Alejandro U. Alvarez

Instead of one tool that half the company tolerates, imagine twelve that each perfectly serve the people who asked for them.

If you had asked me a year ago how long it would take to build a fully-featured clinic management system from scratch, I would have said at least a month.

420 at Washington Square Park was like stepping into another world.

Second time here, now with several more festivals under the belt and a better understanding of what it’s all about!

About a month ago I had the idea to make a chat where you’d be put in a “room” with a group of people, not too big, so you can just have a chat.

At #socialgorithm we recently started working on a new game, let’s call it “Ant Colony” for now.

This post details my journey learning about flocking behaviours, the mathematical models behind them, and my own implementation using WebGL.

At work we have a decently sized pile of bugs in our backlog.

I just came across a great read called “The one time I thought I understood recursion”, which talked about a developer’s first steps with Haskell.

I wrote this right after a phone call from my mum, asking me for her gmail password.

After putting this aside for a few years (3 apparently… ) I finally decided to spend a weekend bringing my personal website back to life.

Online community and platform for code workshops and challenges.

Have you been tasked with generating PDF reports?

Actions This past year I invested heavily in Angularjs - building a massive application at work (at least it feels massive to me, the front end is at about 20k LOC without dependencies).

There are so many new technologies popping up every week on JavaScript front end ways of doing things that it becomes really hard to stay on top of everything.

Yes, this is outdated - I’ve now moved on to use Oh My Zsh, mostly with the default setup to keep things simple.

So I recently got a new Macbook Air, and after a couple of weeks of installing and configuring I finally have an initial setup I’m happy with.

As you may have seen at the end of my first Tricopter post, after the crash I decided that I was going to upgrade the body to the v3 Tricopter kit on David’s new shop.

When I was doing the Tree Generator, I used dat.gui for the first time, and on their workshop they have the following text to play with: dat.gui - This gave me the idea to render text on the canvas using particles that would seem to be gravitating around,…

I just ordered a new Macbook Air, exactly when the October 16th Keynote was over (In case they presented a new one with retina display).

I decided to build a tool that would allow me to see how websites are related in a visual way.

Github just started giving out “Student packs”, which include quite a big list of gifts, including a 1 year license of Unreal Engine.

Project After a lot of research on multirotors I decided to go with a tricopter after finding David Windestal’s videos on YouTube.

If you are developing window-like elements on HTML using jQueryUI Draggable, you are probably using the stack option to ensure that the dragged element will always be on top.

Over the past year I've been more and more interested in HTML5 canvas, since it allows very fast development of graphical animations using JavaScript.

An entertainment site, mixing an RSS aggregator and a “rage comic” site where users submit their content.

An experiment integrating an API with JavaScript.

Spanish (failed) social network fully integrated with Facebook.

First of all, what do we call intelligence when talking about algorithms?

Tabs are nice.

Audio being broadcasted via the Internet.

What is event tracking?

This short snippet produces a “Twitter style” time difference, the idea is that it will round to the nearest time unit, and display only the integers on that unit.

Entertainment site featuring many popular tools and services.

If you maintain a website, you will surely know how important it is to never have any spelling errors in your copy.

This might seem strange, but the lowest bounce rate in my blog comes from Stumble Upon visitors.

This is a really good option in WordPress, yet very few know how to do it.

Have you ever tried to access a computer's BIOS settings to find they are protected?

Have you ever wondered how to assign an image to a certain post using WordPress?

I’ve kept updating this post, scroll down for that!

I know you are probably thinking that this will be some silly thing, but this idea that Thomas Landauer came up with is by far the best I've seen in a long time.

In a new website I am developing for a client I had to add the usual "Did you mean… ?"

What I'm going to post here is a php function that will create a standard url from a user-inputted url so that any string will be converted to a functioning url.

Completely off topic for this blog, but at the time it is the best place to write about this.