HectorCorrea.com

*Posted on 2026-01-12* This post is a short description of what my career as a software developer has been, followed by a few observations and recommendations for those starting a career in software development.

*Posted on 2026-01-05* A few days ago I updated my Bash initialization script to display the current Git branch on the prompt.

*Posted on 2025-11-11* One of my favorite features of the Go programming language is that it can produce executables that I can copy to another machine and run without having to worry about dependencies on the target machine.

*Posted on 2024-11-04* Last month (October/2024) I attended the [US Research Software Engineering 2024](https://us-rse.org/usrse24/) conference that took place in Albuquerque, NM.

*Posted on 2024-09-12* Earlier this month I visited the [Museum of Informatics of the School of Informatics of the Universitat Politècnica de València](https://museo.inf.upv.es/en/el-museo/) which has a nice collection of older computer equiment including…

*Posted on 2023-10-18* A few weeks ago I wrote a little program called (`fixie`) to help me migrate my personal website to be served via statically generated pages.

*Posted on 2023-10-17* Earlier this month I migrated my personal site at [https://hectorcorrea.com](https://hectorcorrea.com) to be hosted as a statically generated set of HTML pages hosted on GitHub pages.

*Posted on 2022-11-12* Mastodon is an open source project with the goal of providing a platform to create decentralized social networks.

*Posted on 2022-08-30* A few months ago I came across a paper titled [Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever?]

Last week the disclosure of the [Log4Shell vulnerability](https://www.lunasec.io/docs/blog/log4j-zero-day/) took many of us Solr users by surprise.

`debugQuery` is a parameter that we can pass to Solr when submitting a query, with this parameter Solr will include extra information in the response that is useful to troubleshoot a variety of issues in Solr queries.

Last week at work we ran into an interesting string encoding issue.

Today I ran into an issue setting the value of `document.body.innerHTML` that caught me by surprise.

A few weeks ago I read the book [Linux Containers and Virtualization - A Kernel Perspective](https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484262825) by Shashank Mohan Jain and I was fascinated by the example that he provides on how to build your own container from…

Five years ago (in 2014), after being a C# developer for many years I took my first job as a Ruby developer.

Last week I ran into an interesting issue renaming a bunch of files in my machine.

A few months ago I upgraded the machine where this website runs from a machine with Ubuntu 14 to one running Ubuntu 19.

One of the advantages of owning my web domain is that I can host my website and email anywhere I like.

*Posted on 2018-09-22, updated on 2024-02-07* When I started writing code on Ruby I learned there were many ways to download and install Ruby on a Mac.

This blog post is an extended version of the notes that I used for my talk titled [Build your own software, yes, build it](http://2017.code4lib.org/talks/Build-your-own-software-yes-build-it) at Code4Lib in Los Angeles, California on March 7th, 2017.

*Posted on: 2017-01-18, Updated on: 2024-09-17* Over the years I have written the code to power my website (hectorcorrea.com) in a variety of programming languages and platforms.

When I first started programming in Ruby and Ruby on Rails one of the things that I struggled the most was finding *where a particular piece of code (a method, a class, a string) was defined*.

[Linked Data Platform](http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/) (LDP) is a W3C recommendation that defines a set of rules to provide an architecture for read-write Linked Data on the web.

[Code4Lib](http://code4lib.org) is an annual conference that brings together a mix of people that work at libraries and/or develop software for libraries.

The folks at Packt Publishing asked me to review one of their newest books [Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms](https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/learning-javascript-data-structures-and-algorithms) by Loiane Groner.

<img style= float:left; src= https://hectorcorrea.com/images/poodr.jpg /> Anyone that has done a decent amount of programming in Ruby is bound hear about the book [Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby](http://www.poodr.com/) ^[1] by Sandi Me…

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One of the things that trips most newcomers to Node.js and MongoDB is how different the process to connect to databases from Node.js is compared to other programming environments.

Last year I blogged about my [first experiences hosting a Node.js website in production](https://hectorcorrea.com/blog/running-a-node-js-web-site-in-production-a-beginners-guide/49).

[Node.js](http://nodejs.org) is a JavaScript interpreter that runs in a server environment and gives us the ability to run JavaScript code directly on the server (i.e. outside of a browser) just like we can run server side code in other languages like PHP,

In this post I describe my experiences taking my first Node.js website to production, running it on port 80, and hosting it outside my local box so that it's available to the world wide web.

This blog post describes the steps that I used to configure my OS X machine to SSH to a remote Linux machine without having to enter my password every time.

Over the last couple of months I've been meaning to update [my sample Express.js application](https://github.com/hectorcorrea/simple-blog) from Express 2.x to Express 3.x but the fact that support for layouts was removed from Express 3.x was holding me ba…

Below are the links to the slides and code samples that I used during my presentation **A Decaf Introduction to CoffeeScript** that I gave earlier this month.

A few days ago I configured Sublime Text 2 editor to use three different hotkeys for compiling and running CoffeeScript files.

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As I start learning Node.js one of the things that have puzzled me the most is having to write JavaScript code to run in an asynchronous fashion.

Last year I blogged about [my first impressions using a Mac for web development](https://hectorcorrea.com/blog/ruby-development-on-the-mac-os-x/15) from the point of view of somebody with a strong Windows/C# background.

Over at the Pragmatic Bookshelf Trevor Burnham has a great post titled [A CoffeeScript Intervention](http://pragprog.com/magazines/2011-05/a-coffeescript-intervention) in which he shows several code snippets that demonstrate how CoffeeScript code is typic…

In this blog post I show how to use CSS and jQuery to slide-in a panel full page on top of another and then slide back in the original content.

These are my notes from Anders Hejlsberg session on Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic.

These are my notes from [Jensen Harris](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/about.aspx) session at Build Windows conference on Tuesday September 13th, 2011.

In this blog post I describe some branching strategies that I've found useful when using traditional source control systems like Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Lookie here...I am running Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express on my MacAir!

Ever since I got my [MacAir late last year](https://hectorcorrea.com/blog/ruby-development-on-the-mac-os-x/15) I've been having **issues copying files from my Mac to my external storage device**.

<img src= https://hectorcorrea.com/images/binarytree_simple.png alt= git align= left />When I started learning Ruby last year I decided to implement a **binary search tree** and some of its basic operations (insert, delete, walk, and search) just to get my

This blog post is a beginners' guide (written by a git beginner) on how to perform **basic version control operations with git** including initializing a repository, adding files to it, and using branches.

A little more than a month ago I got myself a MacAir.

A few weeks ago I noticed that when users of my site request a blog topic that does not exist although I was displaying a user friendly message indicating that the topic does not exist **I was not returning the proper HTTP status code (404) to indicate to…

A few days ago I was struggling with a problem with [log4net](http://logging.apache.org/log4net/index.html) in a web application.