2024 in review

We made it. Another notch in my belt. As I mentioned before, the ending of every year pervades me with an intense feeling of gratitude. I’m painfully aware of my health limitations, of the unstable and chaotic state of the world, of the insurmountable list of problems we must confront as civilization.

Although it’s difficult not to feel certain...

Aitor's Cool Tools list 2024

Many years ago, I read What Technology Wants. At that point, I’ve known about Kevin Kelly for a long time by his connection with Steward Brand, his work in Wired magazine and his “1.000 True fans” theory, but I have never followed his personal interests or know his personal life journey. You can see a very succinct...

Osotu - On Neuroscience

This post is part of a series. Feel free to check the other posts:

• On Competences & Skills

• On Emotions

As I write this post, I’ve already finished Osotu’s training course for teachers (I still have to upload the notes on a few modules), so in retrospect, I can say confidently...

Osotu - On Emotions

This post is part of a series. Feel free to check the other posts: On Competences & Skills

I just attended the second session of the training course for teachers on Osotu. This time, we discussed the role of emotions in the learning process. 

This time, it was hard to find parallelisms between general team leadership and teaching....

Osotu - On Key Competences and Skills

As I have mentioned before, Atlas didn’t attend formal education for the first three years of his life. He started at school on what the Spanish system called “Infantil” (akin to Pre-K/K in the US), and at that moment, we chose what we thought would be a good school for him. Long story short, after three years, we were...

2023 in review

Another revolution around the sun! I couldn’t be more grateful to life for giving me more time. More time to enjoy my family, more opportunities to become a better father and husband, more mornings where I can be delighted by the blue sky. I’m genuinely grateful. That’s my general feeling with 2023, but let me write down some specifics.

LLMs and prompting

I have been interested in AI for quite some years. In 2018 I did a nano-degree in AI programming and learnt many things about ML, neural networks and other AI topics that were all the trend then. But in the last 12 months, the progress on LLMs has been so deafening that I think it would be irresponsible for...

Sunsetting a fintech app, some learnings

This post is part of a series on the learnings acquired on developing a Fintech native app for some years.

About three years ago, on Dec 28, 2019, the first native app for Devengo was published in the App Store. On launch, we were laser-focused on providing the best salary advance solution in Europe, and our native apps...

Asking together

I just used my son blowing a candle as a pretext to spend lunch talking with him and my nephews about them. Why does a candle go out when you blow it out? What is the purpose of the wick? I keep asking them questions without confirming their theories to see how far they can go.

I often do these...

2022 in review

A few months ago, I discovered Mike Crittenden blog, and on it, this notion of the 12-week year (see my take on it here), I’ve decided to adopt it as a framework for establishing and reviewing goals and life objectives.

As a first step, I’m using it to review this year, which will die in a few hours.

A Life Framework

Enough.

I’ve had this unpleasant feeling feasting at my guts for too long.

The feeling of flying the worse seat of UnhealtyLifestyle Airlines. The feeling of being on autopilot as life passes. The sombre feeling of you are going to regret this. The unsettling feeling of you are going to die (moderately, I’ll admit) young.

I’ve been working too much,...

Summers

‪Atlas becomes 3 today. He has been 24x7 at home for the last 16 days. We couldn’t feel prouder of how well he is managing this situation. His normal day before the lockdown was whole mornings of games at the park, hours playing with his grandparents, visits to his friends in the grocery shops, the butcher,...

Bessemer para el Capital

Traza esta Bonilista paralelas entre el acero que se amontonó durante siglo y medio a apenas 500 metros de mi casa y los productos digitales que asoman en el móvil. Y hace bien. Gran parte de nuestro sector vive en un permanente excepcionalismo, convencido de que lo digital vive en un limbo existencial donde lo humano no aplica.

Quizás...

Fifty years together

1966. Vietnam. Race Riots. LSD. Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde”. The Surveyor 1 lands in the moon. Star Trek’s first episode.

