I lay
the foundations
other engineers build on.
Computer enthusiast, doctor and engineer. Former vice-dean of COEINF, the professional college of computer engineers of Catalonia. I write every Saturday and I have not missed one since 2022.
The book
The Emotional and Technical Guide to Rescue Stalled Software (2024) is about conquering technical debt without sacrificing your sanity or your shipping schedule. Its rule fits on one line: never rewrite, never stop delivery. About the book.
Essays with more than half a million views
More than 250 of them on Medium, one every Saturday since 2022. The most read one, and the ones read longest, argue with the canon:
- The JavaScript framework war is over
- Software Development Is A Beautiful Mess
- Scrum vs Extreme Programming: Was XP Right All Along?
- Confirmed: Code Coverage Is a Useless Management Metric
- The Craziest Piece of Software I've Ever Seen
- What Are Micro-Frontends Really For?
Twenty of them, with a line on each.
The world at the top
The mark in the header is not a picture. It is a planet, grown the moment this page opened, by the pipeline of a program I wrote before the year 2000 for a university graphics course: Mons fractals, Java 1.1.8 on MS-DOS, writing worlds out as VRML.
It is a pipeline of filters, and the order is part of the meaning. Start from an icosahedron. Split every edge and push each new midpoint out or in by a fraction of the edge it came from, so the first rounds carve continents and the last ones only roughen a slope. Work out the climate from latitude and height. Put in the sea as a minimum radius: everything below it is raised up to it, which is why a coastline reads as a coastline and not as a change of colour. Only then paint it. Paint first and you get a ball of one colour.
Reload, and it is a different world. The same pipeline runs here, rewritten in TypeScript with nothing underneath it, and you can turn the dials yourself.