José Padilla

Installing pdfium in Mac OS

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 19:30:22 +0000

TIL: How to install pdfium in Mac OS using the pre-compiled binaries provided by https://github.com/bblanchon/pdfium-binaries.

Twitter Account Suspended

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 12:25:38 +0000

I woke up on June 16th to an email from Twitter stating that they had suspended my Twitter account. It stated that my account had been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules against posting violent threats. I knew I hadn’t personally made those tweets.

I immediately thought my account had been compromised even though I had a strong password and two-factor authentication configured on it, somewhat possible I guess. I then thought about potentially leaked access tokens.

Figuring out the home network

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 05:26:30 +0000

After moving in to our new home ?, one of the first things I did was sign up for gigabit internet from @GoNetspeed.

The ONT is in a corner down in our basement and my office is in the second floor at the opposite side.

Follow me as I figure shit out…
— José Padilla (@jpadilla_) January 6, 2021

After moving in to our new home ?, one of the first things I did was sign up for gigabit internet from @GoNetspeed.

The ONT is in a corner down in our basement and my office is in the second floor at the opposite side.

Follow me as I figure shit out…

Podcast: DjangoChat Ep. 45

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 17:14:18 +0000

Back in November I was invited to DjangoChat to talk about my contributions to the Django ecosystem. We talked about how I got started contributing to Django REST Framework and other open source projects, my work on Blimp and FilePreviews, authentication, and my current role at Auth0.

Talk: Python, Government, and Contracts

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 19:29:28 +0000

Today, Froilán and I gave this talk at PyGotham 2019.

Video

Home

Sat, 02 Jun 2018 17:26:42 +0000

Home

Favorite PyCon 2018 Talks

Sat, 26 May 2018 15:00:36 +0000

Finally caught up with most of the PyCon 2018 videos. Here are my favorite so far.

Alex Gaynor – Learning from Failure: Post Mortems

Connecting to a VPN automatically when not at home

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 14:58:51 +0000

When I’m on my home Wi-Fi, I rarely connect to a VPN. When I’m out, I always make the habit of doing so, except when I forget. I was hoping VPN clients would have a feature to automatically connect based on a list of networks, but after some quick research, I guess not. Maybe I’m wrong, but ended up with this nifty solution. I’m currently using Viscosity as my VPN client, but should work similarly for other clients that allow some scripting.

DevOpsCT Talk: osquery

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 15:37:03 +0000

These are the slides for a recent talk on osquery I gave at a DevOpsCT meetup.

Python Type Hints

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 02:48:49 +0000

These are the slides for a recent 5 minute talk on Python Type Hints I gave at newhaven.io meetup. Slides are also available on Speaker Deck.

Running osquery on CoreOS

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 16:26:08 +0000

Most things in CoreOS Container Linux can be run in containers, except when it doesn’t make sense. Here’s how I got osquery up and running.

osquery is an operating system instrumentation framework for Windows, OS X (macOS), Linux, and FreeBSD. The tools make low-level operating system analytics and monitoring both performant and intuitive.

osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events or file hashes.

PGP Key Transition

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 13:06:54 +0000

Keybase | Gist

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512

PGP Key Transition Statement José Padilla Fri Jul 28 12:54:01 UTC 2017

I have created a new OpenPGP key and will be transitioning away from my old key. The old key has not been compromised and will continue to be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to be encrypted to the new key, and will be making signatures with the new key going forward.

I would like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. This message is signed by both keys to certify the transition. My new and old keys are signed by each other. If you have signed my old key, I would appreciate signatures on my new key as well, provided that your signing policy permits that without re-authenticating me.

