Recent content on Leticia Portella's thoughts and learnings
This post has a small caveat… we did all this in a small break from the lockdown, so we didn’t go to closed spaces and a lot of things were still in recovery. Things may differ. We also did everything with public transportation, so we were limited in the options we had for the trip. However, this is totally a trip that can be done by public transportation only :)
Clothes 
 Penneys and Dunnes have great cotton basic clothes but they have a size small 
 
 Next has the best and cutest outfits but they are more expensive. M&S is also good. I like their clothes 
 Search for donation groups in your area. So many good toys I got from my neighbours
 
 There’s a free cycle group in the north of Dublin that is fantastic 
 
 
 My…

 Pregnancy for men —> most books focus on mom, this one is for dads 
 Save our sleep by Tizzy Hall and When your child is sick by Prof Alf Nicholson —> both recommended by my GP
 
 When your child is sick became super useful when she was a bit older. There’s a clear list of red alerts for each scenario that is helpful 
 
 
 60 dias de neblina —> book in portuguese…
We asked the midwife in our classes and the service is available in Ireland but not as common. The midwife seemed particularly not pro doing this. She said it would be done by private companies and the prices would be around 3000 euro. 
 Decided to study to see if it is a good thing. There’s a really good article from the New York Times from July 2024 about the topic:…

 When I got pregnancy, my instagram/feed went insane. Don’t freak out <3 Block words like pregnancy and disease to make sure you are not flooded with bad content.
 
 Being a mom is amazing. A lot of people will tell you your life is over but it is not. Make sure you follow the right people 
 
 
 I love Dr Mona . She’s absolutely one of the best pediatricians out…
This was my baby shopping list 
 
 I focused on the bare bare minimum because things can go insane 
 If in Ireland, do buy things in advance. Our crib delivery date was 2 months away and still they said it could take an extra month. The buggy we got on babydocshop.ie and the estimates is 4-5 weeks to delivery 
 I don’t recommend buying a lot of baby clothes. Most people I…
Last update: Apr 2025 
 As soon as you discover… 
 The biggest recommendations are: 
 
 Do pelvic physiotherapy. I went to Her Physio as soon as could. She is a Brazilian who lives in Ireland for 12 years and I couldn’t recommend her enough. If you speak PT, her online content is GOLD
 
 She books early. Book 2-3 sessions in advance and cancel if you…
Last update: Apr 2025 
 Estimated costs 
 
 Solicitor and fees (we budgeted ~3000 for this) 
 Stamp duty is 1% of house price 
 You need 10k on the moment of sale agreed 
 You need 10% of house value (banks won’t lend more than 90%) 
 A house inspection (if used) / Snagging (if new)
 
 I paid 450 on mine, a friend paid 300 each visit (there were multiple,…
Welcome to Dublin :)
When I decided to try to write a book, the only certainty I had was that I was not an expert on a lot of topics I wanted to write about. So I knew that to make sure I was writing a book that was correct regarding the industry standard I would need to study… a lot . 
 For instance, I have a whole chapter dedicated on software developers: expectations for each phase of the career, the myth of…
Many many moons ago, I wrote a blog post about what was like in my first 6 months at Stripe. Since then, a lot has happened including a whole pandemic and me spending every free hour writing my own book . Because of that and many more things, I never got to write a second piece to what I was initially hoping to be a once-a-year kind of blog post.
This is the translation of the keynote talk I gave at Pycon Brazil 2022. The talk was about leading complex software engineering projects and what is the major skill needed for the job
It’s a book about software development for people that don’t have a background in computer science but want to know more about this world. Are you not interested in becoming a developer? No problem! This book is still for you: 
 
 We can only build software for everyone if everyone is involved in the construction of software. Anything besides that is utterly flawed. The only way we…
While trying to check test coverage for a file that had multiple Class Based Views (CBV) everything was returning as coverage but they weren’t! I couldn’t understand why and it took me days until I get to an answer! So I wrote this post to make it more easily accessible 😊
I fell into a case where I wanted to count the tags that were present in an HTML file and I didn’t want to download any library (like BeautifulSoup) to do so. I searched online and realized I could use the HTMLParser to do that.
This is the forth post on how to create your website step by step!
This is the third post on how to create your website step by step! In this post, we will allow that people can comment on your awesome posts!
Last year (2021) I decided to add GoatCounter as the analytics tool for my blog . There were a couple of reasons why I did it, but the main one is privacy. I am trying to move a bit away from Google, and I wanted something different.
Last week I was part of the 2nd online edition of Pycon Brazil. An inclusive event, with interpreters to Brazilian sign language, free admission, code of conduct and much more.
I wanted to go to Northern Ireland since I first heard of the magnificent Giant’s Causeway. Since it was a short drive from Dublin, we decided to rent a car and do a trip there. Because we never get the car, we decided not to go to Belfast, which we could easily go by train. 
 Day 1 
 We left Dublin early morning and headed to Northern Ireland. There is no border from one country to…
This is the second post on how to create your website step by step!
We arrived in Faro late on Tuesday evening. We stayed in Faro GuestHouse. The room was nice and there was a lovely balcony where we shared a bottle of wine on our first night with a view to a church. 
 
