Two years gap

It's been more than two years between my two last posts on this blog. That's far away from my initial attempt to write one post a week.

It's not that I need to justify it, but I'd like to recall what's been going on in my life during this two years.

• My first son and second child was born in April 2013. We are four, and we are happier than before.
• I found a new job at Ericsson, as a research and development engineer. I joined the company in January 2012 and I'm currently playing a role as a technical team leader for a development team in SAPC.
• I had and overcame cancer. I had a rare kind of cancer: liposarcoma. I got a fat tumor removed from my right armpit in February 2012, followed by 6 weeks of radiotherapy between April and June. I currently have regular reviews and everything is fine. According to statistics, the probability of the tumor coming back after treatment is 5%, and decreases along time.
• I completed a Master in Software Engineering that started in February 2012 and ended in July 2013.
• I learned about Coursera and its wonderful course offering. I accomplished the course Functional Programming Principles in Scala in November 2013.

The main reason for not writing any posts during this time is that I was too busy taking care of my family, my own health, my job and my training. So almost any spare time that I could spend using my computer at home was devoted to studying.

I hope I can write here regularly from now on, but one post a week is probably a too ambitious goal to meet. Let's see how I get by and go on with it.

Syntax Highlighting II

The first time I looked up for a method to include code snippets into my blog entries, I came up with a solution based upon using the service provided by the site tohtml.com. I blogged about it.

This approach had a couple of drawbacks:

1. Highlighting is based upon HTML tags. Hence code edition is a cumbersome task since the easiest way to do it is to take te code snippet back to tohtml.com, edit it, generate the HTML code again and replace it in the post.
2. The generated HTML code doesn't use CSS. So customizing it is hard and changing its style requires to generate the code again.
3. The code snippet is part of the articles text so its width is limited. This affects readability and requires some custom line breaking.

So after I read the post How to embed snippets in your blog, I gave it a try and switch to use GitHub's gists.

Using this approach overcomes the first and third drawbacks. And the second is not a serious problem since now code snippets appear enclosed into a text box, so even if I would change the background to a dark color, snippets will still look good.

The only disadvantage is that I lose the possibility of highlighting parts of the code snippet (e.g. using a bold font or yellow marker style for just one line), but I certainly like it much more the way code snippets look in the blog now.

Paternity leave

So it's been a while since I wrote my last post here. The reason is that I've been too busy since February 20th, when my daughter was born. My wife and me have been taking good care of her and that, as any parents already know, requires a lot of time and energy.

This blog is a personal project, thus one of the first things I had to take aside. It's been almost two months since then.

I'm glad that I had the opportunity to invest all those time and energy in my family. It's been hard to adapt to the new situation. Now it's time to take it back.

Syntax highlighting

In my last post, I included some C++ code snippets. I always wondered how to provide syntax highlighting when posting some code, so a quick Google search for html syntax highlighting headed me towards tohtml.com.

It's a really useful and simple web app for the occasional code blogger, since I was afraid of the possibility that I would have to manually edit the blog's template CSS to achieve it.

License

I've been thinking on licensing contents for this blog. I was sure on using a Creative Commons license, but was doubting on the options.

I finally chose an Attribution Non-Commercial license not because I don't want contents here to be used for commercial purposes but because I don't want that to happen not noticing it.

So I'm not against commercial uses of this contents, just let me know if you want to do such a use.

I thought about including the ShareAlike restriction to the license, but finally discarded it. Attribution is enough, I just don't need to restrict further use. If you want to include any of this contents into a copyrighted work, just feel free to do it as long as you give me credit for my contents.

Start

This is a project that has been around my head for a while now. The truth is that the feeling to start writing a blog has been getting much stronger for the last months.

I'll try to be disciplined on writing at least one post a week. It is not a hard to achieve objective, but I hope it will make possible two things: a) get myself used to analyze, write and communicate on various subjects on a regular basis with a soft transition (from thinking to actually doing), and b) I'll get the chance to think about any actual progress or experience (or lack of any) in my work life every week.

For months, I've been thinking about where to write, whether to limit myself to write about software and technical stuff or have a broader range of subject, where to open it, whether to register my own domain or not, to set it up on my own server and use wordpress or drupal or just use a blog service out there, and then which one?, ...

The little push in the back that I actually needed to start this up has been reading Rework. I finally realized that basics for a blog are content and where or how to hold it are secondary. So I took what I have right now, which is my Google account.

Let's see where it gets.