The old key, which I am transitioning away from, is:

pub 2048R/9B2987B1 2014-03-04 Key fingerprint = 6120 BB14 9792 D8E9 A371 B03C AAE3 EF57 9B29 87B1

The new key, to which I am transitioning, is:

pub 4096R/B55434E2 2017-07-28 Key fingerprint = 58FD 4723 5047 E944 BDE3 4DC7 9A11 1405 B554 34E2

I disown all other and prior keys, so please don’t use them. Specifically, the following keys are not valid for me:

0x33CFB6D79478C173
0x56921E75F4A66D4C
0x7C09FCF380E5AFA3
0x55FCA69C27265701
0xAAE3EF579B2987B1 (as provided above)

The entire key may be downloaded from: https://keybase.io/jpadilla/pgp_keys.asc?fingerprint=58fd47235047e944bde34dc79a111405b55434e2

To fetch the full new key from a public key server using GnuPG, run:

gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv-key B55434E2

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is signed by the old one:

gpg –check-sigs B55434E2

If you are satisfied that you’ve got the right key, and the User IDs match what you expect, I would appreciate it if you would sign my key:

gpg –sign-key B55434E2

You can upload your signatures to a public keyserver directly:

gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –send-key B55434E2

Or email identity@jpadilla.com (possibly encrypted) the output from:

gpg –armor –export B55434E2

If you’d like any further verification or have any questions about the transition please contact me directly.

/jpadilla —–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–

iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJZezRFAAoJEKrj71ebKYexuL0H/RG388KJwp+fWA8hR0jMrSFX OC4zgsMB6GLsSiZJhivDvYTXJdcFc2x6l9Cgh4YQTZwsDLsK2O7+Ao+AxcUAC5rQ zb2UIX6GzEly7i7+2HNKpv2AKcpdI5yNwuvjvTJMeivDAnSr9ymSTkbzIMyUuGkh bEuIodVuuf0jvrgECw8I8DLsyKPt3KkVPYjc1Ji3Q0w0uVtQhndvaD1Etc7wO3Vw h28Rkw7a6bK8Dt/ZmC+PI50/rKMDWPlSV2+ATCpitKZrDvEyk843d4ue39NaZ6uo rKLn6Fv0kZLZzX2VnEi64TKUfu7s2LzTOoKLT4km6M2ExcT7rj84nNlPCZrICluJ AhwEAQEKAAYFAll7NEUACgkQN2XJ6h5H7264vRAAtn7Z3rey+Hsi1g7tBEeYs0wY pjrn3hPQ5Ej1A+V5kpZuTH0Hh8TaW1LxmClRLE0jmMZV9bhRbCfyG9GMaSFeJp1W NXZAfXW2vtNurCKgsyBJhtk1MNZg7pbURvcaXifq+gt/Z7UZ6X/YlAfPLsmp22e+ wVA7i0TUlXYcQOtNwhhDD2N/hoG1lMgB2XkC8uzvRIOn06kSneFORzegyeK60rBw GdbzhuQrkzqZ0inhuEIXzDHFA7yIfOKg3aabx4Mc/K++42iy+bBZzx9UDHGoKay3 RSdnzRNCiQAL2S0Ckk+qo56rHzTqsz0XFtaLdMjp/c58knrLnVekMnPMJMXnnxwj dAzV31Lyxk4VZomw2z2PA/1R/C9bY2msJ5hCggqICguwM2bnRzn17mEawwAKTY0S rCK/744woagAa57muhVZyQk7eVXKxiS7EVjNGVM83jk0hwuUBv+v55Zawi3hm8fL RUMXwxIkv+HHD76x//mBmLOrjkdHMlZ1WyPiOFbRQrthpUabZ3V27h7IObsOZcbv S9e5hh69jEcOZffL/I5iuu4zc6Wcq3F7G5oiMoVGPUSUQUxhZtZX9OK1PzrMQezw 2ejhY3+1ktS5rsPTMw6qjiei0E0MIa+Yluw2u6CeT7oxQlJXuSFKCQB1CAnEOE/l iWstOpXJiOkvoLtMrPM= =hyse —–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

Update Kubernetes Deployment after pushing image to Docker Hub

Sat, 27 May 2017 23:41:13 +0000

I recently moved FilePreviews.io’s workers deployment to Kubernetes in Google Container Engine. After setting the workers up as a Deployment I wondered how this would fit with my current setup for continuous deployment. On a previous setup, I relied on Docker Hub to automatically build, push tagged images, and notify Rancher via a webhook.