 

 Day 1 - Faro 
 We woke up and went to the Igreja do Carmo , which is a beautiful church but the reason we went there was to see this small chapel made out of human bones.…
I’ve written over and over about why you should have a blog and write on it . I made this website using nothing but free tools. The only thing I paid was my domain (leportella.com) and I find this super cool! 🤩 
 When I created my website I realied on a lot of different tutorials, one for each part of it. Because the process of creating it can be quite tricky, I decided to create a…
I had a Django model that had 2 regular attributes and a user Foreign Key:
I talked to Tim Bourguignon at the Dev Journey podcast about career life and mentoring.
A friend of mine told me this week that she was invited to give a talk at a conference, and asked me what I thought about it. I told her all the things I consider when giving a talk and I discovered I consider a lot of things!
All my career I worked in places where people were better than me. Like… way better, in one thing or another. They were truly exceptional people.
There are people who can play the piano wonderfully while others can’t even clap in rhythm (me).
There are people who can express themselves well and people who cannot deal with the countless thoughts that flow through their brain.
There are multiple types of intelligence. 
 In the past few days I have had several philosophical conversations with people of all kinds.
A…
From: Little Women 
 ‘My Beth 
 ‘Sitting patient in the shadow 
 Till the blessed light shall come, 
 A serene and saintly presence 
 Sanctifies our troubled home. 
 Earthly joys, and hopes, and sorrows, 
 Break like ripples on the strand 
 Of the deep and solemn river 
 Where her willing feet now stand. 
 
 ‘Oh, my sister, passing from…
One thing that I always say that is hard from learning computer science by yourself, is not knowing what you don’t know. I learned the name of a couple of concepts that I am going to share, so people know they exist 😊 
 When I started studying Python, if a new variable depended on another variable, I would write something like this:
Microphone 
 I use a Blue Yeti microphone for recording my podcast. 
 Keyboard 
 I use a Keychron K2 Wireless keyboard. They can pair with up to 3 devices at once, which was a good feature.
I don’t like clicky keyboard so I am using the Red switch option, which also makes the keyboard more thin and other models. 
 Portable monitor 
 I bought an Asus MB16A Portable…
“This post is also known as “My saga learning Scala - Part 5”
Panel with the London Chapter of Latinas in Tech!
Design 
 I use Canva for all my podcasts designs and my resumee! 
 Fluxograms 
 Whimsical is my go-to tool for this. It is very expensive but it allows you 4 free boards (and I use them well)! 
 Mental maps 
 Whimsical is my go-to tool for this. It is very expensive but it allows you 4 free boards (and I use them well)! 
 Notes 
 I like the bear.app for daily diaries in…
Hacktoberfest is here and it is an awesome moment to contribute to open-source! However, Git and Github can be quite scary, so let’s talk a bit about the basics of these two extremely useful tools! 
 Versioning 
 Git is a versioning system that was designed focusing in code versioning. It basically helps us to handle file modification in an easy and painless way. 
 Github, on the…
Create a venv with python3 
 python3 -m venv MyFirstVenv
 Create a venv with conda 
 conda create -n MyFirstVenv python = 2.7
 Understanding VirtualEnvs 
 Virtualenv is a Python tool developed to isolate development environments. It is really handy when you need to isolate projects that use different versions of Python and packages. It is specially good if you consider that…
Minimum working example 
 % mydoc.tex
 \documentclass [12pt,openany] {memoir}
 \usepackage {graphicx} % allow images
 \usepackage {float} % image location ([H])
 
 \title {My LaTeX book}
 \author {Leticia Portella}
 
 % ============= DOCUMENT =================
 \begin {document}
 \maketitle 
 
 \include {chapter1}
 
 \bibliography {mydoc}…
I didn’t study computer science in college and I never took a “formal” programming course. Without going into too much detail, I want to reaffirm that, looking at the past, I by no means believe that having gone to another college (different from the profession I have today) was a waste of time. <! - more -> A university teaches many things that you cannot learn by yourself,…
I was recently helping a friend who was transitioning from Matlab to Python. Giving him some tips, I realized that many of the cool nuances I learned in Python were taught me by someone in a “do you know that?” style or to solve a very specific problem that could be solved more simply. 
 When helping this friend who is there on the other side of the world, I remembered the time…
Hi! Welcome to my corner on the internet :) 
 While writing this I am wondering what would you like to know about me. I usually try to summarize it in one phrase: I am an oceanographer that discovered to be passionate about programming and decided to change careers. But it feels… simplistic, I guess? Well… I guess every summary is a simplistic thing. If this is what you are looking for, great!…
Write me! 
 
 Sorry :( 
 I received too many spams, so I removed the form. See you on social networks :)
I was handling some LaTeX files and I needed code coloring. I found the package minted and it seemed perfect, but it required a couple of things that made my life a bit more complicated on VSCode.
LaTeX (yes, written exactly like this) is a system that allows you to write documents without worrying about the style of the presentation.
Tutorial given during the OceanHackWeek 2020
Leticia is a Brazilian developer who changed career to web development four years ago. She previously worked as an Oceanographer but caught the coding bug! Now she works as a developer at the payments solution company Stripe. She is a great example of a software engineer without a CS degree who has a successful career.
If you ever told me you are learning to code (or anything, really), chances are I told you you should have your blog and write in it.
This post is also known as “My saga learning Scala - Part 4“
As the years went by, I developed a framework to deal with my impostor syndrome in different scales it occurs. It is not something super complex or with a deep theoretical background, but it worked for me and I’ve been using it for the past year.
Although we think of a software as being this one massive thing that does a lot of things, we can thing of a software as a huge pile of small functions that work together. A function is basically something that receives inputs, work with them internally and returns an output.