So I resolved to change part of my regimen about 4 weeks ago.  Let’s chart the changes.

Pros

• I’m “me” again.  This is how I remember myself feeling and behaving prior to 2011.
• Coding (once I’m in “flow”) is so…much…better.  Like “lightbulb coming on” better.  I’ve felt like my mind has been shackled for the past few years, and those fetters seem gone.
• My sense of humor and general perspective is much better.   My family genuinely seems to like who I’m being at home.
• I have actual emotions again.  As we’ll see, that’s also a ‘con’, but the world seems to be in color again, not Black-and-White.
• I can be “present” once again.  Fully, wholly, don’t-care-what-the-clock says present.

Cons

• I’ve gained like 10 pounds.  Yes, in 1 month.  I have appetite like a man starving, but yet I’m full.
• I have no idea what time it is, nor can I measure its passage accurately.  Like, time dilates into one hyper-focus session and hours can evaporate in what seems like minutes.  
• I have an insatiable appetite for caffeine.  I’m constantly pounding coffee, espresso drinks, Coke Zero.  With enough of it onboard, I can feel normal.  Without it, I’m as listless as a drunken manatee.
• It’s simple to saturate me with stimuli.  I don’t have the accompanying anxiety, but I do have the shutdown-effect so common to folks with my brain chemistry.   The bar used to be so high, but now it’s laughably low.  Imagine your kids running towards you squealing when you come through the door and you curling up in a little ball with you hands over your eyes and your thumbs in your ears.
• Dealing with interruptions is hard.  Getting back into a “flow” state, especially in our open floorplan offices, is harder since any sort of visual or auditory stimulus can knock me out of flow.
• Emotions…suck.  I’ve had things I’d ordinary slough-off really impact me, almost to the point of breakdown.  On the other side of it, I’ve known real joy and laughter in ways that I just couldn’t channel before.

So basically, things aside from work are going great.  Things at work requiring me to be a poised, ready-for-anything, tactful, considerate individual are not great.

I lost my uncle on January 6th.  His given name was Ova Haddix, but he was always “Ovie” to me, and so he shall ever remain.

Ovie was born Nov 10, 1939 and died January 6, 2015 at age 75.  He was buried in Sterling Heights, Michigan just north of Detroit, his adopted home.   My Aunt Sue asked me to be a pallbearer and I was honored to serve.  It was the least I could do to serve a man who’d epitomized force of will and strength, whose earnest gaze and frank self assessment I needed as a child and adolescent.

Thus far on this little experiment, I’ve:

• Overslept by 1 hour.
• Completely lost track of time innumerable occasions.
• Discovered an odd blurring & vibration in my vision.  Generally, it feels like I’m looking through a tunnel or a straw at the world.
• Had insatiable cravings for caffeine and sugar.
• Hyperfocused on assembly language programming and exercism.
• Generally feel like I got hit by a truck–slow, plodding, etc.

On the bright side:

I still remember an interview I had around February 2001, in which +Ron Garnett talked about how his team wrote code:

We write stuff in Assembler, because we’re too lazy to write stuff in C.

Wait…what?  I thought the whole purpose of C was to have portable Assembly, so you could control the bare metal correctly.  I did get an inkling if you were that good, assembly could be seductive in your ability to do whatever you want.

From this article:

Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score.

Ah, the Spotify Engineering Culture.

We’ve all heard the gloss:  Small, independent Squads organized into buzzwordy terms like “Tribes,” and “Guilds.” These terms hearken to days past in humanity, days of community and craftsmanship.

Here’s what I take from the above:  None of that fricking matters.  What really matters is a throwaway blurb at the very end of the video, starting at 12m 30s.  Transcribed here:

We’ve learned trust is more important than control.  Why would we hire someone we don’t trust?  Agile at scale requires trust at scale, which means NO POLITICS.  It also means no fear.  Fear doesn’t just kill trust; it kills innovation.  Because, if failure gets punished, people will be afraid to try new things.