I ended up writing a small server to handle the webhook event from Docker Hub and PATCH the container’s image tags in the Kubernetes deployment which triggers a rollout.

Developer Ergonomics

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 20:25:49 +0000

These are the slides for my PyCaribbean 2017 keynote on Developer Ergonomics where I talk about the current state of package managers in Python vs in other ecosystems like Node and Rust.

Looking backward and forward

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 15:30:35 +0000

2016 was with no doubt an eventful year for many.

On March 12th, I married my high school sweetheart. We’d been together for around 9 years and engaged for like 4 of those. Best day ever.

During the last quarter of 2015, we cofounded Alias Payments to build Gasolina Móvil. We became part of Parallel18′s first cohort and after six months we were closing a deal with PumaEnergy.

On August, my wife and I packed our things and moved to Hartford, CT for her doctoral internship. Its our first time living away from Puerto Rico, but we’re making it work. I’m still finding the right balance when working mostly from home. Since living in the East Coast, we drove to Québec City for my wife’s birthday, visited beautiful Boston way too many times, spent Thanksgiving in NYC with new friends, visited Stars Hollow(Washington Depot, CT), hiked some local trails, visited the casino at Mohegan Sun and more.

Upload files to S3 and generate previews using Laravel

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 16:40:10 +0000

I recently put together a PHP client library for FilePreviews and immediately thought about putting together a blog post on how I’d use it. After 6 years, according to this repo, of not writing a single line of PHP, I looked into Laravel since it seems to be the rave these days. Alright, let’s get to it.

This is a step by step guide on how to use Laravel to upload files to S3, and generate previews and extract metadata using FilePreviews.io. If you are already uploading files to S3 with Laravel, check out how to integrate with FilePreviews.

Create a Laravel project

I’m assuming you’ll probably have composer already installed.

$ composer create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist filepreviews-laravel-example

Filesystem / Cloud Storage Setup

In this example we’ll be using AWS S3 to store our files. After you’ve got a bucket and some credentials, let’s setup the project to use them.

First we’ll add S3 support to Laravel

$ composer require league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3

Since no one want’s to commit their S3 credentials we’ll modify config/filesystems.php to use environment variables.

's3' => [
 'driver' => 's3',
 'key' => env('S3_KEY'),
 'secret' => env('S3_SECRET'),
 'region' => env('S3_REGION'),
 'bucket' => env('S3_BUCKET'),
],

Now add your corresponding credentials to your project’s .env file.

S3_KEY=YOUR_AWS_S3_ACCESS_KEY
S3_SECRET=YOUR_AWS_S3_SECRET_KEY
S3_REGION=us-east-1
S3_BUCKET=YOUR_AWS_S3_BUCKET

Database

We’ll use sqlite in this example instead of Laravel’s default which is MySQL. Set DB_CONNECTION to sqlite in your project’s .env file.

You’ll also need to create an empty sqlite database file: storage/database.sqlite.

Model

Now we need to create a Document model. Our Document model will have a name, file(a URL on S3 to our original file), preview_url(a URL to a preview generated by FilePreviews), and preview(a JSON string containing all the results and metadata generated by FilePreviews.

First we’ll generate our model and it’s pertaining migration file.

$ php artisan make:model Document --migration

We need to add the rest of our fields to that migration before running it. You’ll find the migration inside the database/migrations directory. It’ll be named something like 2015_11_25_125309_create_documents_table.php.

Make sure the up() function looks like the following.

public function up()
{
 Schema::create('documents', function (Blueprint $table) {
 $table->increments('id');
 $table->string('name');
 $table->string('file');
 $table->string('preview_url')->nullable();
 $table->json('preview')->nullable();
 $table->timestamps();
 });
}

Now run your migrations.

