Alberto López

I wholeheartedly agree with Martin Fowler and his on-point paper on software architecture. I find it quite refreshing to see someone who, with expertise, understands our domain. Yes! Architecture is a shared understanding of how the most important things of our systems are organized, and how they communicate with each other, that only happens in successful projects. Regarding the issue of defining these important things , these things are important because the expert developers say so. This seems arbitrary, even contrary to the perceived view of software as an engineering field, which still kind of is. But it kind of is a social exercise too, because we reflect our understanding of the world, an understanding that most often is achieved through socialization, into programming constructs. Given this, Ralph Johnson totally nails it in the article’s last paragraph: “Software … is limited by imagination, by design, by organization … by properties of people, not by properties of the worl...

It is quite fitting to talk about code as a craft. As many others do, our field, Software Engineering, is not quite the same as the others. This is due to its abstractness, for we, after all, write language. Okay, maybe not human language; we write machine language. Either way, these are languages in that they arrange our understanding of the world in their lexical rules, semantics, and structures. Maybe a difference between these two kinds of languages is precision and utility. In one way, human language may be ambiguous, and serve no purpose other than a means to itself; language for language sake, like poetry or irony. On the other hand, machine language is more utilitarian; it must be as precise as possible. However, this last property has become a little fuzzy over time because, after all, humans still get to read and understand the code, so an act of appropriation is made in reading and meaning, or we just use a high-level programming language that, while more readable, might be ...

Don’t mind the title of this blog; it’s just me being silly. Well, it is amazing, isn´t it? Indeed, for a reason this is humanity’s greatest technological achievement! And, as always, it is cleverness which leads the way. Holy molly, they weaved computer programs to save memory?! Amazing, and quite smart! As a former space fanboy, I knew some things about the Apollo programs. However, I did not know anything about all of these efforts. Now, knowing all this work that was placed with sweat and headaches by my fellow engineers, just makes me have more respect for them and this great achievement. Besides the cleverness, what caught my attention is how recent software engineering was for its time. In this documentary, we get to see how innovative the command module’s computer was. Gee , that little machine is a giant step toward chip-manufacturing at the tiniest of magnitudes. But, talking about software, one of the problems arising from such innovative computer was software redundancy an...

Heyo! I am Alberto, and as always, I am glad I am sharing this space with all of you! Expectations To be honest, I don’t really know what to expect from this course. Yes, as we did in our first class, we reviewed Grady Booch’s object-oriented design principles, but then it seems we will make use of Amazon Web Services, so I am completely lost. Either way, I expect a quality class where we learn something useful for our careers. In this case, I expect to be able to understand programming as a whole unit, that is, holistically, which, given the term Architecture , implies the need to understand this unit atomically, functionally, and as efficient as possible to design and implement reliable systems. Personal Interests As I have stated in other blogs, I love philosophy, art, and technology. Just as I would gladly like to explore the intersection of these to imagine new possible ways of interaction and expression of culture, I would also love to research the intersection of these with psyc...