Juan Ramírez

2022 update

2022-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

This year 2022 is leaving and a new one, 2023, is coming.

At the beginning of this year the medical tribune denied declaring me permanently disabled, so as a consequence I had to rejoin my previous position as a software engineer in Telefonica. At the same time, I demanded them. The judgement will take place in 2024.

I really tried to do it well, but in the end the secondary effects of my surgeries made my boss realize that something was wrong, so he had a talk with me that made me feel very anxious and stressed. Indeed, I had to take another leave because of this reason, but the medical tribune rejected, in a first take, to accept it as valid.

I had to rejoin Telefonica again, but they seemed to understand the complexity of my case and told me to pass another medical recognition, more oriented to reflect my cognitive difficulties. A friend told us that there were a legal way to appeal the medical tribune resolution, so I thought about using it, attaching the medical recognition report as a probe of my difficulties to do my previous job.

Anyway, as I saw that it was very difficult for me to properly explain to the people in the medical tribune the secondary effects I had (sometimes they asked me about those effects and I didn’t remember them, due to my amnesia), I could get from my neurologist a report which stated that it was recommended that my wife come with me to talk to the medical tribune. She could finally come with me and we could explain together my secondary effects to those people.

After hearing us, the medical tribune finally decided to give me a new sick leave, and that’s the one I have today.

A new hope, a new challenge

The final days of 2021 we also discovered that we were pregnant. It it a girl, and we decided to call her Ana. It’s not only a great news, but also a great challenge for us, especially for me taking into account the cognitive secondary effects of my surgeries. Blanca also thinks it will be a good stimulous to my mind.

She finally came to this world finishing August. She’s a very good girl, and we’re definitely very happy with her.

Happy 2023

This will continue being my personal blog indefinitely, so I’ll try to improve it and I’ll try to continue writing here periodically.

I wish you all a very happy 2023!

Goodbye and thank you, 2021! Welcome, 2022!

2021-12-31T07:00:00+00:00

2021 has been the year when I started to accept (and even celebrate!) my new status as ABI affected (and survivor). It’s not a little thing. ABI is shocking for anyone who suffers from it, but it can also be the beginning of a different, new and better (yes, better!) life. A life where one can learn to identify his or her weaknesses and strenghts, how to transform weaknesses into strenghts and how to use the latter to compensate the former.

I’m thankful because I’m alive and because, during this year, I learned a lot of ways to overcome obstacles in my life and to be a better human being after all.

2021 has been a transition year. During this year I started to be more independent. I started, somehow, to be me again. I hope 2022 to be the year when I can start to consider myself recovered from my ABI (at least when I can consider my rehabilitation more or less over) and when I can return to more or less normal life. Yes, I know I’m different after all this, but someway we’re always different as time doesn’t stops and every experience makes us different.

Next year should be the year when I hopefully just go on with my life after this really overwhelming experience. I know it will not be exactly the same as before, but I want to think that it doesn’t really matter so much since I don’t really remember so exactly how my life was in the past ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So let’s go on! I wish you everyone a happy 2022! :)

7 tips to have your code better reviewed (recovered post)

2021-08-29T11:30:00+00:00

Note: This post has been recovered from my archive after having been lost due to my brain injury. It was originally posted in my old development blog on September 25, 2017.

Code reviews take time. Of course. But they are helpful. Very helpful. They are a fantastic way to keep all the team on the same page and encourage everybody to do the right things and to do them correctly. Here you have some tips I’ve learn through the years to avoid my code reviews to become painful or useless:

Create reviews for all the code you push. No, seriously: do it. Some companies or teams have this process semi-automated or very established as part of its tech culture. If they don’t, ask your manager to do so. And if she responds that it’s a bad idea, run out of that company!! NOW!!.

Remember: Most of the times optional code reviews means no code reviews.
Create your reviews early and often. Don’t wait to have a monster with a million of lines of code. Several small, specific changesets, are way easier to review than one big changeset with lots of changes. Also, your changes will more likely be accepted if you divide them into several smaller steps.
Review your own code before showing it to your teammates. Imagine you receive that code from another person to be reviewed for the first time. Be your best reviewer, be critical with your code. Take your time.
In order to avoid noise, use your IDE to identify possible bugs. Modern IDEs analyze your code in order to find possible warnings or bugs. If your IDE does not analyze it automatically, pass your code through a static code analyzer.

