Wow, another year went by! And here we are again doing some retrospective. I know this is a cheap way to avoid visiting a psychologist but somehow, writing these posts helps me create piece of mind. And many people have told me they like reading them so it´s a win-win situation! I started the year with a new role: Automation Team Lead at Wonga. Wonga is a financial services organisation with presence in multiple countries, operating in a heavily regulated environment and this involves a lot of challenges in terms of automation.

Ah… the summertime! Lots of feet in the sand pictures, people showing off in Facebook, extreme unbearable heat and most importantly… holidays time for many people! And of course, everybody thinks about quitting their shitty jobs during holidays so many chances are you will do some interviews between the 15th of August and the 15th of September as it is the perfect time for companies to hire and it is possibly the time of the year when people are more likely to consider a job change.

There are many companies building applications using C# which still predominantly run on Windows servers. Windows 2012 Server was definitely a step forward and I can´t wait to see the first headless Windows Nano servers, which is happening in Windows 2016 Server. However, the Windows ecosystem is sometimes a bit of a step behind the Linux world or has taken a completely different approach (Powershell I am looking at you).

After some years working in startups I thought it was about time to write a blog post with some thoughts and experiences related to the stock options you sometimes get in this type of companies. When I was in Barcelona I often thought about how great it would be if more companies offered stock options. But this thought has changed lately and I would like to explain why. Most of this is just plain common sense and some of you may say “hey, this is very clear in the contract, you should know what you are signing” but the reality is that most of us don´t know much about these things and only experience teaches us.

Here we are again, another year has passed and it´s time for retrospective! This year has been a bit weird for me. A year of reinvention, regeneration and most importantly, making peace with myself. Most of it has happened at a personal level but it has also affected my work. I have spent all year working at Another Place Productions, a small video game studio in London where I have been able to improve my DevOps knowledge a lot as I was in charge of all the backend and infrastructure.

For a very long time, Capistrano was, without any doubt, the de-facto tool to deploy your dynamic languages applications. Now there is a better one, Ansible based, called Ansistrano. Ansistrano was initially created by Carlos Buenosvinos and is a set of 2 Ansible roles: deploy and rollback. It has almost 200 stars on Github and some large companies are already using it. In this video you can see how to deploy a small Silex application and you can also see how to rollback and add a small hook reloading the opcache in your production servers.

Play Framework uses the concept of BodyParsers to read the data being sent in our HTTP requests. You can read more about this subject in the official docs. As it can be seen, we can specify an explicit BodyParser in our controller actions as explained in this page but unless we have some specific need we will possibly be better delegating the right parser to the framework. By default, Play uses the BodyParser.

En el momento de escribir esto, hace algo más de 2 años que aterricé en esta fascinante ciudad en busca de un futuro mejor para mí y mi mujer. Han pasado una infinidad de cosas desde entonces y creo que es un buen momento para hacer balance. Y en vez de pagar una sesión de psicólogo, he decidido escribir un poco al respecto. He pensado escribir este post en castellano ya que aunque la mayoría de los que me leéis entendéis perfectamente mi incorrecto inglés quiero pensar que esto puede servir a gente indecisa cuyo nivel de inglés quizás no sea muy bueno.

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote an entry in this blog. What the hell, I haven’t written a single blog post in 2014! And this is a shame. A clear resolution for 2015 is to try to write a bit more here. Anyway, sorry for another (hopefully not) boring retrospective post. But it’s been a very complex and intense year for me and I really want to write about it.

2012 fue un año muy intenso pero 2013 tampoco se ha quedado atrás La gran decisión Empecé el año todavía en SocialPoint. Probablemente la aplicación más grande de Symfony y uno de los proyectos más importantes de Europa sin ninguna duda. Rodeado de buenos amigos, excelentes ingenieros, pero algo cansado del ritmo frenético de los meses anteriores. Y ya llevaba unos meses dándole vueltas a la posibilidad de marcharme fuera.