Me: “Hey Joey, what would you like to do today?”

He: “Let’s go iceskating.”

[…silence…]

She: “Dad doesn’t do iceskating.”

Me: “I can do it if I have to.”

* * *

Ah famous last words.

I’ve been working alot lately.  Let me rephrase:  I’ve been working roughly 9:30->8pm M-T-R-F.  I haven’t been working late Wednesdays because of Church, and not Fridays because something usually comes-up.  I haven’t been able to spend much time with my son, and we’re both missing it.

I’ve come to understand my limits: 2 meetings.

Looking back on it, it’s hard to comprehend a day where I had 7 1-hour meetings in a single day, because as it stands today, I’ve had 3 meetings and my mind is tapioca.  Actually, you might say I’ve had 4, but I’ll get to that.

Running down the list:

1. 10:30am Team standup.  Daily coordination face-to-face activities.  Absolutely essential.  Still counts against the quota!
2. 2pm.  Steering committee meeting for something rather important.
3. 3pm. Emergency coordination meeting because our team discerned we were blocked on all our upcoming work and needed to pull in some other work.

Now amid all that, was a sit-down I had around 11:15 with another developer on a point-of-interest.

Imagine yourself trapped in a cylinder filling with water.  The water comes in at an uneven rate: Sometimes it dribbles, sometimes it gushes.  You can’t get out of the cylinder, and once the water reaches your head you’ll drown.

“Okay, that’s torture.”
Yes, it is.

Now, let’s imagine the cylinder were bigger, maybe the size of one of those nuclear storage tanks, but still only 7 or so feet tall.  You can have things in there with you to distract you, but the water’s still coming in and once it gets to the top, you drown.

It’s quiet and loud, busy and peaceful as I sit outside Starbucks this afternoon.  Caffeine from the Clover-brewed Ethiopian Yirgacheffe courses through me as the clock turns 6.

I’m reeling having watched The One I Love.  Like, back on my heels reeling.  Watched that at the Kentucky Theatre with a small matinee crowd, attempting to shut-down a few brain cells to prepare for crunch time ahead–crunch time at home, at work, etc.  I wasn’t successful, the movie’s a mind-f@#%.  Like, your mind rejects it, refusing to suspend disbelief, right as the main characters…have to suspend their disbelief.

Dynamics?  Yes, dynamics.

1. In music, dynamics normally refers to the volume of a sound or note, but can also refer to every aspect of the execution of a given piece, either stylistic (staccato, legato etc.) or functional (velocity). The term is also applied to the written or printed musical notation used to indicatedynamics.

 I’ve read Peter Egan obsessively for years:  I have dead-tree copies of 2 of 3 Side Glances compilations, and one edition of Leanings that stoked a motorcycle obsession I’ve had since 2008.  Prior to that, I’d pick up copies of Road & Track in the Winn-Dixie in my hometown, read the Egan article and then place it back on the shelf above the sign, “IF YOU READ THEM BUY THEM. THIS AIN’T A LIBRARY [sic].”

SPOILERS!!

Dinosaurs in London.

Well, that was awkward.  Capaldi off to a poor start, but honestly, so was Tennant in “Christmas Invasion”

New Opening looks like the opening to Amazing Stories in 1985…

“People are apes.  MEN are monkeys.”  Nice, Mdm Vastra

Clara dealing with the change.  Not well.  Metaphor for all relationships–people change.  Are we big enough to see through the veil?

Parallels: Doctor and the Dinosaur, “I am alone…”

I try to pause every so often and record what my toolchain looks like.   Sort of like people posting on Everyday Carry, but for what I use every day in development.

• Development machine: 13" MacBook Pro Retina, 2.8GHz Core i7, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD.  I love this machine.  My wife calls it my woobie.  She’s not far from right.

