Julio Merino

Software artist. Writer aficionado. Open source enthusiast. Runner. Father of two.
Currently: Senior Software Engineer at Google, New York City.

  • Unused parameters in C and C++

    Today I would like to dive into the topic of unused parameters in C and C++: why they may happen and how to properly deal with them—because smart compilers will warn you about their presence should you enable -Wunused-parameter or -Wextra, and even error out if you are brave enough to use -Werror. Why may unused parameters appear? You would think that unused parameters should never exist: if the parameter is not necessary as an input, it should not be there in the first place!

    February 16, 2015 · Continue reading (about 6 minutes) · Comments

  • One month in with Android Wear

    Or: A review of the LG G Watch. Right before the Christmas holidays, I was gifted an LG G Watch Black Titan, a relatively simple smartwatch that sports the new Android Wear operating system: After over a month of daily use, I am now comfortable about writing about my impressions. But, before doing that, let me set this review in the right context. -- Context-setting Sometime last summer, the continuous interruptions from my phone ended up irritating me significantly.

    February 5, 2015 · Continue reading (about 7 minutes) · Comments

  • Task tracking and the Bullet Journal

    iGTD, Things, Org mode, OmniFocus, Google Tasks, Trello, Google Keep… All of them. All of them I have tried over the last few years and all of them have failed me in some way — or, rather, I have failed to adjust to their idiosyncrasies. Part of it is because the overwhelming feeling that builds up after days of continuous use due to how easy it is to end up with never-ending piles of open tasks.

    November 20, 2014 · Continue reading (about 7 minutes) · Comments

  • shtk 1.6 is now available

    The Shell Toolkit, or shtk for short, is a little project I introduced back in August of 2008 to support other tools such as sysbuild and sysupgrade. Since that time, the project has seen little activity because it did not have much to offer and because shtk's public interface was not documented (hence making it impossible for developers to get started with shtk). Well, both are changing today with the brand-new release of shtk 1.

    November 17, 2014 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Code review culture meets FreeBSD

    One of the things that often shocks new engineers at Google is the fact that *every change to the source tree must be reviewed before commit*. It is hard to internalize such a workflow if you have never been exposed to it, but given enough time —O(weeks) is my estimation—, the formal pre-commit code review process becomes a habit and, soon after, something you take for granted. To me, code reviews have become invaluable and, actually, I feel “naked” when I work on open source projects where this process is not standard practice.

    May 31, 2014 · Continue reading (about 9 minutes) · Comments

  • Refocusing Kyua maybe?

    The FreeBSD devsummit that just passed by gave me enough insight into Jenkins to question the long-term plans for Kyua. Uh, WHAT?! Let me explain. In the beginning... One of the original but unstated goals of Kyua was to fix the "mess" that is the NetBSD releng test run logs site: if you pay close attention, you will notice that various individuals have reinvented the wheel over and over again in an attempt to automate release builds and test suite runs.

    May 23, 2014 · Continue reading (about 6 minutes) · Comments

  • BSDCan 2014 summary

    BSDCan 2014 and the accompanying FreeBSD devsummit are officially over. Let's recap. FreeBSD devsummit The FreeBSD devsumit at BSDCan is, by far, the largest of them all. It is true that I already visited a devsummit once —the one in EuroBSDCon 2013—, but this is the first time I participate in the "real deal" while also being a committer. The first impressive thing about this devsummit is that there were about 120 attendees.

    May 21, 2014 · Continue reading (about 6 minutes) · Comments

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