Posts on Maria Solano

2 kinds of smart people

majosolano99@gmail.com (Maria Solano) — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:16:41 -0800

I always had great relationships with my professors, especially the math ones (I majored in math after all).

I don’t remember what the lesson was about that day, but I remember one random day of 8th grade math when the teacher stopped talking about trigonometry and said: “There are 2 kinds of smart people: There are the naturals, the ones that just get it and don’t need to review or study to do well. Then there are the disciplined, the ones that don’t get it and need to stare at the textbook for hours, solve hundreds of exercises, and days later they finally understand the concept.”

My reviewing criteria

majosolano99@gmail.com (Maria Solano) — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:15:01 -0800

I like to review pull requests. Maybe it’s a habit that stuck with me after being a computer science TA during most of my undergrad, but I just enjoy reading code. You learn a lot doing that.

I also like LSP. I’ve both contributed to the protocol as part of my day job but also during the free time I spend on open source, and although there are a lot of things wrong with the spec I still find the interaction between editors and language servers fascinating.

My code editor

majosolano99@gmail.com (Maria Solano) — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:49:53 -0800

There are 2 events that sparked my curiosity to try out Neovim.

After reading all the books and staring at the gorgeous compiler errors, I was deep into my Rust journey and re-writing ShellCheck with the crabby (pun intended) language. Why? Because I thought (and still think) that a Bash linter written in Rust would make the internet explode. However turns out that parsing shell languages is kind of cursed, and in addition to the sweet Reddit karma I also wanted to write a linter that I felt proud of, not only copy-paste the Haskell hacks into my project. After more than a year in this endeavor I realized how hard it was to write an elegant Bash linter, but I also began to notice how in the weekly “what’s the best text editor for Rust” Reddit threads Neovim kept being invoked.
I was fed up of Copilot in VS Code. I overload <tab> for a bunch of stuff (navigating through the completion list, jumping through snippets, accepting Copilot suggestions, etc) and having my tabbing always triggering Copilot was extremely annoying. I tried doing what a VS Code Andy would do: Tweak the JSON hell of settings.json and keybindings.json, search for a plugin that would solve my super specific use case, open a GitHub issue asking for the feature I wanted that (even as a MediumFirm employee) was auto-closed after a few days, etc.

And so at that point I was like “Yeah whatever let me pay attention to Reddit and try out this weird thing”.

Hello, World!

majosolano99@gmail.com (Maria Solano) — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:18:53 -0700

I always found the comma after the “Hello” a bit odd, but I’m no one to judge the tradition.

I guess a good way to start is to tell you about my first “Hello, World!” program. It was the second semester of my undergrad, and I was giving programming a chance although I was already nerdy enough to also get into coding. However it was love at first sight: There was something about the mysterious keywords of that Java program that captivated me.