• OS: Mac OS 10.9.4.  Unix when I want it to be, polished Consumer OS when I just don’t care.   It’s been 3 years since I ran a windows box as a development machine and with virtualization I can’t see running windows as a primary OS ever again.
• Physical Setup: Thunderbolt Gigabit ethernet, Thunderbolt-to-DVI single 23" monitor, Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.   I’ve dabbled in multi-monitors and buckling spring keyboards, but this setup keeps my attention focused and my repetitive strain to a minimum.  I’ll eventually wear out this keyboard and probably buy another one just like it.
• Note taking tool: Evernote, but honestly I’m dissatisfied everywhere I turn.  Evernote gets closest to what I want amid everything else I’ve tried:  Google Keep, OneNote (which is an abomination on the Mac), paper notebooks, PDAs, Google Drive Documents, emails.  I basically pendulum between over-noting and under-noting everything.  Google Drive wants to be the master, but I resist.  I’m not sure why.
• Blogging Platform: Blogger, through simple inertia.  Wordpress seems like exchanging one master for another.  I’m taking a hard look at Github:Pages and Jekyll because I like finer-grained creative control and Markdown, but I can’t commit to it.
• Terminal Program: iTerm.   Tabs are nice.  I spend lots of time here these days in irb or grails shell.
• Command line shell: zsh + oh-my-zsh.   Tabbing command-line completion and aliases for most things.  (Ex: gc == “Git commit”), with a vibrant community to go with it.
• Package Manager: Homebrew.   I have no idea how I survived on windows without a decent package manager like apt, yum, or brew.  I’d switch away from Windows to *nix or Mac for this alone.
• Editor: Sublime Text 3.  I’m an old vi guy.  Sublime has let me forget the envy I always had for not learning emacs.  Like homebrew or oh-my-zsh, has a rabid, vibrant community.
• IDE:  Honestly, none.  I like command line tools and Sublime, but I acknowledge IntelliJ 13 is peerless in the Java/JVM IDE world.  (Sorry, Eclipse…I’ve been a user since 2.11, but you’re just a hot mess.)
• Virtualization: VirtualBox.  A colleague turned me on to this a few years ago, and paired with Vagrant for setup/teardown, it’s great.
•  Scripting Language: Ruby.    This one feels like the old Simpsons plot “So you finally decided to steal cable tv.”  Ruby is NICE.  It’s like PERL grown-up, without the awk acne:    The language just falls away, and you’re dealing with the problem at hand.
• Backend framework (tie):  Rails 4.x or Grails 2.x.  Yeah, I’m not taking a position here.  If you’re playing with the JVM ecosystem, Grails is the obvious pick.    Rails is (and remains) a breath of fresh air, especially with the tools that go with it:  Bundler, Berkshelf, rbenv.  Moreover, there’s a frenetic vibrancy in the Rails community that’s infectious.   Maddening–sure–but infectious.
• Browser: Chrome.  Frau Perry croons, “We fight, we breakup, we kiss, we makeup.”  Chrome makes me uneasy the same way IE 5 did back in the day–it’s becoming a monoculture, and Google’s starting to get evil with it.  Still, it’s fast and its fundamental architecture still has Mozilla’s Firefox playing catchup.
• Source Control: Git, specifically Github and Github:Enterprise.  Pull Requests and social coding have changed how developers work in the last 5 years.
• Mobile: None.  I was a phandroid, but I’m still on the smartphone wagon for 1 year and 6 days now.  I’m not first in line for a mobile development position, but there’s enough left in server and web development that I think I’ll be okay.
• Social Media:  Twitter for short-form and Facebook for long-form.   Facebook’s just inescapable if I want to interact with family, friends, and church.  They seem intent on running everyone away, but the simple network effect keeps everyone there.  I much prefer twitter, but understand not everyone can stand it, particularly since they went public and started screwing with everyone’s   Google+ is dead, and has been since 3 months after it launched.  Google should merge it with Youtube (the perfectly good social network they already had) and be done with it.
• Miscellaneous: Vagrant, Chef, gvm, Github Pages, Jekyll, Markdown, npm, 

/Stream-of-consciousness

There aren’t really pics to go with this.  Sorry about that.