If your team uses a code formatting standard, use an automatic formatting tool to format it. This will allow your teammates to concentrate on the really important things and avoid silly conversation threads about coding style.
Prepare your review. I mean, not only add the code or the changesets you want to review. Link the review to the corresponding ticket and/or explain the feature you’re trying to add, focusing on implementation details that maybe are not in the ticket, but are relevant. If there is some piece of code which is not obvious, you should explain why you did it that way and not differently.
Carefully select the people you want to review your code. If there is a policy for that, follow it. Most of the cases, however, not everybody in your team needs to review your code.

People who probably needs to be included in your code review includes your manager, some people with experience in the related product domain, the original author of the piece of code you’re touching (or just someone who touched the code before) and anyone who is developing another related feature in parallel (ask for that if necessary).
Don’t take it personally. It’s your code what is being reviewed, not you. Long comment threads in a review doesn’t mean someone hates you or wants to annoy you. More probably, it will mean she disagrees with you in some specific technical thing. Be nice, assume the best intentions on the reviewer and answer all the comments pleasantly.

Be ready to learn from others. Be grateful on the good suggestions and express your arguments clearly, but with politeness, if there’s something you honestly don’t agree with.

How to tell Git to ignore files locally (recovered post)

2021-08-29T11:00:00+00:00

Note: This post has been recovered from my archive after having been lost due to my brain injury. It was originally posted in my old development blog on August 1st, 2017.

Excluding files for being versioned in Git is easy through the use of the widely known .gitignore file.

This .gitignore file is normally versioned.

That’s clever, because most software sources will generate binaries or intermediate code when being run or compiled. Also, if you’re working in a virtual environment (Python virtualenv, for instance) or with a package manager (npm or RubyGems, for instance), you’ll likely have your project dependencies in a directory inside your repo.

Adding those generated files or directories in .gitignore will benefit everyone involved in the project, because having git ignoring them will prevent people to add those files to the project, so those files will be autogenerated uniquely for each one.

By the way: You can place multiple .gitignore files, inside each directory, to establish directory-specific rules.

So why in the world would we want to exclude files only for us?

Well, there may be several reasons.

First (and this is a very typical case), imagine you have generated files that are specific to your IDE or your OS. Typical examples are .DS_Store files on MacOS, the .idea directory generated by Jetbrains IDEs and *~ backup files created by vim.

Why would someone who uses Atom on Linux want to mess out with those lines on the common .gitignore file? Should we cover there every file name pattern for every IDE/OS/environment in the world? It doesn’t seem a good idea, don’t you think? In addition, you could come up with a conflict with some editor which uses a pattern that matches a file that needs to be versioned.

Second, maybe you want to use a special file or directory in the project to store something, but, the same as before, it’s something other people don’t have to mess out with. Maybe you want to use nvm but not everybody involved in the project is gonna use it. Or, for example, I usually create a directory called .snippets on each project, where I store… well, code snippets, to have them always located.

To ignore these kind of files locally, I’ll explain two different methods:

Method #1: `core.excludesFile`

To apply this method, create a file named as you want (for example, ~/.gitignore_global) and specify its path in the git global config variable core.excludesFile

This method makes git ignore files in all local repositories. This makes this method ideal for ignoring environment generated files, but maybe not for project-specific files. If you want to ignore some files only for one project, you’d better make use of the second method.

For example, we’re going to create a file ~/.gitignore_global. Please note that, on this context, global means that we’re going to use these exclusions for all our repositories in our machine, but nobody will know it outside of our environment, so in some sense it will be also local.

So, we create the file to ignore, for example, MacOS .DS_Store files and Jetbrains .idea directories. The pattern syntax is the same as the one used with .gitignore:

.gitignore_global

1
2
.DS_Store
.idea/

Now we have to tell git that we want to use that file as excludesFile:

$ git config --global core.excludesFile ~/.gitignore_global

Method #2: `.git/info/exclude`

This method is also widely documented. In every git repository, we have a special file .git/info/exclude where we can add the patterns we want to exclude locally.

This .git/info/exclude file is unique for each repository. This makes this method ideal for project-specific files or directories. Anyway, we could use a symlink to a file in our home directory, for example.

Again, the same pattern syntax applies:

.git/info/exclude

1
2
.env
.nvmrc

This way, git won’t alert you about those files having changes on the repo, and nobody will have to know about your .env variables or the Node version you configured on .nvmrc (and you won’t overwrite files on your teammates repos).

Epilepsy in the context of ABI

2021-07-09T07:30:00+00:00

Note: This post has been moved from my old Wordpress personal blog, which I don’t expect to update anymore.

The nervous system is similar to an electrical circuit. If you cut an electrical wire in a circuit, an accidental connection between two points of different potential can happen. When electrical circuits in the brain are cut due to a stroke (or a surgery, in my case), abnormal electrical activity can be generated in several parts of the brain. These kind of abnormal electrical activity episodes may appear in the form of epilepsy.