$ php artisan migrate

Controllers

Our simple application will allow you to list existing documents and create new ones. To simplify things a bit we’ll generate a resource controller.

$ php artisan make:controller DocumentController

Let’s go ahead and add that to our routes.

Route::resource('documents', 'DocumentController');

Next we’ll configure our controller’s functions, index which will render our list of documents, and create which will render our form.

<?php
namespace AppHttpControllers;
use IlluminateHttpRequest;
use AppDocument;
use AppHttpRequests;
use AppHttpControllersController;
class DocumentController extends Controller
{
/**
* Display a listing of the resource.
*
* @return IlluminateHttpResponse
*/
public function index()
{
$documents = Document::all();
 return view('documents.index', compact('documents'));
}

/**
 * Show the form for creating a new resource.
 *
 * @return IlluminateHttpResponse
 */
public function create()
{
 return view('documents.create');
}

}

Touch Typing and Programming

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 14:34:52 +0000

Programmers solve problems and most of the time use a keyboard to do so.

I firmly believe you need to be able to efficiently express yourself through typing. There’s probably nothing more fundamental in programming than being able to think of something and expressing it in code without losing your train of thought.

I say efficiently and not perfectly. You don’t have to be the fastest typist in the west but speed helps. I could make up a couple of “imagine a surgeon that didn’t know the way around a scalpel” or “a baseball player that didn’t know how to swing” but I wont, you probably get the picture.

Juice Box

Wed, 22 Apr 2015 15:41:18 +0000

A month ago I decided to take another stab at proposing a solution to allow all of us to keep working on great programming workshops.

Personally, the biggest headache in each and every one of the workshops that I have organized or participated in is the time and effort it takes to configure and setup the attendees’ computers. This results in attendees and instructors loosing valuable time that can be spent actually sharing knowledge. Various other people have shared the same worries and feelings about this, so might as well try and do something about it.

Mako & Oliver

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 17:04:00 +0000

Three weeks ago today, on an unfortunate accident, Mako my 6 year old Siberian Husky escaped from home, and we noticed just a couple of hours later. After endless hours, driving around different possible routes, talking to people, calling out his name, posting hundreds of flyers, hundreds of people sharing on Facebook and Twitter, we haven’t found him yet.

Mako is more than a dog or pet to me, he’s a loyal friend, and we’ve been through a lot. This past weeks have been eternally tough for us. We’re still looking for him every day, we’re still receiving calls of people who’ve seen similar dogs around, I drive with my windows down in hope of hearing that beautiful distinct howl. We’re hopeful that perhaps a loving and caring family found him, rescued him, and has fallen in love with him. But we’re still not giving up.

Top 20 Hacker and Designer News 2014

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 14:07:00 +0000

Last year around this same date I started The Hacker and Designer News newsletter as a weekly curated recap of the what I thought were the best articles from Hacker News and Designer News on startups, entrepreneurship, hacks, programming, design, etc. I built and open sourced an aggregator to help me collect posts. I later built news.hdn.io using that same aggregator to view the current top posts on both sites side-by-side.

Learned a couple of things from building a newsletter, missed a couple along the way, but definitely looking forward to ramp up subscribers throughout 2015. If you still haven’t, feel free to check out past issues and subscribe.

File Uploads + CORS + IE

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 16:14:00 +0000

Supporting Internet Explorer is always kind of a drag, but sometimes you just have to. Adding to the mixture file uploads via AJAX and CORS only make it that much more fun.

When dealing with AJAX file uploads I always seem to keep going back to jQuery File Upload. Making these file uploads work on IE require fallback to using an iframe, which is supposed to work automatically almost right of the box. I encountered some issues, maybe it was the slack of sleep, reading outdated Stack Overflow answers or simply not understanding the documentation that well.

