Skip to main content

Getting Started... One Last Time

Hi, I'm Joaquin and I'm currently on my eight (and potentially last) semester of my Computer Science undergrad degree at ITESM. I'm also very happy to share that earlier this month, I started an internship as a Solutions Engineer @ Facebook!

I don't quite know what to expect from this course, but if it's anything like Programming Languages, I'm sure it will be very interesting, and I'm excited to see what lies ahead. 

My tastes haven't changed much; I still enjoy playing tennis and playing videogames. However, with the pandemic, the former became impossible and I lost a bit of interest on the latter, which is why I started practicing calisthenics to stay active and bough a VR headset to keep the experience fresh. 

With the quarantine, I stopped commuting everywhere, which means I haven't listened to too much music in the past year, and besides singles from some of my favorite artists, I've only listened to songs that were already on my repertoire. The lack of releases also meant that I haven't watched any new movies or series, but I rewatched some of my favorites such as The OfficeCommunityAirplane, and more. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is Design Dead?

 This week, we had to read Is Design Dead? by Martin Fowler. Just by reading the title, the thought of agile methodologies popped into my head, since they do involve design, just not as much as we're accustomed to. And not too surprisingly, Fowler reached a similar conclusion: design is NOT dead, it has just evolved along with us to keep up with today's standards.  Before, design was used to make sure that you knew everything you needed to get done, and it let you find any flaws in your plan beforehand. It was meant as an all-encapsulating process that all future code will be based on. Today, it has maintained its role as a guide, as to not make the developer feel totally lost, but with today's fast-paced work environment and ever-changing requirements, with the help of methodologies such as Extreme Programming, it has evolved to become more dynamic and easier to change.  For my personal opinion, I've had experiences (both academic and professional) where a bit of desig...

Why is an architect?

  This week's (very short) article, Who Needs an Architect?, Martin Fowler explains to us the different definitions of architects that exist in the software world. The first and most common definition, which Fowler disagrees with, says that an architect is (s)he who helps identify what the most important parts of a project are, in order to give it structure. However, it is also mentioned that these parts are usually the most important because they are the hardest to change, so an architect's job should also include reducing the amount of these parts. Following the logic, by this definition, an architect's job is to reduce the amount of architecture.  The second proposed definition, which I also think I agree with, is that an architect's role is more like a guide's. His purpose is to help the team become better by using his expertise, and communicating with as much of the team as possible in order to remove their blocks. I think the word architect  still fulfills thi...

Microservices

 This week, we read an article called Microservices  by James Lewis and Martin Fowler, which did a great job explaining the differences between monolithic applications and those that run on microservices (and the ones that use a little bit of both). They explained the advantages and pitfalls of implementing any of these methods, and they conclude that while microservice-based applications seem promising, it's still too early to tell whether they'll be better than monolithic ones. Luckily for us, this article was published in 2014, and we're far enough in the future to know that they are, in fact, more widely used today. Before reading this article, I was already aware of these different types of applications, and I knew that the market had a preference towards microservice applications, but I hadn't realized how much this change had affected how businesses are run today. From personal experience, I belong to a cross-functional (XFN) team that dabbles in many different p...