Author: David Barreto

David Barreto is a technology enthusiast with a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineer and a Master's degree in Systems Engineering. He is passionate about management, software development, blockchain, teaching, writing and discovering new technologies. He currently lives in Toronto.

Where did the inflation go?

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inflation

In a previous article I analyzed how the FED’s monetary policy compared to Bitcoin’s. An important takeaway from the article is that, since the beginning of the pandemic, the FED has printed more than 3 trillion dollars, increasing the m0 money supply by 90%. At the same time, and according to the Congressional Budget Office (source), the US economy (GDP) is expected to contract by 5.6% by the end of 2020. In a scenario where the amount of money entering the economy increases drastically but the economy contracts, why aren’t we seeing an increase in the inflation rate?

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Bitcoin’s vs FED’s Monetary Policy

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Federal Reserve building

In the book “The Bitcoin Standard” written by Saifedean Ammous in 2018, the author claims that Bitcoin is a better store of value than the US dollar because it’s a “harder” currency. The corollary of this claim is that, if you want to save money for the future, you better use a hard currency that’s most likely to preserve (or even increase) its purchasing power over time. According to the author a simple way to analyze the “hardness” of a currency is to calculate its “stock to flow ratio”.

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[Spanish] Bitcoin salvó a mis padres

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Bitcoin

Hace un par de meses tomé la decisión de renunciar mi trabajo para dedicarme a estudiar las tecnologías que hoy en día se conocen como “blockchain”. No fue una decisión fácil debido a que pasar varios meses sin ingreso económico y viviendo en una ciudad extremadamente cara como Toronto, mis ahorros se verían seriamente afectados. Pero no pude evitarlo, vi demasiadas señales a mi alrededor que apuntaban a que estamos al borde de una transformación social que va a estar apalancada por un nuevo sistema económico basado en riqueza y no en deuda. Bitcoin, creo yo, será el catalizador de esa transformación.

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Google Apps Script Local Development Tutorial

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Updated on September 20th 2021

In a previous blog post I talked about the limitations of Apps Script and its cloud editor. Today I’ll focus on showing you how to create a modern local development environment that uses Typescript and consumes libraries from npm.

For this purpose we will be using clasp, a command line tool developed by Google that will allow us to connect our local development environment with Google Drive. As an obvious first step we need to install this package globally from npm.

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An overview of Google Apps Script

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In any company, there’s a lot of data sitting around in spreadsheets. We manipulate that data using built-in functions to create formulas that allow us to extract meaningful information. If your company is using Google Suite you’re able to extend the default functionality available in a spreadsheet by creating custom functions using a flavour of ECMAScript called “Apps Script”.

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Applying agile principles to management

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Ever since I made the transition from being a developer to being a manager I no longer spend my days in front of an IDE coding away. These days my tools of choice are calendars, spreadsheets, documents and presentations. Another significant change is that the people that I interact with on a daily basis have a more diverse set of skills and backgrounds that not always includes technology.

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Immutable Array Operations in Typescript

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In a previous blog post we explored how to perform immutable operations to update objects using Object.assign(). This time we are going to explore how to perform immutable operations on an array of objects which is a common pattern in Redux. If you wan’t to learn more about Redux, take a look at the excellent training course “Getting Started with Redux” by Dan Abramov, the creator of the library.

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The Different Levels of Immutability in Javascript

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Avoiding mutations in our code is becoming increasingly important in Javascript due to the principles of functional that makes our code easier to predict and to scale. This blog post can be considered a continuation of a previous one: The Limits of Object.assign().

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Improving the Yeoman Generator Gulp Angular

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The Yeoman generator generator-gulp-angular is a great tool for building AngularJS and in my opinion is much better than the official Yeoman generator for AngularJS (generator-angular), because it uses Gulp and not Grunt as the task runner, it has a component-like folder structure for the code instead of the “drawer” style, it uses libsass instead of compass (ruby), it supports Typescript and has a lot of options for configuration.

But there is a thing that I don’t like: how it handles bootstrap-sass.

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Working with Sass, Bootstrap and Gulp

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For frontend developers, the days when you manually linked css files to your index.html are over. Modern workflows needs some compilation steps before having a css file that can be use in development or production. Most notably, sass has become the most important language that extends css functionalities, while gulp has won the battle on the building tools front.

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Introduction to the Typescript Transpiler

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Typescript is the new kid on the block, a newly attempt to bring order to the javascript chaos. ES6 is around the corner and is a fantastic step forward for frontend development (classes!) but it will take years to be fully implemented in all major browsers. That’s when Typescript comes to the rescue. Typescript goal is to be a superset of ES6 that, in addition to all the new stuff that the standard is defining, will add a static type system. Typescript has also a transpiler that converts our Typescript code (i.e. ES6 + types) to ES5 or ES3 javascript code so we can use it in today browsers.

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