Backup OpenPGP keys on paper

Sat, 18 Oct 2014 22:15:00 +0000

Recently I remember I was keeping a backup of my OpenPGP keys on an external hard drive that any day now could just cease to work. After my first attempts with PGP/GPG where I lost my private keys and could no longer revoke them, I wasn’t planning on loosing another one again.

After reading what others did to store their private PGP keys, I figured that the best way to store them was on paper. That’s where paperkey comes along. Paperkey is an OpenPGP key archiver by David Shaw, one of the main GPG developers.

My talk on JSON Web Tokens at DjangoCon US 2014

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 02:18:00 +0000

I had a great time at DjangoCon US 2014. Lots of first times.

First time at DjangoCon
First time speaking at DjangoCon
First time speaking in front of “large” crowd.
First time visiting the west coast
First time visiting Portland

Special thanks to Blimp for enabling me to do this. Thanks to the DSF’s grant which made the trip financially possible. Thanks Froi and Sasha for coming along, all the support, and making the trip way more fun.

Django REST framework Sprint at DjangoCon US 2014

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:22:00 +0000

This’ll be my first time attending and speaking at DjangoCon US. I’ll be talking about JSON Web Tokens, Django, and Django REST Framework.

I’ve been talking about working on a Sprint for Django REST Framework with Tom Christie on Twitter. Tom pointed out a list of decent candidates to work on if we get some people together. We’ll have a tagged list of obvious bug candidates before the sprint. He’s also planning on helping us out remotely those days.

Getting started with Go

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 10:52:00 +0000

I’ve been using Python for a quite a few years as my main go-to language for building web apps, RESTful API’s, utilities, and much more. It’s the driving power for most of our backends at our startup: Blimp, Blimp Boards, and FilePreviews. I have very few bad things I could argue about Python, but I won’t.

I’ve recently felt the need to dig into newer programming languages and technologies. One of the languages I’ve been wanting to try out for a while now is Go. So I did, and here’s why and a couple of resources that helped me out. The first thing I did was read up about Go for a few days.

Getting started with Ember.js

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 19:51:00 +0000

I played around with Ember.js on and off last year and after building some quick demos I decided to invest some real time in building real web apps with it. I have been keeping track of some useful tips and resources for people starting out with Ember.js.

Ember.js Guides

The official Ember.js Guides and Tutorials walks you through the very basic concepts for someone starting out, and slowly getting into more “advanced” concepts and features. Those guides are truly written in a simple to understand tone only using technical jargon where necessary. I definitely suggest going over these guides before starting out with Ember. I’ve kept them handy since they are also useful for future reference.

Barcamp Viejo San Juan

Sat, 17 May 2014 23:15:00 +0000

Last Barcamp we organized was back in 2012 in Mayagüez. The one before that was in 2011, and the first one was back in 2010.

We already have a date for the next Barcamp Viejo San Juan, Tuesday, June 3 at 7PM. This time we’ll be meeting at Piloto151 in Old San Juan.

For those that don’t know what a Barcamp is, Barcamp is a conference in which the guests become the event speakers. We expect everybody to make a 10 minute presentation to the rest of the audience. The idea is to encourage the exchange of ideas in an open and interactive environment.

Internet Speed Tests on a Raspberry Pi

Thu, 20 Feb 2014 03:25:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago soynerdito soynerdito shared a bot he made to tweet internet connection speed results every now and then.

I then remembered I had a Raspberry Pi I wasn’t using at all. So I built a small app that runs speed tests every 3 hours. It’s based on speedtest-cli which is a Command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net.

The only difference with the one I built is that instead of tweeting the results, it posted all available data to an endpoint. I built a Flask app that can be used to store those results for different users as well as share them via a JSON API.

If you’re interested in running your own, check this Gist out. It contains a README file that will help you setup your box(doesn’t have to be a Raspberry Pi). It also includes a sample Flask app to store your own results. If you’re interested in using the one I’m hosting you could do so, just let me know and I’ll send you a URL to store results and one to share or consume. It’d be interesting to see different kinds of results at a larger scale, not just my own.

