I’ve migrated my Emacs configuration to use a literate programming
style, after several unsuccessful attempts at better organization, and
going through many Emacs
 configuration
bankruptcies . 
 The big plus is obviously that the configuration file itself is in an
Org file. But another big plus is that Gihub renders the file directly
in the repository. It makes it…

I'm a fan of Fabien Sanglard's work ,
and after reading his Wolfenstein 3D book I felt inspired to write my
own raycasting engine. Once I was done, I wrote a series of articles
in the devz.mx blog explaining how it all works. 
 
The engine is written in ClojureScript, as it allowed me to insert the
running engine directly in the articles and people could play…
Some time ago I wrote a series posts in the devz.mx blog on setting up a ClojureScript project from scratch. I did it for learning how to do it myself. There’s multiple leiningen templates that will set it up for you, but I always fell short when wanting to set up a more complex environment such as a browser connected REPL, code evaluation from your editor, setting up multiple ClojureScript…
This article was originally posted in the devz.mx blog . 
 Terminé de leer el libro Game Engine Black Book: Doom de Fabien Sanglard recientemente, y uno de los capítulos que más disfruté fue el dedicado a los ports de Doom a las diferentes consolas de la época. Está lleno de detalles técnicos e historias sobre las restricciones sobre las cuales tenían que trabajar los programadores de la época…

 
Hi!
 
 
 
My name is César Olea. I'm a Software Developer living in Hermosillo,
México. If you want to know what I'm working on, the best place is my
 Github profile . You can also find my contact details in my resume , or
check out my Linkedin profile . 
 


 
Rockofonia
 
 
 Rockofonia was a podcast centered around Hard Rock and Heavy Metal. It
spanned two seasons with more than 200 episodes, and for a little
while it even was syndicated in the BC México area. Episodes either
feature Tony GM or myself as DJ. 
 
 
Now in Spanish
 
 
 Rockofonia era un podcast de Hard Rock y Heavy Metal . Logró…