Days are getting longer where I live, meaning summer is around the corner. I have to say I am not a big fan of having daylight up until almost 22:00 on the longest day of the summer, but more daylight, sun, and warm temperatures are welcome.
Speaking of temperatures, this week I have been working on making a heat risk map of Spain. The idea is to find heat islands and correlate them with income distribution and age groups, to assess whether those who are more vulnerable are also the most exposed to climate conditions. So this week I have been gathering the data, which I have to say it was harder than I expected. I am by no means a data scientist, so maybe it is just that I am not used to gathering raw data from public resources. As for the methodology, I am loosely following this study, which cross-references heat islands with access to climate shelters. My only criticism of this study is that the choice of climate shelters is, in my opinion, poor. Parks might not be a climate shelter if they do not have shaded areas, and libraries and sports centres, if they are closed during the summer or during the midday (as many of them are in Spain) can not be considered as a climate shelters. I’ll keep you updated on this as I make progress.
This is part of a series CV- and portfolio-driven projects. I realised that my professional profile lacks proof of value, more so considering I am a self-taught developer and I don’t have a big (or small) university name on my CV. I have spent most of my professional career working for the private sector, mostly on admin and internal tools, so I don’t have much to show to prospective clients and employers. Other projects for this CV / portfolio build-up include a Telegram bot with real traffic and subscriptions. I hope soon also add updates here about this project.
In other news, here are some interesting things I have found:
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Radicle is a distributed, peer-to-peer Git collaboration stack. It is proposed as an alternative to GitHub, without any central authority. I haven’t tried it yet, but I liked the concept and will definitely learn more about it. People these days are looking for alternatives to GitHub due to their change of policies regarding the use of code to train AI and also the more recent instability of the platform. Some heavy projects like Ghostty have announced their intentions to leave the platform and look for alternatives. So here’s one I will explore.
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Tolaria is an open source note-taking app made by Luca Rossi (Refactoring). I liked the app and the philosophy behind its opinionated design, with offline, markdown-first and lock-in-free as core values. But beyond that, I was more fascinated about their repo. While I was exploring it, I quickly realised they have a docs folder. Inside, apart from your typical README files explaining the architecture of the app, it also has an
/adrfolder. This stands for “Architectural Decision Record” and is based on the idea of keeping a record of all the architectural decisions. Each file in the record is just a couple paragraphs long and keeps the decision itself, why it was made and what options were considered as well as whether this decision was superseded by a later ADR. From what I have seen, this concept is attributed to Michael Nygard on this post. I see the usefulness of keeping one of these as a great way to keep all the context about a project, which often goes as unwritten knowledge inside the heads the people who started the project. I find this great to give both humans and AI agents context about the project: better understanding why the code has the shape it has makes it less likely to introduce regressions. I have personally started keeping an ADR on my projects. -
I would like to also share with you this guide to securing a Linux server. This guide targets particularly people who self-host, and I think it is a great resource for everyone starting with self-hosting and even for people already self-hosting to have a check list to go through and make sure their infrastructure is as secure as possible.
To finish this week’s update, I would like to add that I am recovering fine from my broken pulley. I have incorporated this week light open and half-crimp hangs and it is responding quite well. Next week I might go back to climbing, just easy boulders to start with. I am looking forward to it. Till next week!