Here are the results graphed since I started running it. Interesting to see how so many spikes in my download speeds. Those are probably related to download in other computers or probably streaming Netflix. Upload speed as expected doesn’t really fluctuate that much.

The easiest way to add WebSockets to Django

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 16:27:00 +0000

TL;DR – I came up with a very simple solution to handle WebSockets in Django apps. You just install django-websocket-request, run a script and you have WebSockets for your Django app. The cool thing is that this solution makes Django believe its getting a (somewhat) normal HTTP request so you can reuse almost all of you application’s code. Plays nicely with Django REST Framework and with plain function-based views and class-based views. Check out the demo and it’s source code on GitHub.

Auth with JSON Web Tokens

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 04:03:00 +0000

When it comes to implementing authentication on web apps, one solution you’ll definitely hear about first are cookies. Cookie-based authentication uses a server side cookies to authenticate the user on every request. This means that you’ll need to keep a session store, whether it’s on a database or on something like Redis. A solution you’ll probably not hear as often is token-based authentication which relies on a signed token that is sent to the server on each request.

The Hacker and Designer News Newsletter

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:01:00 +0000

After recently building a scraper and web API for The News, I thought it’d be a cool idea to use that data somehow. First thing that came to mind was to build a newsletter. And so The Hacker and Designer News Newsletter was built.

Newsletter

Every week I’ll send a newsletter with a curated recap of the week’s best articles from Hacker News and Designer News on startups, entrepreneurship, hacks, programming, design, and more. Something I may consider for the new future is allowing people to subscribe to a simple and shorter daily recap.

Scraper and Web API for The News

Sun, 08 Dec 2013 12:51:00 +0000

I recently found out about http://thenews.im thanks to @gcollazo. The News is a pretty cool project by ahmetsulek that brings together under one same site LayerVault’s Designer News and Y Combinator’s Hacker News.

I decided to take advantage of having all those posts from two different sources together and built a scraper for it with Node.js. Once I had all the posts stored and updated on my side I thought it’d be cool to implement a JSON endpoint to allow anyone to use the data however they want.

Example:

Traveling to Boston

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 21:59:00 +0000

I’ll be visiting Boston for the very first time with my lovely wifey from December 11th to December 15th. It’s definitely not a lot of time for a first time visit, but we want to make the best out of it.

Since she’ll be two days in a conference, I’ll probably doing some walking and sightseeing to visit meet any startups and local hackers that are up for it.

A hub for all events of interests to Startups of Puerto Rico

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 11:16:00 +0000

Ryan Oliver has done a fantastic job at keeping the Startups of Puerto Rico community posted with all the recent events that have been popping up. If you are signed up at startupsofpuertorico.com you should have received some emails with the events that we recommend you checking out in previous weeks, as well as those that are on the horizon.

Now we’ve got an awesome working Events section. The idea behind this section is to be a central hub of all the events happening around that are of interest to community members, not to replace Facebook Events, Eventbrite or Meetup. You’ll still receive an ocasional email with upcoming events. You can also subscribe to these events via an iCalendar or RSS feed.

Ember.js + Django

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 22:40:00 +0000

Quick deck about how easy it was to switch an Ember.js app from using localStorage adapter to using an adapter for Django REST Framework.

To show the simplicity of it, I took the simple Markdown Editor I built a couple of days ago, Poe, and switched the localStorage adapter with one that works with Django REST Framework.

Presented at the prPIG meetup on September 26, 2013.

Get a $5 Amazon gift card and up to 1-year of Blimp PRO for free

Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:53:00 +0000

Today we launched a new page to help our users share their love for Blimp and to give some love back in the process. You can read more about it in our Let’s share the love blog post.

If you still haven’t tried Blimp, join now and get 1-month free of Blimp Pro, the easy-to-use and beautiful Project Management software.

