a Freelance Web Developer

VerbConjugations is simple iPhone application that tries to help the people that is learning Spanish to find out how a verb is conjugated.

With this application you can ask for any infinitive verb and you’ll obtain how this verb is conjugated is different tenses and persons.

The application also has an offline mode so you can check the verbs already searched without Internet connection.

The application works on any iPhone/iPod with SDK 3.0 or higher.

Let it a try, it is free, and leave a review, it is my first iPhone app and I would love to receive any kind of comment or issue.

The license is completely opened and you can check/download the code on the iPhoneVerbConjugations GitHub repository.

 

Another year, another conference, the conference that opened my eyes to the amazing word of Ruby, there on 2007, is just tuning the last details.

Conferencia Rails 2009, this year bigger, more impressive, with new venue, bigger organization team, more energy, and asking to the english spoken community  to meet us with talks.

This year I am not being to much helpful on the organization team, I know they are not missing me: a big and strong bunch of people is helping this year with new energy and ideas. I am on the register application support one more year. You can check the code and help sending patches here on the ConfRor2009 github repository.

As more news arrive to me about the Conferencia Rails 2009 more sad I feel, this is because this year I will not can assists to the event, I will be on New York on an weird adventure.

The ‘Call for Papers‘ is almost closed. Be hurry and propose your talk to Conferencia Rails 2009 on the registration app.

It’s done, I’ll be traveling with my angel to New York City next October. It won’t be a very short visit: 3 months. All the Autumn on New York.

I’m very excited, very stressed and very nervous, I know not one of this sensations is a pleasure sensation, but this is my way, I am a guy that likes to feel at home, and NYC is definitely not my home. But I know at the moment I’ll know where the bakery is and a good place to take a relaxing coffee I’ll start to feel at home.

This is a very great experience, a personal one, but I’ll like to turn it on an important professional experience too.

I don’t want to make telecommuting on NYC, I don’t want to work at home. I can to keep working for my actual clients on the same way I am doing it here on my house at Mallorca (Spain), but I need something different, I want to work close to other coders, I want to work close to New Yorker coders.

I have spoken with the managers of one of my most important actual projects, and the development team I am deeper working with: LaCoctelera, I exposed my concerns and they are absolutely agree with me, I have to take this opportunity, I will stop coding and committing for this project for a while, and on my return we will see if I am still helpful for them.

So now I have time, but I don’t have any idea if my skills will be desirable there on USA.

What I’m looking for is kind of simple: a Ruby on Rails project, with a development team of at least three persons, with hi coding level, comfortable office space, where a ten agile fingers and a bright mind could be helpful.

The money is not a problem, I’m chasing the experience and the knowledge I could acquire, so if your budget is not weight but your team is amazing I would be proud to work on it. The contract isn’t a problem either, as a Freelance I own my own software company, so this’ll be not a employment contract but a international companies relationship.

But if I can’t access to any kind of refundable job I am also opened to volunteer work.

If you know or are part of something like what I am looking for, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Software development is a box of wonderful surprises and the community I have found around Ruby on Rails is the most passionate I have never met.

The last crazy geek stuff I have been involved in was the RailsRumble. A contest where small web development teams have to show what they are able to build in only 48 hours. Of course the web framework to use is Ruby on Rails, which other can you use to implement something almost finished in only this bunch of hours?

The experience, besides being a technology challenge, is a very enriching personal experience

Our group was formed by Raimond Garcia, Felipe Talavera, Carlos Matallín and me.

Within a few days of cross mailing conversation we had an approximate idea of what we were gonna build. The 3 developers get together at my house in Mallorca, our designer and front developer, Carlos Matallín, could not enjoy physically the experience with us, but was on continuous contact through mail, skype and video conference.

The previous night was the discussion time.. a few cups of coffee and a lot of pen and paper, our idea was incredibly simple and could become something incredibly helpful, but it was full of small details and possible solutions that should be decided before work started.

2am, Day D -2, Hour H -48, the time of the first commit, just a very concise README.md file and go to sleep.

When I waked up in the morning my partner Felipe had already the server standing up and our most important tool working: the mail digester.

The day was very pleasing, not any pressure stressed us, our code was responding our expectations incredibly well, Raimond was concentrated on the integration test layer of our application, Carlos was sending us very correct designs time at a time, Felipe working here and there knowing all the stack of the application and me focusing on the mail parser. Time at a time we reset our bodies with a very cold dip up on our small swimming-pool.

At the end of the first day our application was working. Not on any casuistic worked well, but it was working.

