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0 A.D: a pleasant surprise
When I was younger, I remember being a great fan of real-time strategy games, specially those based of history. One of the main reasons I was really happy when I’ve got my first computer, was that from that moment i would be able to play the first “Age of Empires” game, which my dad bought…
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Managing secrets
A few hours ago, I published a small article on Whitesmith’s blog about sharing and managing secrets, inside a software development environment. At first I dig a little into this problem that is very common and later I explain how we are addressing these issues. You can check it through the following link: Managing Secrets…
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Browsing folders of markdown files
If you are like me, you have a bunch of notes and documents written in markdown spread across many folders. Even the documentation of some projects involving many people is done this way and stored, for example, in a git repository. While it is easy to open the text editor to read these files, it…
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Django Friday Tips: Security Checklist
Security is one of those areas where it is very hard to know if everything is taken care of. So you have been working on this project for a while and you want to deploy it into a production server, there are several settings on this new environment that should differ from your development one.…
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3 Months of Remote Work
Three months have passed since I left the office and started working remotely (+1000 km), in this post I share the “pros and cons” of my short experience, even though across the Internet many people already covered this topic extensively. Whitesmith has been “remote friendly” since first day I joined, more recently the company is…
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Django Friday Tips: Managing Dependencies
This one is not specific of django but it is very common during the development of any python project. Managing the contents of the requirements.txt file, that sometimes grows uncontrollably can be a mess. One of the root causes is the common work-flow of using virtualenv, install with pip all the required libraries and then…
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Securing IoT Devices
During the first couple of months of the year 2015 I’ve worked a “little” on the subject of security in the Internet of things world. Even though there is a lot of information about this topic and its crucial role on this new era of the IoT. So today I will share a small document…
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Django friday tips: Switch the user model
In the most recent versions of django, you’re no longer attached to the default user model. So unlike what happened some time ago, when you had two models (User and Profile) “linked” together through an one-to-one relationship, nowadays you can extend or substitute the base user model. It is as simples as adding the following…
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Getting ready to ruumbleee…
After being absent last year, today I will start my participation in the Rails Rumble event. Together with a teammate we will try to finish a project within the next 48h, using the Ruby and its Ruby on Rails web framework. Personally I enjoy this kind of challenges, even though it’s not guaranteed that we…
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Plasma 5 doesn’t start in Debian (testing)
Well, I just lost a few hours of my time trying to solve an issue cause by an upgrade to my debian workstation. My desktop environment, which is KDE Plasma 5, was not starting so I had to switch to Gnome for a while to correctly use my computer and do my work. Also almost…
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Democratizing the Eurozone
Yesterday one of the most influential figures of this year’s European political scene visited Portugal. I was totally unaware of the event but thanks to the reddit’s community I was able to discover the video of the talk given by Yanis Varoufakis at the University of Coimbra. It’s a long video but I can assure…
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Multimedia tools for Linux
Convincing someone to try and adopt a Linux based operating system is a hard task, not because these systems are hard (nowadays) or don’t offer enough functionality, but mainly because when people learn to use a certain system/product and it already is engrained in their workflow changing is hard. I’m certain this is the main…
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An heavy chat application
Following up the quote I pointed some time ago in an entry entitled “Bloat”, I will let here one good example. I know Slack it is a great application and it has some complex features, yet I don’t see any reason for any chat program to steal almost 900 Megabytes of my computer’s memory. Note:…
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Newsletters for Python web developers
The amount of new information that is added each day to the web is overwhelming, trying to keep up daily with everything about a given topic can be a time consuming process. One good way I found to tackle this problem and to avoid wasting a good chunk of my day searching and filtering through…
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Getting started with GPG
Last week I gave a small workshop during the lunch hour (the famous Whitesmith’s “Lunch’n Learn”) about openPGP. It only covered the most basic aspects so that non-technical people could be introduced to this tool, something that can be very useful when someone is sharing or working with sensitive information (either personal or work related).…