Join: http://blimp.io/15g9JCJ

Ember.js demo app #1: Poe

Thu, 12 Sep 2013 13:13:00 +0000

One of the first Ember.js project ideas in the Puerto Rico Ember.js User Group was a Markdown Editor. My all-time favorite Markdown editor is definitely Mou. Mou is a Markdown editor for web developers, on Mac OS X.

Mou is great, simple, and has a couple of nifty features built into it. One of my favorite is being able to change the CSS applied to Live Preview and HTML/PDF export. That means that we can use the same CSS styles GitHub uses on their rendered Markdown. That’s why I always write my README files in it.

Python shell history

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 12:04:00 +0000

If you’re not a fan of enhanced Python interpreters like IPython or BPython but still do heavy use of it you might have notice how annoying it could get whenever you have to quit it, started again, and remember what was the last things you ran. I do this all the time, usually for simple things like testing out built-in functions or quick hacks.

Startups of Puerto Rico Platform

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 14:11:00 +0000

Two months ago I opened an issue for CAP-0003 proposing to execute a platform to contain what I’ve been able to identify as useful tools for the Startups of Puerto Rico community.

A couple of people showed interest and a conversation was immediately started to discuss it in more details. About a month ago I got together with Ryan Oliver and decided we would start working on an MVP v0.1 that we would just put out there by the end of summer.

About 200+ commits later, I’m proud to announce that we’ve reached our goal and are launching v0.1. We decided to start with the two easiest features, a directory of startups and a directory of creative talent. The basic idea with these two directories is to showcase, which startups are hiring, and who’s looking to be hired.

Roadmap

This is just the beginning and we’re only getting started. We already have something of a roadmap of the next things we want to get to. Some of those are a directory of all the groups out there(Startup After Hours, prPIG, Founding Founders, etc…), aggregated calendar of events, and a directory of resources to showcase available resources for the community. We also have some enhancements thought out for the existing features.

We need you your help

Here’s what we need from you. Go to startupsofpuertorico.com and signup, and if you’re working on a startup, create a startup profile. If by any chance you’re working with more people on your startup check beforehand to see if they haven’t added it yet. You’ll be able to add a team to your startup soon! We know this isn’t much yet, but it’ll help us get data in there. Once you finish that, we need your feedback. Tell us what you like and what you don’t, what you think about the roadmap, style, copy, etc… You can also help out by sharing the project with the whole community.

You can send a pull request with any changes you’d like to suggest directly to the repo or send me an email. We are managing the project with Blimp so if anyone wants a closer look at what we’re currently doing and want to get your hands dirty, feel free to send me your email and I’ll invite you in.

Huge thanks to Ryan, Jonah, Axel, Omar, Giovanni, and everyone who helped put this together one way or another. We are all in this together!

Blimp en Luz De A’lante

Tue, 06 Aug 2013 02:04:56 +0000

Autofinanciado por tres jóvenes puertorriqueños, Blimp ha llevado su sistema de gerencia de proyectos a más de 8,000 usuarios en más de 100 países. ¿Como lo han logrado?

Being a self-starter

Sat, 22 Jun 2013 13:56:00 +0000

I spent the last 4 and a half years getting my Bachelors degree in Computer Science. Throughout those years I worked on different things ranging from small personal projects, with small to medium size companies, government, and co-founding Blimp. I accomplished all of these because 4 years before I began college I decided to I would self start. By that time I was just learning basic programming. Months after I took that decision, I got my first freelance client, my parents. Yea, whatever, maybe they did it to help me out more than it was for me to help them out.

From Day Job to Entrepreneur: Interview with Giselle Zeno

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:54:02 +0000

It’s not everyday someone thinks to themselves “Fuck it, I’m doing this”, quits their job, risks everything and starts working on something they truly believe in, embracing failure every step of the way. Since Startup of Puerto Rico and events like Startup After Hours, Founder Institute, Startup Weekend, and others started I’ve slowly but surely seen it happening. The most recent person I know that decided to do this is Giselle Zeno. I’ve known her for a while and was very intrigued to know what finally triggered that mindset in her. Hopefully this is the first of a series of interviews to awesome people that have recently reached that mindset switch or are almost there.

