Julio Merino

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

  • Introducing Markdown2Social

    Markdown2Social is a new open-source tool, originally written at Google for Google-internal posts, that converts Markdown documents to Google+ posts.

    December 10, 2015 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Compilers in the (BSD) base system

    A commonly held axiom in the BSD community is that the C compiler belongs in the base system. “This is how things have been since the beginning of time and they define the way BSD systems are”, the proposition goes. But why is that? What makes “having a compiler in base” a BSD system? Why is the compiler a necessary part of the base system? Hold on, is it? Could we take it out?

    October 23, 2015 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

  • Welcome to my homepage, version 2.0!

    Back in May, I wanted to play a little bit with Twitter Bootstrap and the result of those experiments was that I set up a personal site on this same URL. The site served me well for these months, but I wanted to see it grow to better represent my presence on the Internet. To that end, I have now been playing with Jekyll, a static content management system natively supported by GitHub Pages, and came up with the site you are own now, which went live yesterday.

    October 22, 2015 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • An open letter to online support staff

    Dear online support staff member, I am probably not your average customer. If I send a support request to your team by email, it is because I have already exhausted all possible resources on my side and concluded, with good certainty, that there is an issue on your service. Yes, I have read your online support material. I have tried different browsers. I have tried different devices and operating systems. I have tried disabling browser extensions.

    September 24, 2015 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • "Your English is pretty good!", they said

    As I spend September in Seoul and attend an intensive Korean language course, my story with English comes to mind. This is a story I have told a bunch of times to friends and coworkers and it’s time to write it down for posterity’s sake. In the title of this post is a verbatim quote of something I have been told many times throughout the years: Your English is pretty good!

    September 20, 2015 · Continue reading (about 9 minutes) · Comments

  • My coding workflow

    How would you best organize your work environment for maximum productivity if you were tasked to develop a type of application you had never developed before? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could witness how an experienced developer manages the tools of the craft so that you could draw ideas and incorporate them into your own workflow? This post aims to answer the above for the type of work I do by sharing how my workflow looks like. I want to compel you to share your own story in the comments section, and by doing so, create a collection of stories so that others can benefit from them.

    September 7, 2015 · Continue reading (about 11 minutes) · Comments

  • How to commit a code hack and not perish along the way

    You are the developer in charge to resolve a problem and have prepared a changelist to fix the bug. You need the changelist to be reviewed by someone else before checkin. Your changelist is an ugly hack. What kind of response are you gonna get from your reviewer? Well as with everything: it depends! (Cover image courtesy of http://www.startupstockphotos.com/.) If you have: clearly stated upfront that the changelist is a hack, explained how it is a hack, justified that the hack is the right thing to do at this moment, and outlined what the real solution to get rid of the hack would be then your reviewer will most likely just accept the change without fuss (!

    June 19, 2015 · Continue reading (about 6 minutes) · Comments

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