I frequently ask myself how this virus would have been handled 15 or 20 years ago. While science and technology are going to play a fundamental role in digging ourselves out of the situation where we find ourselves in today, I wonder how much of a part they have in also taking us there in […]
Because of my engineering background, I approach most problems in a similar way: find the biggest bottleneck, optimize it, repeat. Avoid micro-optimizations. To me, the way this virus attacks (and kills) the elders is the biggest bottleneck that we still have to solve: Those who are 80 and older account for 72 per cent of deaths in Canada. But only 18 per […]
What kind of coffee has the most caffeine: light or dark?
By now, the COVID-19 global pandemic has affected, in one way or another, all living things in this planet specially the dominant species, humans. You can always find positives in any kind of situation, even in the mainly negative ones. Collateral positives, in a way. Since I am mostly a positive person, my first post […]
zoomquilt.org (a project by Nikolaus Baumgarten) is the most original site that I have seen in a while. The first time, I stared at this infinite zoom illusion for several minutes. As a developer, my curiosity meter went up to 100% (well 97.5%) and I felt this need of finding out how it was implemented. […]
Snow felt all day long, it got very messy by the end of the day.
Naming things is hard. Some names bring people together, others drive them apart. I am too familiar with trying to find names that are descriptive, that reveal purpose, that don’t transmit the wrong intention. I do it every day when I code. But what happens if I don’t do a good job at naming a […]
I recently took the test at The Political Compass site and was very surprised with the results. Here is what I got: For reference: For someone that experienced a communist regime for more than 20 years I am very surprised that my results are leaning so much towards the left….. at least I am more […]
These design principles used by Amazon to meet Amazon S3 requirements are pure gold: simple yet powerful. • Decentralization. Use fully decentralized techniques to remove scaling bottlenecks and single points of failure. • Asynchrony. The system makes progress under all circumstances. • Autonomy. The system is designed such that individual components can make decisions based […]
I really enjoyed watching The Queen’s Gambit. It has been a while since a new show has caught my attention, instead I have been rewatching The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica for the past few weeks. I love this mini-series format: very few but long episodes, one story to tell. No 2nd season, squeeze all the […]