David Acevedo's Blog

Inspired by this NPR's article . This is a crib sheet of my favorite audio books. I'll write a blog post (or vlog) later.   Some books are better on Audio 1. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, narrated by Will Wheaton  2. Robert Dugoni's Tracy Cross White series narrated by Emily Sutton-Smith 3. Robert Dugoni's The Eighth Sister and The Last Agent, narrated by:  Edoardo Ballerini 4. The Graveyard book narrated by the author Neil Gaiman 5. N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season by Robin Miles (get the Booktrack edition) 6. Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig and narrated by Dominic Hoffman and Xe Sands    Some great audio book performances: 1. The Man of the Mountaintop by Susan Trott, et. all, narrated by a cast including Stanly Tucci. (Audible exclusive) 2. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, performed by great actors including James McAvoy. (Audible exclusive) 3. The Myst by Stephen Kind in 3D audio. This is my first book on tape I ever heard and it is still one of my favorites. It is tha

 Dart,  Byzantine Languages pt. 1 Why is Dart a Byzantine Language? Dart wasn't born with types. It was born to replace JavaScript (JS) but wasn't any better than JS when it was born, because very quickly ES6 made the improvements Dart had over JS disappear. Then TypeScript gained ascendance as types help get a handle on large JS databases. So types were added to Dart... and Dart seemed to be ready for the graveyard of fringe languages like Pony, Prolog, and Idris. But Google didn't give up on it. Dart kept evolving but like a Bazar, it evolved by adding things like it added types. So when you look at Dart you see many design decisions in the language are in conflict. It's a packed language, with lots of things. Its syntax was extended to use types and it's lightly based on C, quite possibly the most popular language historically but also one that largely succeeded in-spite of its syntax not because of it. What's good about Dart? The VM. The virtual machine that

Best Tech Books for Programming Language Learning I'm a bit of a polyglot no only in human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese) but also with programming languages. I found that the best way to get a deep understanding of the programming field, I needed to be broad. I got introduced to Bruce Tate's 7 languages in 7 weeks series right when I was starting to learn Ruby and found the cross-language trends to be very useful in knowing what to learn for the future.  So here is a list of Programming Books that I found good for learning a language. These are the must have books in my opinion to "get" or "grok" the language. Most of these books I have not finished but they're so good I can recommend them for other language learners and polyglots. All these books should accelerate your learning dramatically.  Poignant Guide to Ruby Ruby: POODR and _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby .  Okay, so _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is the reason I fell in love with

As a teen, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my friends. This started an interest in the medieval period that led to me taking a medieval history class in college just to understand the period more. Over the years I've also read great books like " Dungeon, Fire and Sword " about the crusades (I recommend the book) and yet with all that knowledge it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me I had a completely wrong understanding of economics in the Medieval Period. "Viking helmets, sword and footwear" by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 In my D&D games, players who are adventures battling monsters and creatures would need equipment and on the trips to town, they'd get resupplied with their adventuring necessities. I'd run these moments referencing my imagination of what it must have been and fantasy books I'd read. There be an inn with a raucous bar, a gruffly black-smith, if a city also a weapon and armor sm

In my time in government, I've worked on modernizing legacy systems. Though not all legacy systems are worth modernizing, I've found a few "classic" languages in the process that are not the ones you'd expect. All these "classic" languages share a few things: They're all proprietary. They all had or have enterprise support They all have outdated UI (user interface) elements reminiscent of the '90s. Microsoft's (Visual) FoxPro    License: Proprietary Latest Release: 2007 Top on these languages I've encountered is FoxPro, a language that is unsupported now, but was back in the '90s a good language. It was bought by Microsoft and that gave it a sense of enterprise support. I encountered this language at the Environmental Quality Board in Puerto Rico, where there were two "programmers" in this language and a system running on it. The environmental complaints/issues ticketing system had been modernized not too lo

I really like Github's  Atom Text Editor . I really like that it's multi-platform allowing me to master one set of skills that is transferable to all platforms and all machines.  On thing that just burns me of the default set-up in Atom is the Autocomplete feature that seems to change my words as a type them. Because Ruby uses the end of line as a terminus for a statement you usually finish a word with pressing the return button and you get really annoying changes to your finished typed word a la MS Word. I find myself yelling "No that's not what I wrote!" at the screen in busy coffee shops. I disabled autocomplete for a while but it is a very useful function. Then I found out they changed the package that gave the autocomplete to a new one called "Autocomplete Plus" that gives you more options. All that I needed to change to make autocomplete sane again: 1. Open Atom's Preferences 2. Search the bundled packages for " Autocomplete Plus &