Alpha’s Manifesto

Software Security

Yes, I continue to go on courses. Now I just finished the Software Security course, from the University of Maryland.

As usual, let me give you a quick review of what it was about, what you need to get into it and what you can get out of it as well.

ATPS: Angular, Protractor, Travis, SauceLabs

A few days ago I got the combination of Angular + Protractor + TravisCI + SauceLabs working together. There are a few quirks into making this work, but nowhere I found a comprehensive description to jump all the obstacles. Here I’ll describe what I did to get there.

MOOC: Android Dev Part 1

Yes, I continue to go on courses. Now I just finished the Android Development Part 1 (or “Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems: Part 1”), dictated by the University of Maryland.

As usual, let me give you a quick review of what it was about, what you need to get into it and what you can get out of it.

General Game Playing

I’ve recently taken and finished the course on General Game Playing, by Stanford University. Let me tell you what it was about and what the experience was like.

My time tracker: Google Calendar

Long time ago I wrote about a proposal from a StackExchange user about how to use Google Calendar for task planning across projects and activities. The idea seemed good, and after months of making it my bread and butter, I think I have perfected it to address most of the problems I had with my workflow in Trello. It’s not the holy grail of productivity, but it has helped me a lot.

Let me explain it to you, because if you use Google Apps or GMail, you’re most likely to benefit from this.

How TDD pays off

Software engineers, amirite? They keep blabbing about this fancy-pantsy weird wibbly-wobbly stuff nobody understands and they just want to keep things complicated. They want to test things even before they are done and then develop the app. Are they insane? And it even takes more time, so it’s a waste of money.

Well, my little friend-that-does-not-adhere-to-software-methodologies, they are right on what they do. And it does pay off. Let me tell you why.

(In here also: an update on the mongo-faceted project.)

Sleep time

Many of you that know me also know that it has been forever a problem of mine to get to sleep properly. Not to sleep early. Not to wake up early. It’s about the quality of sleep. I’ve tried many things to address this problem, raging from hormones to witchcraft, but something seems to be making a difference: smart alarms.