Meanwhile in Spain, a B-52 crashes over Spain releasing 4 hydrogen bombs. The minister for information and tourism —in a visual definition of what it means to be an hidalgo and...

Serendipity, Concert Halls and Public infrastructure

Eight months ago I was waiting at 3am in downtown Reykjavík for a bus to take me to the Keflavík airport. Streets were unsurprisingly empty and quiet. Standing there, in the wee hours of the mourning, Harpa, the fancy concert hall built during the biggest recession in the history of the country that cost more than 160 million euros to...

Everything changes, it all stays the same.

In the afternoon of August 3rd, 2010 my wife and I were standing under the rain, waving as our friends left the driveway of a big house in Mosfellsbær. I remember the moment clearly and the feelings of anxiety and excitement.

After 5 years we are moving back to the Basque Country, our homeland, and I thought it would be...

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

A friend of mine is starting Computer Science in college. She is learning to code in Java and is experiencing the transfixing feeling of commanding machines for first time. I remember perfectly the thrill, and even feel it still sometimes, although now it’s indissolubly connected with a cynical perspective on the software industry. But I digress.

Yesterday we were talking...

On Database Dumps and Ethics

Last week the Ashley Madison hack has been my main focus of attention in the tech world. Maybe because it involves regular citizens’ privacy on an unprecedented scale, maybe because it involves sex –always a great bait in our our hypocritical and puritanical western society– the hack has sparked conversation on the ethics of using hacked digital information.

Digital...

Prisionero en la Arcadia

Vice, The Awl, The Guardian, Jacobin, Aeon, The New Inquiry…

Salvo puntuales y honrosas excepciones es difícil encontrar publicaciones en castellano analizando la cultura del siglo XXI. Hay cientos de sitios y revistas que, pasado el Mediterranean Tech Delay, publican lo que ocurre, pero no es eso a lo que me refiero.

Hablo de los Paul Ford y los...

Narcocorridos, Apps and Culture

As human beings we go through different stages. We keep realigning our focus as that-thing-called-life develops. What was a logical top priority on high school makes us feel embarrassed in a party just a few years later.

Developers —despite it what might seem looking at HackerNews— are not different, we’re human beings too. We shift from obsessing on every single...

Nice state

There is an ongoing attack on common sense. Move fast and break things then move fast and fix things. Profit. Repeat. Price has replaced cost so completely that you don’t clean your clothes anymore. You ship new dirt-cheap ones from China and give old dirt-dirt ones to charity. Moral gratifying consumerism. It’s Slavoj Žižek all over the place.

Same questions

We watched Ex Machina yesterday. Good movie. I like most of it, except the last 10-15 mins. But, as with most Sci-Fi movies lately, the thing I find most valuable on them is the ethical, moral and philosophical questions it raises.

In the same way that good developers eventually understand that making software is all about people, not languages...

The shape of your notes

I suffer a compulsion for note taking that forces me to carry small notebooks all the time. I found this simple technique a great stress reliever; it allows me to keep my mind clear and focused, delegating all the popping thoughts to a simple analog buffer.

There are lot of things to love about notebooks. They are fast, flexible and...

Tremors, earthquakes & tectonic shifts

Coder, informatician, software artisan, digital craftsman, hacker… maybe we can’t agree about the denomination of our work as we like to invent countless number of ways to call it but we don’t -used to- have problems explaining what is its nature.

For that last 40 years we and the developers before us, have being struggling to discover how to make...

How to write a micro-story in 30 minutes

0 min. Wake up early. If you are not a morning person, just free yourself from the bed, and try by all means to get to the shower. Once there, the water will do the rest in 5 minutes.

5 min. Go to the kitchen. Ignore any mess that is -pretty certainly- around. Your task is make a cup of...

The Cursed Year

Today is the last day of the Year.

Yes, it is. At least is the last day of my year. The worst year I’ve probably had in my life. The year I’ve come to refer as The Cursed Year. Mainly because of working problems, that derives on financial problems, that derives in personal problems.

