Recent content in / on ~miguelbernadi
Writing is an underrated skill, and any intellectual worker is
required to write. Part of it is writing to think, to help evaluate
and express the ideas (and yes, this includes drawing, diagramming,
mapping…). The other, is to share those ideas. 
 I’ve been interested in writing for a long time and keep finding
people with interest and need on improving and…
A recent hiring process required me to write down a debugging story
that included application code and infrastructure. This prompt reminded
me of an old happening back in 2016 and how amazingly baffling it
was. I didn’t use this event in my job application, but I found it was
worth writing down and share, showing the interesting failure modes
that big distributed systems…
I was reading the other day a nice blogpost by Matthew Garret
(mjg59) about being able to
use SSH keys to sign Git commits. While trying to make that set up in
my machine I realized there are some tricks I use to configure the Git
repository identities I had not spoken about before, so I’m going to
merge both topics. 
 If you are only interested in the SSH signing,…
As perks of the job, I tend to find myself having to maintain old code
bases with many outdated dependencies. That is quite usual, but turns
to be specially painful when you need to update a core dependency and
every other thing starts breaking due to API changes. This has
happened to me in 2 workplaces, first in Ruby on Rails, and latest in
the infrastructure scripts written…
Project management is a basic necessity of developing software (and
things that are not software). As I use Emacs throughout the
development cycle I also need to control projects from there. I’m
sharing here a transient I wrote to help me learn to write transients
and to use these better.
I have seen a rise in the number of opinionated tools present in the
common mindspace in the last decade. These tools usually cause
controversy by limiting user choice and following a set path through
problem space. But why have they become popular? Why are they
“better”?
We started a book club at work at the end of 2020 and the first book
we went over was the extremely famous Refactoring: Improving the
Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler.
This blog is now hosted in srht.site . This is the static site
hosting provided by sourcehut , a very opinionated software forge
with many integrated services.
I try to keep track of improvements in the projects I depend on the
most, and sometimes I even track their development with the hopes of
being able to contribute something back. One of such projects
(though contributing back directly is pretty unlikely so far) is
Emacs, and I build it locally to get the big improvements early on.
Using Emacs, you eventually need to learn Emacs Lisp (elisp) as
everything is written in that language. Configuration is also in
elisp, but usually requirements are minor enough not to need much
learning. I’ve tried to learn it several times with low success, but
recently I got to write a helper for myself that I think is worth
sharing. This is just beginner stuff, and…
I recently read Scott Berkun’s, “ The year without pants ”. For some
reason I got the idea that the book was about how to work remotely,
kind of a tips and tricks collection, which seemed on topic in the
current pandemic situation. Nothing further from truth.
October 6 - 7th 2020, originally in San Francisco (via Zoom). This
is a conference about the development of OpenZFS, the Open Source
implementation of ZFS. Originally developed by Sun and currently
owned as proprietary code by Oracle.
Last June it made the fourth year I’ve been using Emacs, so I felt
it worth going a bit down memory lane. This post is basically my
account of how I found and started to use Emacs, exposing the good
and bad of it all. I still use Emacs everyday and I’m likely to
continue further with all the warts I know it has.
4-5th September 2018, Amsterdam. This is the second time this occurs
in Europe and my first time attending. The previous one was in Berlin
in 2015 and one of my friends referred to it as the best experience
he’d had. I had to see!