Carlos Betancourt Carrero

I make stuff

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My Manager’s README

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Inspired by Edgar’s fantastic post and other Engineering Managers, I’m following the same principle to outline my views for existing and new team contributors.

Effective onboarding is crucial to our industry. New joiners come with a fresh mind, and, in the first few days of a new job, things can go really fast and people can get lost easily. Providing an easy and digestible way for them to know you as their manager, to know your leadership style(s), values, communication channels, and, more importantly, your expectations with them, is key for successful onboarding.

My Manager’s README

¡Hola! I’m Carlos, and I want to welcome you to our team.

As your manager, I look forward to knowing you more through conversations and interactions. To give you a head start in knowing me, I’d like to share my management style, philosophy, expectations, and some...

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Concurrency in JavaScript

A great article written by Thibault Imbert about responsive JavaScript programming using Web Workers and browser threads.

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The sausage principle

If you love something, never find out how it’s made.

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Coderwall will go open source

I’m looking forward to check the bowels of this great product.

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Reactive programming in JavaScript

The folks from Silk have develop a nice library that brings some of the goodies of reactive programming to JavaScript.

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TDD is dead. Long live testing.

Despite David’s point of view, I still think that TDD can lead you to write better and quality software.

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The McDonald’s theory

Thanks to Manuel for this useful link

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Dynamically load configuration tokens using Ruby’s metaprogramming magic

This was originally posted by me on Coderwall.

So, let’s say you need to use tokens in your app to access a third-party API (like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook). In Ruby gems tutorials it’s very common to see the following example code to load these tokens:

module Facebook
  CONFIG = YAML.load_file(Rails.root.join("config/facebook.yml"))[Rails.env]
  APP_ID = CONFIG['app_id']
  SECRET = CONFIG['secret_key']
end

This was extracted from the Koala’s gem wiki on GitHub. Or the following one, which was extracted from the README.md file of the Instagram gem GitHub repo.

Instagram.configure do |config|
  config.client_id = "YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
  config.client_secret = "YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET"
end

It’s a very ugly practice to hardcode things like this, IMHO.

Now, the most recommended and used practice in the wild is to have these API access tokens in a YAML file, so they can be loaded into...

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