Recent content on Diego Vicente
Getting into ATProto: My 2026 Field Guide to the ATmosphere Introduction I have been quite bad at social media for as long as I remember. Not that I don’t have a lot of followers — I really don’t — but I am not consistent: I start using a service (sometimes I even hassle my friends to join it), use it for a while, and then let it wither unused, unopened. It was not always…
Back to Writing… Again At the time of writing, the last time I wrote in this blog was on June 4th, 2024 ; more than two years ago. It’s not only far too long to have a proper excuse; it’s straight up shameful that the last post talks about a tool (WezTerm) I don’t even use anymore. I would love to start writing that series again, because my tool setup has changed a great…
Honing the Tools (II) - WezTerm To take off on this journey to find a new set of very, very sharp tools, let’s start with the basics: If the aim is having a set of atomic, CLI applications to solve my problems, I’d better find a very good terminal emulator to hold everything together . WezTerm is built on Rust, and is the reason why I am changing my mind regarding my daily tools. After…
Honing the Tools (I) - Introduction I have recently started feeling disenchanted with my work setup. I have mostly been using VS Code to interact with all the technologies I use at work: mostly writing different flavors of SQL (BigQuery, Snowflake) as well as Python code in a vast array of situations and technologies: one-shot scripts, notebooks, services, Docker containers, etc. For most of those…
FOSDEM 2024: On the Right Track I am writing this post from Brussels Zaventem airport, where I am lucky enough to have been provided 50 extra minutes before my flight departs to let everything we saw this weekend sink in, and write this post. This weekend, FOSDEM 2024 took place in its usual venue, the ULB campus in Brussels. This has been my fifth consecutive year attending the event 1 , and even…
My Must-Have macOS Applications For almost a year now, I have been using an Apple M2 Macbook Pro as a work laptop. It is a beautiful machine that is much faster than it has any right to, and I have heard the fan roughly three times this last year (and it was during the torrid Spanish summer). Reviewing macOS is more challenging. While it is much better than any Linux desktop experience out of the…
FOSDEM 2023: Glad To Be Back Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels. It was the first time FOSDEM was a physical meetup since 2020, when it was celebrated in the early days of COVID-19 when we were completely unaware of what was coming. For the first time in three years, waves of developers marched through Brussels to the ULB campus, ready for some talks and plenty of…
Back to Life: Fixing my eight-year-old MacBook This is the story of how I turned an eight-year-old laptop into a viable daily driver. Come with me, friend, in this nerd-sniping rabbit hole; this renovating extravaganza fueled by caffeine and acetone vapors. A little bit of the backstory As I have mentioned some time before in this blog, before using Linux as my daily driver, I was a macOS user…
My Current Approach on Web Analytics During the technological writer’s block that have been the last three years and a half, one of my posts has become quite popular several times due to high profile people sharing it on different sites. Some of these times I have noticed because I have been credited and tagged in the post but I have mostly found by accident. I still remember how Leo told me…
Back to the Drawing Board: My New Blogging Setup My last post in this blog was roughly three years and a half ago. That is a very, very long time with no new posts. In this post, I will make a quick recap on the issues my old setup had, how it blocked me from writing, and what the new setup is to try and fix these errors. Blogging with nothing, and nothing only In this very blog you can find a…
My 2019 Reading List I have to admit, I was never really a huge fan of New Year’s resolution in general: I was never able to find the motivation of just choosing a (mostly arbitrary) point in time to start working towards a goal; mostly because I thought that doing so would imply to lose such motivation it once the year was not that new anymore. However, being pretty much Groucho Marx right…
Emacs in 2018: My Year in Review A couple weeks ago, I was chatting with a colleague ( @captainepoch , follow him!) about the time required to configure Emacs so that it makes a difference in your workflow. I think that the investment is absolutely worth it, although I can understand that the friction gets smoother with time. That also made me think how, regardless the time, it seems that even…
Blogging with Emacs, and Emacs only Some time ago I wrote about my blogging workflow : I basically used the almighty org-mode in Emacs to write the posts, and afterwards let hugo generate the static website. hugo is a great tool, and the results are generally good. However, hugo and I seem to make different assumptions on how org should be written. I am one of those 79-characters-wide-text…
Open Data, or Opacity through Transparency In the recent years, it has been possible to see how governments and different public organisms have joined the Open Data: releasing part of their collected data using an open license to let third parties use it, no matter the purpose: most of these license have very permissive terms, allowing distribution and not restricting commercial use. The…
FOSDEM 2018: My first time The first Friday of February 2018, I was sitting on Madrid-Barajas airport, waiting for the cheapest flight available to travel to Brussels that day. After hearing my friend Nacho talk several times about FOSDEM, I finally decided to join him on the adventure. In this post, apart from my humble chronicle as a newbie in this kind of events, I gather some of the talks I…
Using Self-Organizing Maps to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem The Traveling Salesman Problem is a well known challenge in Computer Science: it consists on finding the shortest route possible that traverses all cities in a given map only once. Although its simple explanation, this problem is, indeed, NP-Complete. This implies that the difficulty to solve it increases rapidly with the number of…
Learning Monads by Example This is an updated version of a repository I released on GitHub some months ago when researching for my bachelor thesis. If you are an expert in the topic and see something that can be improved or anything feels off, don’t hesitate to leave a comment in this post or open an issue in the repository. While writing my bachelor thesis, a heuristic search framework in…
Blogging from Emacs: Hugo & Org-Mode I have to admit, I hate first posts. They are awkward, cliché, and most of them just serve as a weak preamble for the posts to come. I was just about to name this post Hello, World! . Since we are going to follow the cliché, let’s follow the useful one at least: let’s talk about technical details of the blog as such. When I decided to create this…
About me I am Diego Vicente, and I am a Data Scientist from Madrid, Spain. I currently work at CARTO . I studied Computer Science Engineering at UC3M , where I also studied a Computer Science and Technology Research MSc. I also spent a year studying in Trondheim’s NTNU . Previously, I have worked at Decide . (Somewhat) Frequently Asked Questions I would like to contact you, how can I do it?…