Hussein Kasem corner...

❄️ Advent of Code 2024 🚀

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:55:40 +0100

December is here 🎉, and that means winter⛄, holidays, and all the good stuff. It also means Advent of code is back! If you wonder what it is, it’s a daily coding challenge running from December 1st to 25th (at 6 AM CET), where you solve puzzles programmatically 👨‍💻. There aren’t any rules, just write your code, run it with your input, and paste the output. Simple, fun, and oddly satisfying.

This year, I’m jumping in again. My plan is to start with today’s puzzle and keep going until I hit a wall or get overwhelmed. Let’s see how far I can make it! (Wish me luck 🍀)

I’m kicking things off with a Kotlin repository to share my solutions, but who knows? I might try out some other languages along the way. It’s all part of the fun.

Here’s to another round of Advent of Code. Let’s do this!

... the art of geniuses ...

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:25:13 +0100

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones. – Donald Knuth

This is one of my all-time favourite quotes, specially coming from a genius like Knuth which I can’t do justice to with words. He is the inventor of TeX, author of The art of computer programming, and the guy who sends you a $2.56 reward check if you find typographical errors or mistakes on his books.

Besides who said it, I think that it captures perfectly the software engineering world. We are not titans performing heroic feats to move forward. We are ants, working collaboratively in teams, building walls stone by stone.

[EN] Once upon I Had a blog…

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:39:13 +0100

Once upon a time I had my own little corner on the vast Internet. I started it, and then buried it somewhere deep inside my mind…

You may wonder (probably not, but my inner self does):

What made you remember it now?
Will this time be any different?

Let me answer myself (hopefully my future self will not regret this ;P)

What made you remember it now:

This domain was expiring on August while I was on holiday and I got the renewal notification, and what happened is:

I tried to write something and failed:
- Project was not building, after renaming master to main
  - Hugo: was multiple versions ahead
  - Terminal theme: was outdated and unmaintained
I updated everything and got it up and running

That was in August and nothing changed, no updates at all. However I had a background thread busy with this topic, wondering how to restart and how to keep my motivation to keep a pace.

Now we’re in November, I have some ideas, one of them this blog post, and what happened? A new versions of Hugo were released, and they weren’t compatible with the theme I was using which in August was not being actively maintained, although that I was very lucky, as maintainers got back on August 21st

I’ve updated the theme, but it was still not working, the Docker image I was using wasn’t up to date either, Thankfully I found an image, got it up and running again and now it is time to focus on write, and share 🎉

Will this time be any different:

Yes! But does it matter? At the end is my own place, and I can find it whenever I feel like I want to write, at some point I was also wondering, am I adding something? Or just emitting CO₂ for nothing?

And I concluded that it doesn’t matter, it is adding something, for me, it is helping me with writing and getting some fun.

What happened during all that time?

COVID-19
I’ve moved to a new job after 6.5 years to a completely new space, from privacy to travel, from lead to plain engineer
- And finally I am not the more experienced Android developer in the room (it was happening even during my internship)
- With this I’ve been on: e-learning, e-health, consultancy, privacy and travel domains
I’ve battled with Rust multiplatform for Android (and iOS) and moved away from it
I’ve been teaching again
Gave my first (and second) talk in an internal company conference
I’ve got back to facilitating some meetups
I crossed the 30-year threshold
I’ve learned tons of things to share here, but not yet :D
- And not only tech related
Last but not least: A cat got me and now she is my pairing buddy

What’s next?

My plan is to get comfortable writing, try to move out of the shadows. I’ve never felt comfortable openly sharing this kind of stuff but it is time to shed some light, crosspost, maybe start to build a personal brand lets see where we do arrive.

Who knows, maybe soon I will even start to ask to follow and subscribe 🙈

[EN] Why does CS expect students to learn to write before they learn to read?

