It’s not secret that the hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things… oh, and hiring. In our industry we’ve developed a culture and a mysticism around hiring, with certain rituals and practices which are often so detached from reality that you see numerous jokes and memes about the subject.

Hiring is a difficult problem, yet important to get right. Many developers are faced with the challenge of hiring other team members, without much clue into how to proceed, and end up just copying the well known rituals without stopping to analyse their effectiveness or implications. Often, this results in hindering both companies and candidates, especially those of under represented demographics.

In this talk I gave at PyconES2020, I share my experiences and personal opinions both as a candidate and as an interviewer, analyze the implications of popular hiring tactics, and discuss what I consider effective ones, in order to hire the right developers for your team with minimum hassle for both sides.

Microservices get a lot of sales talk, which leads many teams to adopt them eagerly. However, people are not always aware that they come at a price.

In this talk I gave at PyconES 2018 I discuss the basic theory around microservices architectures, and go over the common pain points that they bring, and how they often get you in the opposite direction than you intended with them.

Have you ever wanted to paint a room but did not decide which color to choose ?

We found an easy and cool solution, all you need is a phone (mainly an Android, but if you IOS, just replace the apps and locations with the IOS equivalent) and an image editor to paint your room in Virtual Reality.

A year ago we showed you a generative escaperoom game on Unity3D. Based on that formula, we decided to create some manually-crafted levels to make the game even better. So we decided to copy the first level design of a card based escaperoom game called Unlock. And the result was as good as we expected.

The game is not yet finished, but because we are going to move to a different project, we thought about showing you a demo of what we’ve built so far.

It’s the fourth year we’re doing this, my, time flies!

2017 was an incredibly packed year for us at a personal level, and the fun is still to continue in 2018. We still managed to scratch a bit of time for Coconauts, with highlights being:

• The start of a podcast. We only recorded three episodes, but each of them managed a listener count of over 100 on ivoox alone.
• We started setting up hackdays during the local bank holidays, which brought us: a escape room game and algorithmic trading experiments.
• On the hardware front, energenies have been our favorite toys. Worthy of mention are also a live picture frame (featured on Instructables) and a smart LED-illuminated staircase.
• Gamedev didn’t stop this year either. We did a bit of fiddling with Phaser and Cocos2D, but in the end we keep coming back to Unity3D for anything serious. Aside from the already mentioned Escape Room, we’ve done a Skyroads remake.
• What about purely software projects? Two little handy utilities: a Github PR tracker and an infinite playlist generator for Spotify.
• And last but not least: we’ve broken a record of blogposts this year! with 21 of them, almost two per month.

Hoping all of our readers enjoyed following us during 2017. It’s still not too late to whish everyone a happy 2018, and stay tuned for more exciting stuff to happen over at Coconauts!