It is another Sunday morning in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The weather forecast indicated that we would be receiving about 3 inches of fresh snow. It seems that we will be getting about 0.1 inches of new accumulation. Given that today is February 28, in the next couple months we might still get winter storms bringing 6 or more inches each.
This past week I had a very nice and interesting conversation with a Principal Software Architect at one of the largest software companies in the world. It was very educational. I really enjoyed the conversation. One of the things that initially called my attention was when I asked the kind of things he does on a regular basis. He mentioned that he “provides guardrails” among other things. When he mentioned it I was not sure what he meant so I made a note to ask him later. At some point I had a chance to describe what I do and have done. One of the things I mentioned was sets of DLLs that with time I have created with the purpose to help developers use a set of tools to get some routine work done without having to redesign and test code use as a scaffold and be able to concentrate on the task at hand. Among the libraries that I have developed are some that deals with encryption, linked lists (I refer to them as queues), sockets, trees, etc. I was then clarified what “guardrails” refer to. It is the same concept in order help developers produce faster code with fewer bugs. It seems that we are performing some similar tasks. Continue reading “Setting Up C in VSCode IDE”
It is already summer 2020 and some people are saying that it does not seem that summer is here yet. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the transition from spring to summer did not materialize. To me the big thing is that when summer starts days start getting shorter. Living in a suburb of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul we understand what short days in winter feel like.
Finally summer 2020 has arrived. Today’s high is in the lower to mid 70s. Currently the sky is overcast. My wife and I prefer it sunny but the temperature is fine with me. My wife prefers hot and humid weather. Not everyone likes chocolate. We will probably keep the windows open all day. Living in Minnesota with long and cold winters, fresh air is always welcomed.
teens. We have traveled abroad on several occasions with and without family. We were going to chat last Sunday (Father’s Day) but due to our schedules we postponed it until Monday. We found out that both have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and are being treated as we speak. Their daughter, who lives with them, has not contracted the virus yet. They both looked tired so we limited our call to 20 minutes. Typically we go for a couple hours. Hopefully all will go well and they will have a short recovery! 
Today is Saturday February 15, 2020 and the temperature is about 35 F which is a great improvement from yesterday. We woke up at -15 F which was exactly 50 degrees cooler. I am on the second block for the day. My wife and I already had our tea with lemon and she is getting in the shower. She will let me know when ready so I can shutdown my computer and start working on lunch. Hopefully I will be able to complete this post today; otherwise it will be ready tomorrow morning. 
Not sure what I did with the initial text for this post. I opened my work space today and 
In the past few weeks I have been reading several articles about how great Visual Studio Code is and how software developers are starting to use as their main IDE. I have been using VS Code on and off but have made up my mind that from now on for Java development I will only use Visual Studio Code. I have installed Eclipse and IntelliJ in my machine, both of which I have used for Java development. I will leave both of them installed for compatibility purpose only. Will let you know my findings towards the end of the year. 
Last week my wife and I returned from a one week trip to Portugal. We had not been there in more than a decade. Some things have changed while other not. People continue to be very nice and helpful especially when you attempt to utter a few words in Portuguese.
favorite beach in the Algarve. By experience we now know why. It is a small town sitting on a relatively small bay with blue and green waters. The population is less than 300 people. My wife took a picture at a restaurant on the beach while the temperature was hitting 96 F and we were enjoying delicious fresh sea food and drinking 
Currently I am working on a 64-bit API for a storage server at work. The plan is to port a limited number of APIs in order to be able to call them directly from other applications / services without having to marshal such calls. I am trying to convert the data structures from 32 to 64 bits while keeping backwards compatibility. At some point in time we should be able to port with little additional effort the current storage server to 64-bits and still support client applications / servers running on 32-bits.