It began simply enough:  A dog days Saturday that promised mild temps and good weather.  Car parts in two separate boxes in my garage.  “I’ll probably have this done before you guys get back from the hair place, " I said.

I set myself two tasks:  Kill the Check Engine light in the Camry that’d been on for two years and 5 days, and give my 1995 truck a tuneup–plugs, wires, rotor, distributor cap.  I had all the parts, and plenty of hand tools.

Saturday, I took my daughters to the kids day/open house down at our local PBS station.  Getting past the claustrophobia of jamming hundreds of kids, strollers, and overwrought parents into the narrow hallways and anechoic studios, it was great kidly fun–lots of booths, sing-alongs, and face painting.  On our way out, we noticed a smart-looking medium duty truck painted like a firetruck, pulling a trailer packed to the gills with equipment.  Inside were two “simulator” booths where two robust gentlemen were showing how they train police officers and firemen to drive their vehicles in all sorts of conditions and situations.

Ramping on a new project is fun!

Actually, it resembles lighting yourself on fire, running and jumping onto a moving train with jugs of water on it, only to discover the first car has flammable liquids, then the next car, then the next.

Restated: It’s never boring.

So, I’m collaborating with a team writing in Rails 4, and that team’s adopted the 12 Factor App religion. Great!  I’ve dabbled in heroku before, and it’s neat to see apps written that way from the first git init.

You’ve gotta love social scientists.

In the ongoing quest to squeeze every ounce of productivity from the burnout-destined drone age 20-to-40, they’re studying ways to measure collective intelligence.

Quotable quote:

Right now, the optimal size is probably somewhere between five and 10, but with the right collaboration tools, you could imagine having a group that kept getting more intelligent, up to 50, 100, or even 500 or 5,000 people. 

::sigh::

Okay, be proud: You’ve got your name on the company, and you’re the centerpiece of this spiffy article.  What you’re trying to do, though, it surmount human biology:  We can keep 7 +/- 2 ( that is, anywhere from 5 to 9) things in our active memory at any one time.  Whenever you go above that number, we forget.  Managing over that many relationships day-to-day simply creates overhead.

I’m muddling through Thinking Fast and Slow.

Much of it sounds like a the Wah-wah sound from a Charlie Brown teacher.  Or, if you like, Unikitty talking business

However, about once in a chapter, there’s a revelation that’s obvious yet profound.  Here is a summary of one:

“Extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples”

Zzzzzzzz…wait, what?  Okay, let’s have an example:

It’s all fun and games until your audience starts forwarding your blog posts to your boss.

I’m tired of shooting myself in the foot by over-sharing.  So, this is over.  Haven’t decided yet whether the whole blog goes dark, gets deleted, or what (if any) content I’ll post here in the future.

I’d like to keep it as a place my kids can see their Dad struggle through his self-entitlement and selfishness to find the path to redemption (yes, over and over).  At this point, the whole thing is just a liability, and that makes me sad.

So, here we are 3 years later.  

In 2011, I saw my name on a weird spot of an organization chart, 3 levels up from where it had been.  I was reporting to a Director (soon to be a Vice President) and my title was ‘Architect’.

I went through all the phases of grief:

• Shock: “Wow, look at all this stuff I need to understand!  I can do anything I want…”
• Anger: “I’ve just butted heads with most everyone in power at my company.  I can’t do anything I want.”
• Bargaining: “Maybe I can balance all this crap with things I like to do.  I can do something I want.”
• Acceptance: “There’s an huge pile of work.  I’m spread paper thin. I can do a little bit of what I want.”

During that time, I expected to live at all levels:  High-level strategy, designing new systems, coding, support/sustainment, etc.  I felt excited, because we needed help in all those places, and I thought I could do it all.