Julio Merino

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

  • I don't really like C++

    Somebody recently tweeted me this message: As a strong C++ dev and googler (hopefully with some #golang exposure), what's your opinion on @rob_pike post? (goo.gl/xlMi4)The answer deserves much more than my original reply included, so here it goes. First of all, I found Rob's article quite interesting. Basically, the authors of Go never expected Go to be more widely adopted by Python users than C++ users. In fact, their original goal was to create a replacement for C++ as a systems programming language.

    September 4, 2012 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Testing NetBSD's share/mk

    For a long time, a pet peeve of mine has been the lack of tests for the build infrastructure files of NetBSD: i.e. those bsd.*.mk files that live under /usr/share/mk/ and on which the whole source tree depends. One could argue that writing tests for these files is not strictly necessary because the successful build of NetBSD is the real final test of whether the files work or not. That's partly true, but unfortunately is not the whole story:

    August 26, 2012 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Introducing shtk

    Have you ever wanted to have a collection of ready-to-use modules for shell scripts? I have, particularly because I keep reimplementing the same functions over and over and over and over again whenever I write non-trivial shell scripts, and I'm tired of doing so. That's why I have just abstracted all the common code in the aforementioned tools and put it into a new package called the "Shell Toolkit", or shtk for short.

    August 15, 2012 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Introducing sysupgrade for NetBSD

    Over the last two weeks, you might have had fun rolling your own NetBSD binary releases with sysbuild. But what fun is that if you have no trivial way of upgrading your existing NetBSD installation to a newer version? Upgrading NetBSD to a newer version from distribution sets generally looks like the following; Fetch new distribution sets (or roll your own).Upgrade the kernel.Unpack the distribution sets over the root directory, without fat-fingering the command and unpacking etc.

    August 6, 2012 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Introducing sysbuild for NetBSD

    NetBSD's build system is close to awesome: after checking a source tree out from CVS on virtually any Unix-like operating sytem, building a full NetBSD release for any of the supported platforms is as simple as running the build.sh script with the right arguments. There are, however, a few things that would deserve automation in this process, but that are not in build.sh's domain to solve. These are: Fetching and keeping the source tree up to date: interacting with CVS is still the responsibility of the user.

    July 25, 2012 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

  • Getting rid of @public.talk.google.com GTalk contacts

    If you use a native IM client to connect to Google Talk and also have a Google+ account, you probably have noticed by now that your contacts list is polluted by tons of addresses of the form annoyinghash@public.talk.google.com. Attempting to talk to these people from the native IM client does not work (maybe it does in some specific situations? I don't know.), so these contacts only add noise and annoyance.

    July 5, 2012 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Kyua gets its own blog

    For the last couple of weeks, I have been pondering the creation of a Kyua-specific blog. And, after a lot of consideration, I have finally taken the plunge. Say hello to Engineering Kyua! From now on, all Kyua-related posts (as well as ATF posts) will go to the new blog. I recommend you to subscribe to Engineering Kyua's Atom feed right now to not miss a beat!  If you care enough about Kyua, that is.

    June 4, 2012 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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