It’s been now over a week since we moved to Sydney and everything is just great. We’re still house hunting but I got a feeling we’ll have a home soon. 
In the meantime, this morning I got a feature request on github to allow AppConstants to interpret YAML files with embedded code like this:
development: &default max_upload_in_bytes: <%= 1.megabyte %>
I haven’t needed it myself but thought it would be a nice addition so my latest commit does exactly that. Let me know if you find any issues.
Now several months after I announced my odyssey to obtain my Australian work visa, the time has finally come!
I’ll be flying to Sydney next week, April 15th, and as you can probably guess, I’m excited as hell! This starts an important new page both in my life and my career, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s about sharing the experience of living for over two years in Europe.
First off, I traveled. A whole lot. Both for work and leisure. I’ve been to 23 cities in 11 countries, which you can check on my map. Getting to explore all these different cultures was definitely rewarding and fun, to say the least. But I have my favorites, including Prague, London, Dublin and Bruges…
While in Madrid, I worked for Mirai España, the company that provided me with great professional experiences. I had the opportunity to work with a few very smart people that, in a way or another, contributed to improve my skills as a software engineer. Not to mention the several conferences I attended, including QCon in London, RailsConf in Berlin and serveral others.
Being a rock/metal fan I am in the ideal place to see just about every band I always wanted to. Concerts in Europe are high quality, frequent and affordable and as such, I’ve attended a whole bunch of them:
- Metallica
- Megadeth
- Soilwork
- Machine Head
- Offspring
- Cavalera Conspiracy
- Within Temptation
- The Haunted
- At the gates
- Judas Priest
- Testament
- Nine Inch Nails
- AC/DC
- Rammstein
- Grave
- Krisiun
- Nile
On a more personal note Madrid is also the place where I met Enif, my beloved girlfriend. We are both very excited about this new experience and, of course, we’re moving together to Sydney, with plans of getting married next year! 
As you can see, Europe has been kind to me and I will certainly miss the experiences, cities, cultures and people I’ve met. But I’m only making room for more and more interesting things that will certainly happen on the land down under. Let’s conquer it all!
Hopefully my next post will be written by the beach, in my new home in Australia.
Cheers, mate!
This will come as no surprise to my closest friends, but I am a long time game development admirer. Although I’ve never done anything professionally I did spend some time in the past studying this amazingly interesting field - it’s my dark hobby. As hardware evolves and gamers demand more and more reality from their consoles, the game development industry is one of the few that basically didn’t suffer with the latest economic crisis.
3D games are getting more and more sophisticated to the point that it’s very hard for a single person, or even a small team, to develop something worthwhile - think of all the people you need to develop a game such as God of War III: screenwriters, artists, musicians, sound engineers, 3D artists, animators, programmers, level designers, combat designers, actors, voiceovers…
So I just wanted to have the experience of writing a full game, end-to-end, and that’s where FallingDreams comes in. To be able to do that in a short amount of time, it had to be something simple and that’s why I chose Tetris. Although simple, it does share most of the steps common to modern games development. It was a very interesting project to work at and you can grab the result here. The source code is also available on my github account, here.
FallingDreams is written in Java (JDK 6) and as such it should work fine on Windows, Linux and Mac OS. I tried to be as loyal as possible to the original Tetris rules, but you might find one thing or two that don’t work as one’d exepct.
Enjoy! 
Disclaimer: This was my first ‘full game’ and is not intended to be production ready. The code has definitely got room for improvement and it served as my playground where I experimented different design techniques, both game and general software related. And it doesn’t have a single line of tests - crucify me 
As I said, it’s not supposed to be considered bug free but I’m sure people interested in games development can benefit from the source files. Feel free to fork it as well! It would be cool to see what people would do with it