365 days ago I started working...

Y asi un dia y otro y otro...

Algunos dias pienso que llevo con la crisis de los treinta desde los dieciocho.

microISV incoming

Algunos días deberíamos coger nuestro portátil, montarnos en el coche, conducir hasta la costa y tomarnos un café mirando al mar mientras llueve lentamente. Entonces haríamos el mejor software de nuestra vida. Un día como hoy.

Día como hoy.

Como hoy.

Hoy.

En fin.

Lidia de Canal Euskadi tuvo el detallazo de acercarme al bar una copia en CD del...

Me rilo con lo de los domingos...

Cada vez oigo hablar a alguien de globalización me rilo. La gente se llena el buche de MacBasura y lo llama globalización. En mi pueblo (bueno cuando tenia pueblo, ahora creo que tengo un centro de revitalizacion de la margen izquierda) eso se llama gilipollez. El tema es que en este gran engaño que entre 5 o 6 caciques (básicamente...

Flickr

No creo que haya mucha gente que no lo conozca aun, pero como agradecer es de pobres pues lo comento.

Hace algún tiempo se ha creado un servicio de almacenamiento de fotos llamado flickr. La verdad es que llamarlo “servicio de almacenamiento de fotos” hace flaco favor a verdadero servicio de esta herramienta pero bueno por algo hay que...

Acabamos de ser tíos

Pues si. Mi hermano y su esposa nos acaban de hacer tíos a Bego y a mi. Se llama Miriam, ha pesado 3.460 gramos y medido 51 cm. Se ha demorado un poco más de la cuenta pero al final ya esta aquí.

¡Feliz nacimiento Miriam!

Utopia

Hace muchos dias un tal Rafael hablaba de la perdida de la magia. Y no. No hablaba de su novia precisamente (ni yo :-):

Nowadays I still have a LOT of things to learn, to improve, but… is no longer fun, at least not like those days… When you learn more programming languages than you can count using your...

Adiós tío, descansa en paz

Se ha muerto mi tío.

Era algo que no nos ha pillado de imprevisto pues llevaba casi tres semanas en el hospital y el propio medico se asombraba de su aguante y fortaleza. Ser excesivamente benévolo con los muertos traspasa la propia definición de hipocresía. Por ello solo diré de él que nunca oí nada malo por parte de sus...

Groovy

Parece ser que en la comunidad OS (aunque quizas debiera hablar de comunidad Weblogera, ya comentare esto…) se esta cociendo un nuevo lenguaje de script. Si ya se que algunos estareis pensando : “Eramos pocos y… Bueno en realidad podriamos decir que teneis y que no teneis razon a la vez. Groovy, que es el nombre que estan dando al...

Aristóteles y los metodos ágiles

Enciendo mi cerebro con un poco de café, mantengo mi conciencia a medio gas disfrutando del placer de no pensar. De existir sin el desarrollo de una conciencia. De poder vivir unos minutos sin ninguna obligación. Desperdiciando el tiempo como un insano placer, dándole una palmadita en la espalda para que sepa que por un momento soy yo el que...

Royal Mile

Ya estoy en Scotland!!!. Sin putos acentos, signos de puntuación y eines pero ya estoy aqui :-). Llegamos ayer y la verdad hemos tenido una llegada un poco estresante.

Nos levantamos el miércoles a las 4:15 AM para coger el vuelo de Dublin a Edimburgo a las 6:50 AM. Mi cuerpo todavía se esta recuperando. Sin comentarios.

Llegamos a Edimburgo...

Core Developer Network

De todos es sabido lo ocurrido en los dos últimos días en el centro de JBoss Group LLC. Y creo que a nadie se le escapa que no es un evento mas dentro del mundo OpenSource. En pocas palabras: Los desarrolladores favoritos de Rickard (que merece toda mi credibilidad ;-) se han cansado del modo de trabajo del grupo comandado...