Hugo Corbucci's Blog

City of Echoes - by Robert Ellis

Posted on August 12th, 2016

This police thriller takes us through the story of Matt Jones, our hero. The books starts as Matt heads to a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles to celebrate with an old time friend and partner his recent promotion to the homicide division of hollywood. As he sits at the bar to wait for his friend, he gets a call from his new boss asking him to start early and head to a crime scene a few blocks away. Matt agrees, sends a message to his friend cancelling the celebration and heads out to the...


Younger - by Suzanne Munshower

Posted on August 5th, 2016

The title of this book suggests the theme quite easily. A woman in her fifties, Anna, gets involved into a project that allows to rejuvenate her appearance by about twenty or thirty years. The context is well set up with a protagonist who is struggling to remain relevant after over twenty successful years in the make up marketing industry. A start with alternating chapters between Anna dealing with her...


Lean Enterprise - by Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly and Jez Humble - Part II

Posted on July 29th, 2016

This book covers a lot about transforming a traditional enterprise into a newer, more suited Lean based company. It covers from finances to portfolio management going throught adoption, technical practices and lot more.
The book is long. And tiring. But full of very valid useful bits of knowledge. I’ve covered Part I in a previous...


Fated - by Sarah Fine

Posted on July 22nd, 2016

The last book of the Servants of Fate follows, as predicted in Claimed, Aislin Ferry and Jason Moros, respectively Charon of the Ferrys and Lord of the Kere. They are both struggling to keep their power over their respective empires. While Aislin has to deal with family politics, Jason also has his own, quite different, family issues as one or more of his sisters are plotting against him and his Kere and he doesn't...


Lean Enterprise - by Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly and Jez Humble - Part I

Posted on July 15th, 2016

This book covers a lot about transforming a traditional enterprise into a newer, more suited Lean based company. It covers from finances to portfolio management going throught adoption, technical practices and lot more.
The book is long. And tiring. But full of very valid useful bits of knowledge.

Broken down in 4 parts, it starts by covering culture, strategy and how innovation starts...


Developing Hybrid applications

Posted on June 24th, 2016

When it comes to mobile, native vs hybrid vs web is among the most common debates. The trade offs are not very complicated.

Native means you have to re-implement similar features across at least 2 platforms but likely a couple more. It also tends to mean you have some sort of shared back-end anyway that doesn't have any user interface but still provides a bunch of common APIs to persist and share data across platforms. It often requires 2 or more teams to...


Developing clojure

Posted on April 8th, 2016

As part of work, I ended up having to learn and use clojure for something more than my pet projects. I have to say it grows on me every time. Ring and compojure make it quite pleasant to develop web applications. The smallest example of a ring web application I could come up with was the following:


From nothing to production in 10 mins with NodeJS, Grunt, SnapCI and Heroku

Posted on January 7th, 2016

A few weeks back, I gave a lightning talk at one of ThoughtWorks Chicago’s First Fridays about going from nothing to production in less than 10 minutes using NodeJS, Grunt, SnapCI and Heroku with Continuous Deployment. Since my friends convinced me that trying to live code this would be one of the most stupid things I could think of doing, I ended up recording a video of the process and talking over it.
It worked fairly well so I decided to share the results here:


Refatoração em Ruby - by Marcos Brizeno

Posted on January 4th, 2016

This is a Portuguese-only book so I'll post the review in Portuguese.
This is just a short summary in English if you're interested:
Marcos introduces 9 of the Gang of Four's design patterns in Ruby. With great stories motivating the patterns and initial code samples, Marcos walks the reader through the work of refactoring code to design patterns. The...


Developing for iOS - part 2

Posted on January 1st, 2016

If the post for part 1 talked about language choice, there is another aspect of iOS development that is also a big choice but a lot less obvious: Graphical User Interface (GUI).

XCode and iOS development are tightly coupled together as with most proprietary development platforms (think Visual Studio). When it comes to the user interface, there are two...