Julio Merino

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

  • Rearchitecting ATF

    During the last few weeks, I've been doing some ATF coding and, well... I'm not happy. At all. I keep implementing features but I feel, more and more, that ATF is growing out of control and that it is way too sluggish. It oughtn't be so slow. About 6 minutes to run the whole test suite in a Mac G3 I just got? HA! I bet I can do much, much, much better than that.

    July 27, 2009 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • The mess of ATF's code

    Yes. ATF's code is a "bit" messy, to put it bluntly. I'm quite happy with some of the newest bits but there are some huge parts in it that stink. The main reason for this is that the "ugly" parts were the ones that were written first, and they were basically a prototype; we didn't know all the requirements for the code at that point... and we still don't know them, but we know we can do much better.

    July 13, 2009 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Technicians and schedules

    Here I am, on the afternoon of a work day, sitting at home waiting for an eircom technician to come set it up my phone line. How nice. The story goes like this: Two weeks ago, I placed an online order to request a phone line, explicitly specifying that the physical installation is already done (even though I don't know if it works or not, but that should be fairly easy for them to check).

    June 23, 2009 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Child-process management in C for ATF

    Let's face it: spawning child processes in Unix is a "mess". Yes, the interfaces involved (fork, wait, pipe) are really elegant and easy to understand, but every single time you need to spawn a new child process to, later on, execute a random command, you have to write quite a bunch of error-prone code to cope with it. If you have ever used any other programming language with higher-level abstraction layers — just check Python's subprocess.

    June 21, 2009 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • How to find an apartment in Dublin

    It has been three weeks since I moved to Dublin, Ireland, and I finally have settled into my new apartment. It has taken me two weeks (I was pretty busy during the first one) to go through ads, visits and offers to finally get a place that is cozy, nicely decorated and decently located, all at a quite reasonable price. I could have gotten nicer places for a bit more money, but I'm happy with this one so far.

    June 12, 2009 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Trying AdSense

    I've just decided to enable AdSense on this blog and see what the results are. If they are not worth it (what I'm expecting), I'll disable ads after a while. But who knows, maybe I get a nice surprise!

    June 10, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Paella in NYC

    These days, I'm starting to cook by myself (aka learning) and yesterday I made paella for 6 people while staying in NYC (leaving on Sunday...). This is the third time in two weeks that I cook this Spanish dish, but I think the results were pretty good despite the lack of ingredients. After all, cooking is not as hard as I originally thought! And it's pretty fun too! Just blogging this because the results look nice:

    May 14, 2009 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

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