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Chat with Nubank Engineers. Wait, do they use Clojure?

During our last session of the Programming Languages class we were able to chat with  Alexander Aldazabal and Eddú Meléndez, both software engineers at Nubank Mexico. Throughout the conversation, both of the engineers shared with us a lot of information regarding both, what is as well as how does it feels to work at Nu, in addition to the technological stack that characterizes the company.  Thus, in this entry, I will display a brief summary of their presentation: Starting with what Alex presented to us: As an introduction, to Nubank's culture, he mentioned that Nubank is generally misunderstood as a financial company. Nonetheless, Alex stated that Nu was founded and still is a software company whose current solutions are helping the financial market.  He also highlighted  the freedom and autonomy that not only you, but the entire engineering team have at the moment of developing new features or products. In addition, he stated that these groups are not made by people who knows or
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Chat with Russ Olsen

Personally, it was a long ago since I had the pleasure to met the author of a book in person and I have never met the writer of any technical book. After this conversation with Russ Olsen, I must say that I'm very fortunate to be one of the persons who have had the chance to share the same, although digital, space as this programmer and for having Russ as the first of its kind.  Although we only shared with him an hour of the class, he had the chance to talked us about a bunch of things, technical and personal alike. I would love to summarize every one of them since I personally think that every word that was shared has a unique value. Nonetheless, as one of the focal pintos that he mentioned, simplicity is key and in order to keep it within this post, I will only highlight those aspects that I found more interesting in three sections: 1. About his life:  Hobbies are everything and, as he hinted, they somehow help us to achieve better opportunities as well as to prepare us for new
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How Benedict Cumberbatch gave popular recognition to Alan Turing.

Before 2014, I doubt a normal person -understand this as a non-geek profile- really knew the impact of Alan Turing's work. I was 13 years old when the movie The imitation game came out and I can say that it was one the few directions that really marked a b efore and an after  in me when I first saw it. Since then, I have easily watched at least 20 times and not because of its wonderful plot but for the marvelous presentation of such a complex topic such as computation history.  Telecommunications, medicines and as many other inventions we enjoy today, its fundamentals and need took place due to the desperation and chaos that derived from World War II. Computers are not different. Like the movie presents, Nazi Germany stole a Polish cipher-based communication machine called Enigma and used it during the Blitzkrieg -the very first years of the war- to streamline the German war effort in addition to coordinate operations in various fronts without being caught in the process. This rea
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OOP is for normies. My homies and I code using Functional Programming

Throughout the development of this course, and as I have expressed in previous entries, I've become aware that, in fact, Functional Programming is more convenient than OOP, and this entry will continue to expand this mentality. The video  Why Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm? introduced us to a very interesting context that was previously touched in the very first entry: humanity within programming. Feldman, R. hinted various times that the OOP paradigm is strong nowadays not because it provided a better understanding of what the programmer was doing, like it happened when C was created back in the day. But in fact, its popularity grew due to the fragile, but complex concept of power.  In the video it was mentioned what I would like to refer as: the principles behind OOP power, those being: platform exclusivity, killer apps and language familiarity. Yes, I must admit that the video explicitly did not mentioned those attributes but those that were mentioned can be perfectly tra
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The magic of garbage collectors.

 I don't know if this is my last entry, at least with Clojure related topics. but, I think that if that's the case, this discussion will be as, if not more interesting than the last two publications. Everyone who has programmed in Clojure knows that this language uses the JVM. This means that it takes all the benefits of using the Virtualization of Java to compile and run code. But... have you ever questioned how does this virtualization, specially, the java garbage collector works? Yeah, me neither. Nonetheless, if you answered no, don't worry that we are not the only ones. In fact, this curiosity inspired Alexader Yakuushev to not only questioned himself how does the tool that almost every programmer uses works, but to explain to the rest of us.  In his video, A new age of JVM Garbage Collectors introduces us to a whole new variety of concepts and abstractions that, if you're not familiarized with data structures, you may find them hard to understand. In particular, A
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Rich Hickey: "Clojure, I'm your father"

In the episode  Rich Hickey on Clojure we get to know the Clojure's creator, Rich Hickey. As an introduction as well as a personal statement, I would like to highlight the basic idea in which Clojure was formed: Frustration.  The discussion starts with a brief explanation of the author's decision to create a Lisp-like language in 2009, same year where well-established technologies, such as Java, C++ or even Python, were becoming  mainstream tools throughout the industry. As Hickey mentions, although these programmable utensils were popular, all of them lacked the power of adding macros or different processes to run under compilation time. Furthermore, they all share a relatively chunky syntax, making them suitable for lazy in addition to unprepared programmers for unhanded data manipulation.  After 30 minutes, he roasted the entire tool-set I've been trying to completely master during the last 3 years... but he's right. As an entry-level programmer I have not met nor us
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How McCarthy constructed the future in the 1960's

 In the previous entry, the podcast  Software Engineering Radio stated that Lisp ended the same way it started, with the community. Nonetheless, this program, in my personal opinion, marked this language as one whose repercussions never really skyrocketed in the intended way. In contrast to that affirmation, the article The roots of Lisp not only the principles behind the creation of Lisp were mentioned, but really presented to the reader the impact that this programmable approach could change and did impact computer science as a whole.  Throughout its numerous pages, the article by Graham, P provides a simple, yet technical enough to challenge the experienced programmer, explanation of the mathematical and syntactical principles behind Lisp. In a matter of minutes, the reader is introduced to Lisp's core functionality. The quick lesson started by reviewing important concepts such as  atoms and operators  as an introduction to the list power, and ended testing the ultimate capabili
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