Julio Merino

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

  • Visual Studio Code: A modern editor

    On April 14th, 2016, Microsoft announced the 1.0 release of their open-source Visual Studio Code (VSCode) editor. I’ve been drive-testing it for a few months and have been quite pleased with it, so here go my impressions. How did I get here? Let’s backtrack a bit first. I’ve been a Vim and Emacs user for many years. Yes, I use both regularly depending on what I have to achieve. For me, Vim shines in doing quick single-file changes and repetitive edits through many files, while Emacs shines in long-lived coding sessions that involve numerous open buffers.

    April 19, 2016 · Continue reading (about 6 minutes) · Comments

  • A look at Go from a newbie's perspective

    I confess I am late to the game: the Go programming language came out in 2009 and I had not had the chance to go all in for a real project until two weeks ago. Here is a summary of my experience. Spoiler alert: I’m truly pleased. The project What I set out to build is a read-only caching file system to try to solve the problems I presented in my previous analysis of large builds on SSHFS.

    March 22, 2016 · Continue reading (about 10 minutes) · Comments

  • Those pesky Makefiles

    As a software developer, you have probably disregarded the build system of your project—those pesky Makefiles—as unimportant. You have probably “chosen” to use the de-facto build tool make(1). And you have probably hacked your way around until things “seemingly worked”. But hang on a second. Those build files are way more important than you may think and deserve a wee bit more attention.

    March 2, 2016 · Continue reading (about 7 minutes) · Comments

  • Analysis of SSHFS performance for large builds

    Last week, I spent some time looking at the feasibility of using SSHFS on OS X to access Google’s centralized source tree for the purpose of issuing local builds. My goals were two-fold: first, to avoid having to “clone” the large source code of the apps I wanted to build; and, second, to avoid having to port the source file system (a FUSE module) to the Mac. What I found highlights that SSHFS is not the right choice for locally building a remote source tree. That said, the overall study process was interesting, fun, and I am now tempted to make SSHFS viable for this use case. Read on for the details.

    February 17, 2016 · Continue reading (about 11 minutes) · Comments

  • The Medium experiment wrap-up

    Eight months ago, I decided to try Medium as the platform on which to post my essays. Over this time I have published a handful of posts in there—8, to be precise, which is… a very shy number—but the results have been quite satisfactory: the WYSIWYG composer is excellent, the analytics tools are simple but to the point, the looks are great, and the community is nice (though I haven’t been able to tap into it just yet).

    January 28, 2016 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

  • Joining the Blaze team

    It has been over 6 years since I joined Google and throughout this time I have been in the Storage SRE family: first with GFS, then with Colossus, and last with Persistent Disk. Even though this counts as 3 different teams, the reality is that I have been doing mostly the same type of work all around. I had pondered the idea of switching to a pure Software Engineer (SWE) role for all these years and never taken any action. Until now. Things change, and the time has come for me to make a move and pursue that thought in an effort to grow in a different direction. And why now, you ask? Well, simply because I have found a role in the NYC office for a project that I am personally passionate about.

    January 19, 2016 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Introducing Nudgy Timer

    For the last two years, I had been meaning to write an Android app just for the sake of it. I had attempted to do so in short chunks of “free time”, but that never played out well: I had to force myself to sit down for a few hours straight to fight Android Studio and overcome the initial difficulties in coding for an unknown platform. That’s why, during the last Thanksgiving week, I took three days off of work to focus on writing my first Android app. The goal was to get a basic app that could later be built on iteratively as open source. The specifics of the app did not matter much for this exercise, but I had a simple idea in mind.

    December 17, 2015 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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