This mystery novel starts slowly by introducing the reader to two young women starting their careers 20 years apart. In the late 70s, Beatrice is starting as a secretary at the First Bank of Cleaveland. 20 years later, in the late 90s, Iris is having her first job at an engineering firm that is in charge of drafting plans of all floors from the First Bank of Cleaveland's old...
The one that got away - by Simon Wood
Posted on December 14th, 2015
This exciting thriller introduces our hero and protagonist, Zöe, in her weakest and most vulnerable point. The book starts when she finds herself naked in a shack tied to the floor. All she remembers was coming back on a car trip with a friend of hers, Holli, from Las Vegas and then darkness. She can hear Holli screaming and crying in another shack...
Agile Brazil 2015
Posted on December 10th, 2015
This year I went to Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, next to Recife to attend Agile Brazil 2015 and have a few more meetings. As a long time organizer of the conference, I ended up not spending as much time watching talks as one usually does.
I did have the chance to attend 3 of the 4 keynotes, one open space session and a few other sessions along with a lot of meetings.
Keynote #1: The Agile mindset - by Linda...
Life after Blink - by Romily Cock
Posted on December 7th, 2015
This is a very short 5 chapters book for those of you who have recently purchased or would like to purchase a simple common Arduino (or Arduino kit).
All Arduinos come with a short instruction to run the 'blink' program which essentially just blinks a LED (usually one that is embedded in the Arduino board itself) to show that everything is working. From then on, the owner of the Arduino is...
Developing for iOS - part 1
Posted on December 3rd, 2015
In the last few months, for multiple reasons, I was drawn into developing a few mobile applications for iOS. I wanted to share a bit of my learnings and the choices I've made when it comes to it. The first one has to be language: Objective-C or Swift.
Well, I tried Objective-C. I did. For about 30 minutes. By then, I had to create 8 files, 4 headers and 4 implementations and I was trying to shape up what my interfaces would look like so I had to keep all of...
Claimed - by Sarah Fine
Posted on November 30th, 2015
The sequence from Marked follows a very similar style and story line. Marked had focused on Eli and Cacy and their growing romance. Eli being a new firefighter/rescuer in Boston and Cacy Ferry, the daughter of the most powerful man in Boston and his co-worker.
Our focus this time is on Galena, Eli's sister, and Chief Declan Ferry, Eli's boss and Cacy's brother. Galena is leading...
Building Micro services - by Sam Newman
Posted on November 2nd, 2015
This book provides a great overview of what are micro-services, how they came to be, the complications and advantages that come from designing your systems with micro-services.
Sam starts by providing an overview of micro-service architectures. Ease of change/upgrade, composability, polyglot environment, scalability and many others are some advantages that come with it. However, a micro-service architecture also...
Everything burns - by Vincent Zandri
Posted on March 28th, 2015
This exciting thriller is written under the point of view of Reece “Pieces" Johnston, a fairly famous author who managed to publish a best seller (The Damned) around 8 years prior to the books’ events and has been living out of its fame. The book starts telling us the story of Reece's young childhood and how he lost his mother and two older brothers to a fire and developed a pyromaniac pathology...
Crawl your app/site on build/commit
Posted on March 17th, 2015
I’ve recently been working to obtain some publicly available data from a few websites who list many projects. As part of that work, I wrote a small simple HTML crawler that identifies all links in a given html page and navigates to them downloading their HTML content. Writing this crawler took me roughly a day of development in Ruby and is not very interesting in itself.
The results of crawling through a website, however, are very interesting. Crawling is a great way to identify...
Miramont’s Ghost - by Elizabeth Hall
Posted on March 13th, 2015
Elizabeth Hall brings the reader to end of 19th century/early 20th century France and then United states with this sad drama story that follows the life of Adrienne Beaver. A third person narrator brings us to the early years of Adrienne’s life with jumps between important moments of Adrienne’s life on each chapter. She’s a very young girl surrounded by richness in the south of France living in her...