The second and last day supposed to be only to correct details and test any problematic casuistics, I don’t know if it was for overconfidence or because the problems to resolve were too hard to resolve but the last commit was exactly at 2am on Sunday, that means Hour H on Day D.

The supposed objective of the RailsRumble is to convince the expert judges that our application developed on 48 hours is above the rest of them.. Our project was judged as the #57 of more than 200 applications. Not available to pass to the next level: the public vote. That suppose to mean that we failed. Nothing further from the truth. We built something very transgressor, very innovative and also very simple, we were congratulated for one of the most known Ruby on Rail gurus: Obie Fernandez, we enjoyed ourself a wonderful geek weekend and we have decided to improve the code and to expose it to the community to see if it becomes as helpful as we think.

And over all we were full up of new inspiration and energized passion towards our profession.

What was that we were working this weekend? … :), the new mailing bot to help your mailing list with informal votes: LetsDecide.us. I’ll talk more concise about it on future post.

OneOfZombies is an experiment proyect.

Don’t come here looking for game development knowledge or very pretty Ruby code design. This is just me playing with Ruby and with Gosu.

After a few weeks working and studding on my free time I can show you this brutal stupid 2D game.

This is not a quality project, this is not a professional stuff.

I am just enjoying my self and having fun, and by the way I hope you will have fun too!.

The game is very stupid, and the code is very ugly and dirty, I just wanted to test the Gosy library, and I have not experience on game development.

It is the first time I put my self on a pure Ruby project with more of one class. I have had such an experience with Rails and still learning! and I realize that I have got no idea about Ruby.

If you want you can go to the OneOfZombies official site and try to understand what is all of this about. You can also download the Mac OSX version, or the source code, so you will can test it on your own keyboard.

Following with the completor suggestor I was playing, I had the need to delete the last word from cursor before the completor writes the suggestion selected.

Thanks to the previous function textarea.lastWord() it was  very easy:

jQuery.fn.deleteLastWord = function() {
  this.each(function(){
    if (this.selectionStart || this.selectionStart == '0') {
      var startPos = this.selectionStart;
      var endPos = this.selectionEnd;
      var scrollTop = this.scrollTop;
 
      var lastWord = $(this).lastWord();
      startPos = startPos - lastWord.length;
 
      this.value =
          this.value.substring(0, startPos) +
          this.value.substring(endPos, this.value.length);
      this.focus();
      this.selectionStart = startPos;
      this.selectionEnd = startPos;
      this.scrollTop = scrollTop;
    } else {
      alert("deleteLastWord not supported on this navigator");
    }
  });
};

Example of use:

$('#my_textarea').deleteLastWord();

Don’t copy and paste from here, WP does weird stuff with code, download from here: http://gist.github.com/143822

This script is almost not tested, it works for me on FireFox 3.0.11 and Safari 4.0.1, so use it under your own responsability.

I was enjoying trying to develop a kind of completor suggestor on a textarea, I wanted it to jump when the tab key was pressed, that what easy with capturing the keydown event and the help of event.preventDefault.

But the thing what wasn’t such easy was the capturing the last word on the textarea from the cursor.

But with the help of the code of the insertAtCaret function I was abble to obtain it:

jQuery.fn.lastWord = function() {
  var buffer = '';
 
  this.each(function(){
    if (this.selectionStart || this.selectionStart == '0') {
      var startPos = this.selectionStart;
      var endPos = this.selectionEnd;
      var scrollTop = this.scrollTop;
 
      var index = 0;
      var new_char = '';
 
      do{
        index += 1;
        buffer = new_char + buffer;
        new_char = this.value.substr(startPos - index, 1);
      } while( new_char.search( /^(\w|\.)$/|> ) != -1 )
 
    } else {
      alert("lastWord not supported on this navigator");
    }
  });
 
  return buffer;
};

Example of use:

alert( "last word from cursor: " + $('#my_textarea').lastWord() );

Don’t copy and paste from here, WP does weird stuff with code, download from here: http://gist.github.com/143808

This script is almost not tested, it works for me on FireFox 3.0.11 and Safari 4.0.1, so use it under your own responsability.

puts lambda {}

puts class << self; self; end

(Esto lo tenía por ahí desde hace tiempo… )

Últimamente está muy de moda eso de satanizar los grandes lenguajes corporativos en pro de los lenguajes de juguete.

Llevo 5 años trabajando con Java y sabéis qué os digo: que me uno a ellos, vine aquí para divertirme y creo que para eso se necesitan juguetes.