Recently I’ve decided to rebalance my investment portfolio but to do it effectively I had to ask myself a hard question: What’s likely to happen in the US economy in 2021 and beyond? This analysis led me to four scenarios with different probabilities of happening: damnation, inflation, reinvention and Japan. The scenario that seems more likely will drive the distribution of my portfolio between risky / high growth assets and safer / low growth ones.
David Barreto
Bitcoin explained without complicated terms
When I was starting my journey to understand this technology I found the literature on the subject dry and the information available online often misleading. I decided to write a simple story to explain Bitcoin’s fundamentals in technology and economics without getting into the weeds. The story itself is free of any technical jargon and I hope it’s accessible to everyone, even if the reader doesn’t have a background in technology. I did add some side notes as the story progressed to connect the dots between the analogy and real life, just in case the reader feels inclined to get deeper into a particular subject.
[Spanish] ¿Cómo le explicarías el funcionamiento de Bitcoin a un niño?
Mis familiares y amigos que saben de mi interés por Bitcoin y viendo la rápida apreciación de la moneda, me han empezado a preguntar ¿Cómo funciona Bitcoin? Como buen ingeniero empiezo a explicarles cómo funcionan los algoritmos de hashing, la relación entre la llave pública y privada, la criptografía de curva elíptica, proof-of-work, la “gossip network”, los wallets, etc. Desafortunadamente la mayoría de ellos no trabajan en tecnología y las explicaciones técnicas no son efectivas. En lugar de ayudarlos a entender los termino confundiendo aún más.
Where did the inflation go?
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?
Bitcoin’s vs FED’s Monetary Policy
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”.
[Spanish] Bitcoin salvó a mis padres
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.
Google Apps Script Local Development Tutorial
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.
An overview of Google Apps Script
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”.
Applying agile principles to management
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.
Redux Form Validation with ngrx-forms
This article authored by me was published on the Rangle.io blog. You can read it here
From REST to GraphQL
This article authored by me was published on the Rangle.io blog. You can read it here
Optimize your Angular 2 Application with Tree Shaking
This article authored by me was published on the Rangle.io blog. You can read it here
Configuring Webpack with Typescript
In a previous post, “A Gentle Introduction to Webpack“, we explore how to setup a very basic Webpack build to transpile ES6 code to ES5. In this tutorial we are going to expand on that article to add support for Typescript.
Immutable Array Operations in Typescript
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.
Setting Up a Basic Typescript Environment
In this blog post we are going to cover a basic setup for working with Typescript and Typings in a Node environment. This is the starting point of many other post on this blog.
The Different Levels of Immutability in Javascript
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().
The limits of Object.assign()
So, you have been using Object.assign to create copies of your objects right? Here’s a warning for you. Object.assign does not perform a deep copy.
A Gentle Introduction to Webpack
In a previous post, we explored how to create a simple build system for typescript using SystemJS. This time, we are going to create a similar build system only this time using webpack.
How to Use Typescript with SystemJS
Now that Angular 2 is out and given the importance of Typescript in the Angular 2 ecosystem, it’s time to understand how to create a proper building system for our projects.
Improving the Yeoman Generator Gulp Angular
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.