If you have been working in software engineering for a while chances are you have often come across (even if you didn’t know it!) design patterns. If you haven’t, as I said, chances are you just don’t realise you have used them — so I strongly suggest the “Gang of Four” book as a starting […]
Posts Categorized: Ramblings
Project Management Disaster
This is another speech I’ve given at Valley Toastmasters, and it’s part of Competent Communicator manual, project #8: “Get Comfortable with Visual Aids“. (The speech is actually based on Michael Wolfe‘s answer to a question on Quora: “Engineering Management: Why are software development tasks estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?”. I have taken […]
The Mac Daddy
This is another speech I’ve given at Valley Toastmasters, and it’s part of Competent Communicator manual, project #5: “Your Body Speaks“. As a reminder, the objective of the project are: Use stance, movements, gestures, facial expressions and eye contact to express your message and achieve your speech’s purpose Make your body language smooth and natural […]
Ad Viewability
Not long ago, Magnetic, the company I work for, released their whitepaper on ad viewability so I thought it necessary to share my thoughts on this rather new concept, which seems to be either misunderstood or completely missed by a lot of companies still. First of all, the whitepaper released by Magnetic and to which […]
Let’s All Go To Sleep
This is another speech I’ve given in Toastmasters, and it’s part of Competent Communicator manual, Project #7: “Research Your Topic“. As a reminder, the objectives of the project are: Collect information about your topic from numerous sources Carefully support your points and opinions with specific facts, examples, and illustrations gathered through research With that in […]
Product Idea: AMEX Concierge by Text
I have been a big fan of American Express for years, both in the UK and USA — without singing their praises too much, I love the customer service they provide and I love the facilities that they offer if you are an Amex Platinum cardholder. I love all the customer rewards points (yup, you […]
Wanted: Creative Software Engineer
A while back, LinkedIn included me in the exclusive group of people who are allowed to have their own blog hosted on LinkedIn 🙂 As such, I got an invite from LinkedIn to start creating my first post. I stared at that email for ages I think (at least a couple of months) before I […]
Java 8 Accumulators and Adders
If you’ve been using Java for a while now, then like me, you must have saluted the move quite a while back in JDK 1.5 to introduce the atomic classes (AtomicLong, AtomicBoolean and so on). They were a big step forward, away from the clunkyness of having to create ridiculous bottlenecks in the code for […]
How Many Planets?
This is the 4th speech I delivered to Toastmasters and it’s part of Competent Communicator manual #4: “How to Say It“. As a reminder, the objectives of the project are: Select the right words and sentence structure to communicate your ideals clearly, accurately, and vividly. Use rhetorical devices to enhance and emphasize ideas Eliminate jargon […]
Small Java Utility to Generate Random int Files
This is not ground-breaking, folks and in fact it’s not even anything sexy, but it’s just something that’s been bugging me for a while when I play with some Java tools and code on my side: I need (very) often a way to quickly generate a text file with random integers as well as a […]











