David Acevedo's Blog

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 They all had or have enterprise support They all have outdated UI (user interface) elements reminiscent of the '90s.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 ...

Programming is a craft. You are building something. The modern languages have given the programmer great ownership of the craft. Before it was more like an assembly and one programmer was responsible for one cog in a big machine and few programmers, the elite, saw the whole machine, understood the whole craft. But now with languages like Ruby and Python, the massive power at the hands of the programmer bring the whole thing back to a craft. It is something you do with your hands. It is creative, like writing and while not physical or tactile, it is built piece by piece. The connection is deep and actually obscured by the way programming is taught. Because programming originated from a mathematical discipline and math has mostly lost its craft origins and now is taught more as an intellectual pursuit, it is often forgotten that math is but a tool itself. Not an end goal. Math is used to do things with it. Calculous to measure trajectories of objects. Geometry is essential for architec...

On a beach in Costa Rica, on Biscayne Bay in Miami, on Cassadaga in Central Florida and who knows where else my travels will take me. Feeding myself good reading: Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist. Feeding myself good food. And beginning to write. It is hard to leave behind the troubles and toils of Puerto Rico, but their fate is their own. There is shock, loneliness and sorrow I'll have to deal with. Embarking on new ventures of writing, long hard work ahead and I'm ready. Behind me the past and dried leaves rustling in the wind.

We are in the middle of a computer programming languages explosion. In the last few years, a slew of programming languages have come into their own, others have been revived with new expressions and a whole bunch of them have been born anew. Also a new modality has appeared of the polyglot programmer, that is a programmer that works in multiple languages. This last change is the most significant. Because for a long time programming was dominated by a very few select group of languages: C, C++, Java and C#. All of which are related. And dominated by a tool set like Visual Studio with C# and Visual Basic. Now that is no longer the case and things are for the better. Recently I taught myself how to program and want to highlight a few books that are good reads. Most books in programming fall into a trap, that is they don't teach programming at all, but instead teach only the programming language. That's like teaching someone the rules to America Football and expecting them to a...