Code and Stuff

I've got a Rails app called MovieMates that I've been building on my spare time for a few years now. When it got mature enough, I deployed it to Heroku for 3 reasons: Convenience (a basic deployment for Rails is as simple as git push heroku, and a lot of the tools out there are optimized for Heroku, including Rails itself) Free PostgreSQL database (which for a toy app like mine, means less money and peace of mind due to auto-management and free backups) Automatic TLS certificate management However, there is one disadvantage:

I love Object Oriented Programming. This seems to be a somewhat controversial statement these days, but I love how good OO code can model reality and feel obvious to the human brain. To me, code that tells a good story might be one of the most valuable properties of a system. I spend a lot of time trying to make my code tell a good story. I love to find a mental model that bridges human understanding with computer logic.

A few months ago I talked about this project I've been working on for the past few years, MovieMates. Back in August, I made the service public for anybody to use and a few days ago I also open sourced its code. I wanted to talk a little bit more about why I did this and why did I do it now. The reason why I did this won't come as a surprise for those who know me.

This is the story of MovieMates, a service I built with my roommates to help us determine what movies to watch. I share an apartment with 3 other people and we love watching movies. Living in a cold city like Chicago, it's one of our favorite hobbies during the long winters. About 2 years ago, we noticed that many times it would take us very long to decide which movie to watch.

I recently wrote a new library for Ruby called Unique Thread. It allows multiple Ruby processes to communicate through Redis so only one of them is running a given thread concurrently. The idea for this came to me when wanting to run a crontab runner on a Rails app but only wanted one of the processes to be running at any given time. If the process running the thread shuts down, I also wanted another process to wake up and start running in its place.

Hello! My name is Fernando and I code professionally. I have been into computers since I was very young and I've devoted a big part of my life to it. I currently work primarily with Ruby and one of the things I love the most about it is its community. I've learned a lot from watching conference talks and reading on the Internet, and most of that content was created by people in their free time.