The first times I had this kind of epileptical attacks, I didn’t notice them, but my wife told me the following mornings that I had had them the night before. Later, I learned that the brain intentionally switches off when these episodes ocurrs as a defense mechanism because they are too stressful for it to be recorded.

I wasn’t very surprised when my wife told me that because, since I left the hospital, I was prescripted anti-epileptical medication, so I assumed that there was a possibility of this kind of episodes to happen. Anyway, as more episodes like that took place later, the dosis of that kind of medication was increased thrice (if I remember well). In addition, I also have a rescue medication for the specific moments when I’m having a crisis. Obviously, someone has to be with me to give me that rescue medication.

A consequence of this is that our life habits changed. Concretely, both my wife and me lost some autonomy. She has on-duty nights in the hospital, but, before all this process (if my memory doesn’t trick me) I used to carry my wife to the hospital in the morning; I could go for errands or do some running workouts during the day when she was on-duty. And, the following morning, I picked her at the hospital when she was done to bring her back home. Some days I even went to the hospital at night to stay some time and have dinner with her. During these latest months, when she had on-duty nights, my parents came the morning before to pick me at Ronda in the morning and brought me to our family home at Chiclana, and finally brought me back the day after. Don’t get me wrong, I really love my parents, but, as you can imagine, in terms of autonomy the consequences are not so good.

Now I’ve been enough time without epileptic attacks, it seems it’s OK to test reducing that medication to find the equilibrium point (especially because that medication has some secondary effects we want to avoid), so doctors are indeed trying to reduce it progressively.

Two weeks ago we also tested me staying alone all night again at home while my wife was on-duty, just like before all this process (and fortunately there were no problems). This was really a milestone for us, because we hope someday to recover all our life habits just as before.

Other symptoms derived from amnesia

2021-06-04T07:30:00+00:00

A lot of people asked me the last few months what memory problems really meant in my daily life when I told them that I have memory problems. When most people hear about memory deficits or memory problems, they just tend to think about trivial things like forgetting what they ate yesterday. Of course, I prefer to remember what I ate yesterday, especially if it was something delicious. But there are symptoms secondary to memory deficits that most people probably don’t think about at first glance. Although some of those symptoms were much more pronounced at first or have already disappeared, they are:

Repetitions or perseverations: This is one of the loudest ones. Following what I read, it seems to be very common in people with frontal lobe region damage. Sometimes I did or said something but, after some time, it came to my mind again but, as I couldn’t remember I already did or said it, I repeated it (sometimes just seconds after doing or saying it first). I seem to remember feeling very embarrassed at first when people told me I was repeating myself. I also know it was very tiring for people who were with me some hours a day (my wife, for example), but I couldn’t really do anything to avoid that.

Confabulations: Another flashy one. As I had gaps in my memory, my mind tried to fill those gaps, and sometimes it just filled them with more or less random information (ok, I admit you can call them inventions, if you prefer). Of course, I didn’t do it consciously, so I wasn’t aware they weren’t real. For example, the first weeks after the main surgery, I didn’t seem to remember my grandmother’s death, so it seems I said several times that I had seen her visiting me at the hospital.

Anosognosia: This rare word means “absence of knowledge of oneself deficits”. As I couldn’t remember my new limitations, I tended to act as if I were capable of doing the same as before. For instance, it seems that the first few days after coming back home from the hospital, I sat at my desk in the morning ready to work just the same as before the surgery, even when I was on sick leave (I neither wasn’t aware of that, of course). I seem to remember I even tried to join some meetings. This made my wife put a banner on my desk saying with big letters that I was on sick leave and I shouldn’t work.

The importance of personal projects

2021-05-28T07:30:00+00:00

Maybe one of the most important pieces of my ongoing recovery is having personal projects I can invest my time and energy in. Of course, my main project now is my rehabilitation, as a whole. But I also think it’s good complementing it with other little things, which I could also hopefully continue with, once I end with my, let’s call it official, rehabilitation process. On the one hand, I think they help me to feel active and not to feel that I’m just wasting my time into something which sometimes looks like will never end; on the other hand, I want to believe they will help me to recover my previous roles in the future.

One of the personal projects I’m investing my time in is writing this blog. As I believe I already mentioned, I post here basically for two reasons: a) because I think my experience could maybe help other people in similar situations, now or in the future; b) to exercise my English writing skills.

Another project I have is learning to play the piano. I always loved music (especially singing) and I always wanted to know how to play an instrument, among other reasons to be able to accompany my voice with something else. Having so much time to dedicate to my own recovery and development made me decide to receive piano classes to learn to play this instrument, and now I honestly think it was a great idea.

