The imposter syndrome

.NET Concurrency Essentials III

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year 2026. May your life goals be achieved this year! Here is my little present for you: the third post about concurrency on .Net!

In the previous post we compared Concurrency and Parallelism and also explained how async and await really work under the hood. Today we are going with a shorter (but not least important) one: SynchronizationContext. What is it and why is it important in UI applications? Does it make my application faster?

.NET Concurrency Essentials II

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s continue with the .Net asynchronous programming series.

In the previous post we compared Task and Thread while explaining how the Threadpool and the TaskScheduler relate to tasks. Today I would like to expand more on two concepts so many others may have started with: async and await. What are they meant for? Are we achieving what we really want to achieve with them?

I usually see people thinking that awaiting a task leads to parallel processing. For me, that is one of the biggest misconceptions about asynchrony.

.NET Concurrency Essentials I

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Do you ever feel that sometimes you just know how things are done but never stopped to understand why? You know you are doing things right because that is the way someone told you. Then when someone asks you something related to that topic you just find yourself explaining the “how” but not the “why”. If that is not your case, you are a lucky one. That is not mine, so I decided to go deep on basic things I use on my every-day work basis and leave them as blog posts.

First date with AvaloniaUI

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, it has really been a long time without posting here! 8 months! Lots of (good) things happening in my personal life so I decided to just write here once I really have something to write about. Something that engages me. And here I am!

Last summer I had to hire a new senior developer for my team and during the interview process, one profile got our attention in a particular way. He didn’t ask for extra money, goodies or benefits. He wanted me to evaluate the idea of migrating our application from GTK to Avalonia. He got me. After checking his amazing background with multiplatform front-end frameworks it was just matter of time to start working on this adventure.

Sherlock 'otool' Holmes

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever had the feeling that something really magic has happened to your computer because of a thing that was working suddenly, out of nowhere, stopped working? Wait, maybe I made some changes, let’s go back to master… mmh no… it isn’t working anymore… but how? This code is working on other machines! It worked on mine like 20 minutes ago! This is impossible, nothing changed and it is not working anymore. Well… maybe I performed a little change that is not related at all with this but… I just installed/updated a couple of things through brew… Could that be the issue? IMPOSSIBLE!

To SQL or to NoSQL?

Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To SQL or to NoSQL? Is that the real question? Nah, the real war out there is to agree on how to pronounce it. Do you pronounce it “Ess-cue-ell” or maybe you pronounce it “sequel” like Bill Gates among others? If you want to know how I pronounce it… I use both just to bother people.

Jokes aside, let’s get on this post! Would you like to know the differences between these two database models? A lot of people are used to always using the same model because they use it at their work and since it is the one they know the most they use it on their personal projects too. It’s very common, so if you never went further on this and want a quick review then you are in the right place, my friend.

Packaging adventures volume III: Wix

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Third and final chapter of the packaging adventures. The previous post about Windows packaging was posted a couple of months ago and we learned how to create a simple Windows installer thanks to a Visual Studio extension. If you remember properly, there were some inconvenient like having two different installers (an MSI file for the app and an EXE file for the setup installer with the required extra components for our application). If you need a single EXE file, more modern-looking and cover the deficiencies of the previous packaging system, keep reading. I’ve got something for you!

Developing user stories

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, in a little meeting we usually do to close our SCRUM Sprint period of two weeks, I was showing all the new features I had developed for our product. One of the features was not accepted and therefore its related user story was moved back from “QA Review” to “On development” again. I misunderstood my task.

What can we do here? Should we just tell the developer what was wrong and wait for him to change it ASAP or maybe should we try to guess what led him to do it that way the first time to see if we have a problem in our product development workflow? We think that the only way to improve is by learning from our own mistakes and we checked what was wrong: the user story was not well defined and I decided to do a freestyle with my imagination for the definition of done.

Packaging adventures volume II: Windows

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So here we are with the second part of the packaging adventures. If you remember, we already talked about macOS packaging a few months ago and now it’s time to show you how to do it on Windows. Windows has many ways to package your applications and I am currently using another one for my production packages, but that will be explained in a third part of this packaging adventures. Let’s start with one of the most basic ways to achieve it. Let’s go!

.NET Framework vs .NET Core

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First things first, I know I’ve been out for a couple of months without posting any article on my site. Sorry for that! I’ve been busy finishing up my computer science degree and I wanted to boost my final project by giving it my free time as much as possible. Thanks to that I have written down some Xamarin things to investigate and share them here, also. Now let’s get back to work!

.NET in a box

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most important things a .NET developer should know is what .NET is. It seems stupid but I know a lot of people that just starts coding and focusing in learning the .NET code they use. They can tell you why that .Count field is better than using the .Any () LINQ method to check for available values in your enumerator but they really don’t know (and some of them sadly don’t care) how their code is translated and optimized for a concrete processor in a concrete operating system.

Packaging adventures volume I: macOS

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If I had to define working (right) as a macOS developer out of the bounds of Xcode IDE with one expression I would do it as: “Oh, there is one more easy not easy thing Apple wants us to do to make it work properly”. Lately I’ve been working and struggling hard with packaging the multiplatform application I work on. When Apple released macOS Catalina they introduced a lot of security changes and a lot of applications suddenly stopped working turning App Store outsider developers lifes in a little nightmare.

Git survival kit

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I first started in my current company I hadn’t used any version control system so when I started using Git it was a little tricky. Lucky me I had one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with, Víctor Guzmán. I remember he said something like: “Ok, you can use a GUI for a bad Git usage or you can use the Terminal for learning real Git usage. I use Terminal so I won’t help you with if you don’t use it”. Since that day he turned me on a Terminal paladin and five years later I have not used a Git GUI tool for nothing (well, except gitk… and GitKraken I used once for a very big mess with a rebase conflict).

I'm an imposter

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know how I got here. I know I did not do the best technical test my company gave to me because I know I left that two or three very important things I considere basic so my test was incomplete. The job interview was not bad at all but I feel that my interviewer has interviewed better developers than I. Maybe they were running out of time and they needed the first mid-decent developer they could find or maybe they had not enough money to hire that better developer that I was talking about. I’m an imposter.