Julio Merino

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

  • Readability: Mind your typos and grammar

    I can’t claim to be an expert writer—not in English, and not even in my native languages—but I do put a lot of attention to whatever I write: emails, presentations, letters and, of course, code. As it turns out, code has prose in it most of the time in the form of comments and documentation. So, when you write any text in your code, engrave this in mind: any obvious typos and/or any grammar mistake very quickly denote sloppiness in what you wrote.

    June 17, 2013 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Lutok 0.3 released

    Lutok 0.3 was released yesterday evening. The packages in pkgsrc-current, Fedora 19 and Fedora rawhide have all been updated accordingly. The major highlight of this new release is support for Lua 5.2 while retaining backwards compatibility with Lua 5.1. The incompatible changes between 5.1 and 5.2 only affected a small subset of the functionality in Lutok, which made this dual support possible. For those that don't know what this project is about: Lutok is a lightweight C++ API for Lua.

    June 15, 2013 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Readability: No abbreviations

    When you are writing code, it is very tempting to shorten the names of functions and variables when the shortening seems blatantly obvious. All of us have, at some point, written calc_usage instead of calculate_usage; res instead of result; stmt instead of statement; ctx instead of context; etc. The thought goes “well, these abbreviations are obvious, and I’ll be a much faster developer!“ Wrong. You might think you are faster at typing, but you don’t write code in one go and never ever get back to it again.

    June 13, 2013 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Readability: Blank lines matter

    Vertical spacing is important for readability reasons: group together pieces of code that should not be split apart, and otherwise add blank lines among chunks of code that could be easily reordered and/or repurposed. That’s a pretty loose suggestion though, so let’s look at some specific situations in which you want to consider your vertical spacing practices (both adding and removing). Give some air to long functions Functions longer than a handful lines generally deserve some vertical spacing.

    June 10, 2013 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Readability: Blocks and variable scoping

    In a dynamically-typed language, it is common for the scoping semantics of a variable to be wider than a single code block. For example: in at least Python and the shell, it is the case that a variable defined anywhere within a function —even inside conditionals or loops— is reachable anywhere in the function from there on. To illustrate what this means, consider this snippet in which we define a function to compute the CPU requirements needed in a database system to support a set of tables:

    June 6, 2013 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Readability: Series introduction

    Dear readers, This post is the beginning of a new series on the idioms and style that I use to keep code readable and obvious. I often get positive comments when undergoing peer reviews at Google and externally, so I am going to share such personal style in the hope that it might be useful to some of you. Explaining these ideas to coworkers when I review their code has proven to be useful in the long term.

    June 3, 2013 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Setting up my old Mac Mini G4 as a development machine

    I've spent quite a few time last week setting up my old Mac Mini G4 — a PPC 1.2GHz with 1GB of RAM running NetBSD/macppc current — as a "workstation" for the development of Kyua and other tools for NetBSD. Yes, this machine is very slow, but that's the whole point of the exercise I'm going to narrate below. I recently got approval from the NetBSD core team to import Kyua into the NetBSD source tree and replace ATF with it.

    October 22, 2012 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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