A third project I started during my rehabilitation, both related to my job and to my work experience, is NeuroLink. Although it’s still a project in development, NeuroLink aims to be someday a social network for people affected, directly or indirectly, by either brain or neurological damage. People who suffer these kinds of pathologies, and also their carers, aren’t generally neurology or rehabilitation experts, so we face a new and challenging experience. We need to learn a lot of new things and, in my opinion, the best way to do it is establishing connections with other affected people, professionals, rehab centers, etc.

Hence, this project has a double purpose:

testing my programming skills (or at least practicing a little bit to not forget them completely) to be prepared for the day I return to work; and
potentially helping other people in similar situations, now or in the future.

This project is, of course, based in our own experience: when we left the hospital, we didn’t know where to go or what to do. I thought it would have been awesome to have some kind of resource like this in those moments so we could have easily found some kind of help from people with a similar experience.

Neuroplasticity: why is it important

2021-05-24T07:30:00+00:00

A brain injury recovery and rehabilitation (at least partial rehabilitation) is possible thanks to a property of neural networks called neural plasticity or neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the ability of neural networks, and particularly the brain, to reorganize and maintain its functions when a part of it stops working as before, especially through stimulation and training. This means that, if some part of the brain is damaged, a different part of the brain can be trained to assume its functions. This is particularly true during childhood, but also through adulthood.

Consider this case: you’re trying to complete a path you’ve done thousands of times to go back home from the office. But the road is closed due to an accident. So you try to take a different road following more or less the direction you know will allow you to arrive home. If you indeed arrive home, although it’s maybe a slower and harder path, you’ll learn this new path as valid, and next time you find the path closed you’ll know what to do. This is basically what the brain does: exploring new ways to do the same and strenghten these new paths it discovers if they results to be good to reach the same goals.

Time confusion after my brain surgery

2021-05-23T07:00:00+00:00

Note: This post has been moved from my old Wordpress blog, which I don’t expect to update anymore.

I think one of the most difficult to explain consequence of my brain injury is time confusion. If someone asks you what day we are on, you’ll probably be able to answer with security and confidence in just milliseconds, or at least seconds.

I know It’s maybe difficult to understand, but I wasn’t able to answer with that confidence the first weeks after my surgery. I know this sounds rare, but I wasn’t even able to know what year I was on. Yes, I knew how to look for the day and the year in my smartphone’s calendar, but It’s like one part of my brain was pretty sure of having already lived in that year (say 2021), and the other part of my brain saw that year like the future. Somehow I felt like Marty McFly, travelling through time.

At first, my neuropsychologist made me draw a lot of timelines, both about personal events and about world events and news. She probably made me do them with the best of the intentions to evaluate my memory damage, but I hated that exercise (probably because it made me realize how lost I was).

I’ve now realized that this is a common sequel after a brain injury, but believe me, it’s a very rare feeling.

Confusion and delirium after my brain surgery

2021-05-18T07:00:00+00:00

Note: This post has been moved from my old Wordpress personal blog, which I don’t expect to update anymore.

The first weeks (or even months) after my brain surgery, I experienced a state of extreme confusion. It was probably related to my memory problems (which I already talked about in my first post), but I seem to remember I felt like being the main character of a surreal movie.

Even when my main surgery (the one that removed the tumor from my head) was done on March 10th 2020, and I left the hospital on April 23rd, my neuropsychologist reported that on my first video-call interview, done on May 1st, I still looked “lost, answering with monosyllabic words to my questions”. Also, it seems I knew I was with my wife in our flat in Ronda, but at the same time I said I didn’t “remember the distribution of that flat or living there before” (although we had already been living there for some years).

I’ll try to explain in the next posts what I seem to remember about how I felt in those moments, but basically, in my neuropsychologist words, I looked personally, temporally and spatially disoriented (which seems to be, by the way, a common symptom in ABI).

Juan Ramírez

2022 update

A new hope, a new challenge

Happy 2023

Goodbye and thank you, 2021! Welcome, 2022!

7 tips to have your code better reviewed (recovered post)

How to tell Git to ignore files locally (recovered post)

So why in the world would we want to exclude files only for us?

Method #1: core.excludesFile

Method #2: .git/info/exclude

Epilepsy in the context of ABI

Other symptoms derived from amnesia

The importance of personal projects

Neuroplasticity: why is it important

Time confusion after my brain surgery

Confusion and delirium after my brain surgery

Method #1: `core.excludesFile`

Method #2: `.git/info/exclude`