Pedro Lucas Porcellis

Protonmail and the false sense of privacy

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I like e-mail as a means of communication, specially for three factors: (1) is built around open protocols (2) is, at a certain degree, universal and the foundation of having a identity online while being accessible and simple (3) it exists at least 50 years. With that being said, some necessities arise that weren’t given too much thought when it were created originally: the desire for privately communicate with others.

The wonders of Git Rebase

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the tools I find more useful on git, and which I love the most is git-rebase(1). It works around the premise that originally bought git to control version systems: that you can and should rework your repository history, to make it more organized and readable.

Around the world, each project stablish its one convention of how to work with git, some of them use techniques like git-flow, others, just a branch and tags, others divide between master/main and a production/release branch. The company I work for convention is to always create a specific branch to work on a new feature, bug fix or whatever. Having done that, I adopt the discipline to (1) keep it up to date with the parent branch using git pull --rebase origin/parent_branch and (2) as I work on it, I try to keep it tidy using git rebase -i HEAD~N.

Regarding Reliable Software

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I spend at least 8h of my day writing code, watching a text editor and some terminals. Thinking about data structures, thinking about how to efficiently store data, and how to teach my computer (or others) to do things that I don’t want to have to do manually, because the computer is more trustworthy than me at certain tasks. It can calculate faster, remember things for a longer period of time, it can talk to people faster than I would ever be able to, and I delegate many of these tasks to it. But I can’t trust it.

¿Que Pasa? March, 2021

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, I find myself once again writing this article a little bit late. A day before new year eve I lost my grandpa and somehow this has affected a little bit more than I thought. I’ve tried to write many times during that period, but I only found motivation to keep doing stuff at work and patch some drafts here and there on my backlog of unfinished rants, that’s the reason of lacking “¿Que Pasa?” on the last two months, althought that’s probably the first one in english.

On Vegetarianism

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In 2021 concluded one year that I have stopped eating meat. It has been a very interesting experience, bringing along nice reflections.

At my family, meat was always really significative and present. To most people, having meat at the table is directly attached to the idea of having food, “having something to eat”. This idea is introjected unto our lives way before we born, and specially living at the South of Brazil, is expected that the act of eating meat as something daily ¹. Actually, I didn’t actually see much of point in not eating meat. When that idea started to enter my mind, and I slowly started to get more familiar with the idea of vegetarianism, I started with the more simple act possible, I join the “Meatless Monday” movement, which I failed miserably. Still couldn’t drop the idea of eating meat, couldn’t barely think about other meals which didn’t have meat, or at least I always had this feeling that it “wasn’t the same thing”.

Autonomy as a Programmer

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things I think matters more to any programmer - and to any other similar works - it’s the crafting and making use of one’s autonomy. To have autonomy is a immense valuable tool, specially considering that while programmers, one of our many facets is to act as a detective. It’s not rare to find ourself facing problems that demands a investigation work, dealing with legacy projects, reading documentation, crawling bug tickets, reading blogs, RFCs, papers, etc. Now, most of this work is easily dealt with and almost automatically when we have access to two important things: (1) documentation of the project, all their proposal solutions and decisions, i.e. when the project is built around public tools so you can reach out to a human being and ask questions, read how and why something was did that way (2) source-code of the project and it’s surroundings.