Shifting to “new-style” url tag in Django 1.5

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:03:00 +0000

Prior to Django 1.3, the syntax for the url tag was {% url project_create %}. Django considered project_create to be a name of a view in your urls.py, not a template variable named project_create.

I recently upgraded Blimp from Django 1.4.5 to Django 1.5.1. We have around 200+ template files that were using the old url tag syntax and there was no way I was going to add quotes around the view names one by one.

Kippt as an RSS Reader

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Last weekend I felt like working on a hack, but what? With the recent news of Google Reader being retired on July 2013 I thought there was something cool to be done with RSS, but what? As I was looking for ideas on my Clips I realized that with Kippt’s latest update, a redesign from ground up and tons of new features, you could store your RSS feed’s new entries, actually read articles just fine and have them stored and categorized however you want with Lists.

Vagrant VM for StatsD + Graphite

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 03:32:00 +0000

StatsD is this little awesome network daemon built by Etsy used to aggregate stats like counters and timers to a pluggable backend service like Graphite. You can read more about how it works on Etsy’s Measure Anything, Measure Everything blog post.

Since I’ve been already playing around with Vagrant and Chef I decided to just put together a simple Vagrant VM for StatsD and Graphite with the help of @hectcastro’s graphite, statsd, and node.js cookbooks.

Favorite Podcasts

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:30:31 +0000

Back to Work
Award winning talk show with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discussing productivity, communication, work, barriers, constraints, tools, and more.

The Web Ahead
A weekly podcast about changing technologies and the future of the web, discussing HTML5, mobile, responsive design, iOS, Android, and more.

Customer Development for Startups
Steve Blank, eight-time entrepreneur and now a business school professor at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, shares his hard-won wisdom as he pioneers entrepreneurship as a management science, combining Customer Development, Business Model Design and Agile Development.

Looking back: 2008-2012

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:11:00 +0000

So, the world didn’t end on December 21, 2012 as many believed would happen and the year is quickly coming to a close. This year has been truly and absolutely awesome. For the past couple of years I haven’t really reflected or looked back on things, so today I set out to do exactly that.

Let’s go back a bit. I always thought I wanted to be a Computer Engineer and during my junior year I decided to finish 12th grade on a summer program and get into college one year ahead (Fall 2008). On June 2009 I went to this Puerto Rico Startup Weekend event where I met Francisco and Pablo Tirado, Giovanni Collazo, Albizu García, Luis Benitez, Alfredo Richner, Rafael Mediavilla, Guillermo Carrión, and others which were all working on very interesting projects. I think I was definitely the one that got the most out of that weekend. Days later I got my first couple of real freelance gigs an opportunity brought by just going to that event and meeting those key people. Weeks later, Fran and Pablo contacted me to help them work on a big government related project… It was an honor!

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m José Padilla. I’m a software developer, hacker, and entrepreneur from Puerto Rico. I currently live in Connecticut with my wife and miniature dachshund.

In 2011, I co-founded Blimp with Giovanni Collazo. During this time we helped customers build ambitious projects and built products of our own, including FilePreviews, an API that produces previews, optical character recognition, and metadata from files.

I also co-founded Gasolina Móvil, a mobile app that helped people pay at the pump. The product later became the first product of Alias Payments.

Projects

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These are a few projects I’ve helped build.

FilePreviews homepage

API · File processing

FilePreviews

An API that produces previews, optical character recognition, and metadata from files. Built with the Blimp team.

Visit FilePreviews

Archived homepage, January 2022

Civic tech · Open data

Contratos de Puerto Rico

A searchable public index of Puerto Rico government contracts, built with Code for Puerto Rico. The service has since been archived.

View the project on GitHub

Open source · Python

PyJWT

A JSON Web Token implementation for Python. I maintain the project with a community of contributors.

View PyJWT on GitHub