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 02:02:24 +0100

Disclaimer: This post is probably very naive

Today I was searching for an old email, and while doing that I found this quote hidden on a signature after the legal/privacy note (unfortunately I was not able to find the original author of this quote).

Why does CS expect students to learn to write before they learn to read?

This quote was in a email from 2010 and at that time I did not pay attention on it but today it was like blinking with neons.

Why? I assume that happened for two reasons: on 2010 I did not had started to code professionally yet, and I did not know that it is so true. This time I could not avoid think about it…

When we learn or teach to code, we start giving the basics like syntax, keywords, etc. And then expect to get written code by just reading little examples (or not even that) therefore we do not read much code when we start, we don’t start by reading a “Hello World” we start writing it.

And now I am thinking if we read more code (in the language we are trying to learn) before writing it would…

… make us develop some sensitivity on the language conventions and styling?
… make us aware that we are authors writing code which will be read by other
… make us learn it faster?

And for doing that is enough just providing beautiful and well written pieces of code, to read and analyze before starting to code? Or what is needed?

For finishing I would like to add another quote:

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1 – Robert C. Martin

Then we start learning code by writing it to end reading 10 times more code than the code we write.

One last thing…

When I say to code I mean write code in concrete language, which is not the same as programming and one last quote:

We did not taught you how to program C++ we taught you how to program!.

This was heard @FIB when suddenly we were in a new programming subject(or course) and been asked to do the assignments using Java without any introduction or class time assigned to learn/teach java a mate complained about not been taught Java, and this was answer.

And from here we can extract the difference between coding and programming (at least for me), programing concepts are absolutely transversal like control-flow structures, algorithms, etc. And coding is just use a a concrete language to apply programming knowledge.

This post was saves as a draft since 28/02/2019 to today (11/03/2019) and I still don’t like it, I feel there is something wrong with it, said that I am publishing to keep going :D.

[EN] I Wanna Talk About...

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 01:16:31 +0100

Since my last post I am wondering about how to organize this blog, and for now those are the main “Topics”:

TIL: Today I leanerned
Thoughts: Just general thoughts
Unnamed: Posts about programing, tutorials, tests I played, etc
My path: Things related to books I’m reading related to my career
Unnamed 2: A section with Spanish content.

Looking at the list we can se two things:

It is still not clear the list of Topic: Yes, I’m still wondering and thinking about it and I want to write it down as a reminder or guide, to look at it later and start writing instead of just wondering.
I’m changing one of my decisions: On [my first post] (../hello-world/) I said I will write in English and I’m commited with doing that except sometime I feel the need to write in Spanish for things I’m not finding in English, or just I do not see myself writing that post in English and instead of not writting it I will write it in Spanish.

Note: Although I did not want to publish more until I clarify my mind and come with a structure while I was talking about this we a good friend he told me “Just write and organize later” and here I am one week later writing again.

[EN] Hello Again

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 01:29:59 +0100

On my previous post I decided to build a blog, but forget about a quite important part, the deployment (just little details) and which dev tools I will use

Dev tools

Here mi mind instead of just picking the tools just started to wonder again about the tooling mainly about what to use to write, an IDE a plain editor, and which [SCM] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_management).

On the IDE front I love Intellij IDE’s, but it sounds too much, then I will just use Visual Studio Code && Vim.

On the SCM front I’m taking git, while I’m very tempted to use Mercurial. I use both on my work and I managed to miss git when using hg, but also miss hg when using git.

Related with the hosting I was between setup a VPS which git to host the code but at the end I opted for https://gitlab.com + sign commits. This option was chosen just by convenience and to avoid doing devops for this project.

Deployment

In my intend of avoiding devops on this project as much as posible I found that gitlab has gitlab pages, which can be used to serve static content which makes it an easy choice

After deployment

And now what? the blog is online, from time to time I publish, but there is something missing?, there is a little voice saying yes!, the analytics you have two know which people you are reaching, if they spent time here or not, but NOT (at least for now).

I will not put analytics in this blog for two reason:

I do not want any cookies warning or adding a privacy policy
I want to enjoy writing without caring if someone reads or not, if someone does great, if not great too. In this case Ignorance is bliss

Hopefully next post will come after going public.

[EN] Hello World

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 23:37:28 +0100

“Today” (today was 13/feb) while I was building and checking twitter I was thinking why I do not build my own blog (again)…

And then the answer was clear because you do not have anything to offer, everything is already there

Then while I was commuting back the idea was still there and I decided to build a blog, but this time not with the idea of offering something, just as my own corner on the Internet (or “the cloud”) where I write for myself just because I always have project/ideas on mind, but I never write them or find time to finish them.

And now I’m here and writing my “Hello World” before having the blog, and there is a reason for that, I want to prove to myself that I am able to write content, and not just “build” a blog.

Let’s start

Language

Looks like finally I’m convinced to start, but this is just the beginning other topic I was wondering about was, in which language shall I write and why. At the end I can choose between two languages English or Spanish:

English: Is not my native language but I have tu use it almost daily because of my job, also I always feel stressed when I have to use it, as for me is not natural. And I decided to choose it as a way to force me to practice it, improve it and hopefully forget the shame I feel every-time I use it because my skill.
Spanish: This would have been the easy choice as I am pretty comfortable writing it, but I had a little voice in my head teasing me saying: “is too easy”.

Then first decision done I will write in English

Note: Probably I will end with posts on both languages or even others

Software

Great! I started to write in English, but I want to publish this content somewhere using something, and then I started to think about using something from building my own blogging software using Django Framework, use some ready CMS, use some service like Medium or even write plain HTML.

And again a decision needs to be made, and my mind is just jumping from one topic to other I had to stop and think again, what I wanna do and what I need.

What I wanna do: Write posts
What I need: Some place to publish this thoughts

This is for me I do not need a dynamic system with user management, backend and all of this fancy and modern things I just need something static.

I want to write, I would have had a lot of fun building and designing my own blogging software even if is not a dynamic system and it is a Static Site Generator but then again I would get lost on trying to build the perfect thing and never considere it done .o0(Looks like I am starting to know myself…).

Then almost against my will I will use a Static Site generator

And is the moment to choose one I heard about a couple of them but it’s always good to google and see what is out there, what I found is a list of static generators.

After spending some time looking at them I narrow it down two three options, two I heard about before and one from the site

yblog and YML: This does not publicize itself a static site generator but in fact it is, is a tool written using YML to generate HTML, it is lightweight (just a few lines of code) it can be extended and is quick to use, but is a tailor made solution and if I wanna personalise it I would have to rewrite part of it.
Jekyll: I’ve heard about this one before, because it is built in GitHub, is what Github pages use. But after looking at it I did not like it, don’t know really why, but was not feeling confortable reading the samples.
Hugo: I just discovered this one today, and reading the samples was feeling ok, and I choose this one.

Probably is not the best way to choose, but if I do not like it I can change it later.

I will use Hugo to generate my blog

Naming and authorship

When I started blogs before I was always avoiding my real name to publish publicly to Internet it is always hard to use my real name and photo, it makes me feel like naked. But if I want to make this my corner this time I need to asume it is myself, and no body cares about my name is just a name and because of that for first time I will blog using my real name .o0(lets hope it does not bit me).

I can sound banal but just putting my name on it feels strange.

This time the main idea is about having a corner and because of that I will name it Kasem Corner, I could name it Kasem blog, but while I am writing this post the idea of a corner is becoming lovely.

https://corner.kasem.tech

And the hardest part (at least for me) when it becomes to blogging, write about what, as I said I have nothing to offer.

And because is for me I will write about Random.

Summary (decisions taken)

Build a blog
Write it in English
Use Static Site Generator
Start with Hugo
Use real name: Hussein Kasem Corner
Content: Random