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. ...
The unfortunate thing about working in a corporation is you have to ’tie out’ with people. This sounds awfully exciting, with visions of ropes, knots, maybe even a lasso or wrestling someone to the ground. It’s not that exciting. No, what “tie out” really means is getting 2 or more people to agree to do something. In general, that requires those people be physically or virtually in contact at the same time. ...
Thought I’d just shout this one into the ether: When one feels wronged by a person, the correct procedure is to go to that person one-on-one and discuss it. 15 “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. (Matthew 18:15) Okay, that’s what to do, but why does God want us to do it that way? Because it’s human nature to gossip, and conflict destroys community. ...
Well, I had a good run. I exited Facebook on December 30th 2012 and remained off until 4 April 2014. Last week, Whitney asked me to dig up some pics from my trip to Cebu in 2012, most of which were on my dead MacBook Air…and on Facebook. Hmm…quandry. So, I bit the bullet and dove back in. It’s good and bad. As one would expect, the “network effect” is wonderful. Most of my dad’s family is active, along with some key people from mom’s family. Instantly, I saw pictures of people I haven’t seen in person in 3-5 years. Likewise, much of my high school class is on there and it’s neat to see people grow, change, and rear children of their own. It also seems they’ve adopted more of the “limited sharing” tools from Google+ so you can share a story with one “list” but not your entire friend group, or go whole hog and share out to “Public” like Twitter. ...
At the risk of sounding like a mommyblogger: It’s difficult to hear yet another thing your child’s food allergies prevent. Honestly, at times, it feels like my kids are going to end-up in some Food Allergy ghetto wearing a medical alert bracelet staring out through plexiglass at kids luxuriating with their peanut butter, quiche, and potato salad. Yeah, I’m sad. This is part of my process of getting over it, so bear with me. ...
Methodology Doesn’t Matter; People Do I’ve been in industry for 15 years, as unbelievable as that seems. I just want to shake people when all they can talk about is Process this and Methodology that and Tool this other. It. Doesn’t. Matter. Okay, it does matter, but only when you have the people end of things sorted out first. Assuming an equally talented group, those with a better system will (generally) perform better over time. However, no methodology in the world is going to make disengaged, sloppy employees perform well. (It’s tempting to draw a parallel to the Auto Industry, but I’ll spare you.) ...
Sorry I was unable to ___ because…. the Loyal Order of White Castle was meeting at the same time. I was playing ping-pong. I was playing XBox. I didn’t get to work until 11am. I couldn’t find the indicated conference room with a map, sextant, compass, GPS, diving rod, and several readings of appropriate entrails. I was busy juggling. I was at lunch ’til 2pm. I chose not to go to bed until 3am, and a nuclear explosion couldn’t wake me at 7, let alone my 20 year old Sony clock radio
Five-year-old Joey: “Harold, when are we going hunting?” My step-son is a canonical boy: Around age 1, his mother reported him fashioning pistols and shooting her with his toast. He likes taking things apart. He loves archery, and he’s fascinated by firearms. We live in Kentucky, so most consider this not Neanderthal DNA expressing itself, but the natural order of things. So yeah, hunting. As with many things in my life, I found myself in the 1.5 day Kentucky Orange Card certification class this past Friday and Saturday through an odd chain of events: We actually read the 4-H letter from our local Ag Extension office. (We get the 4-H letter because we signed-up for a community garden plot last year, but I dropped the ball and we never planted it.) In the newsletter was a blurb about Scott County 4-H Shooting sports: Archery, air rifle, air pistol, .22 rifle, .22 pistol, and trap. It appeared this was all free. There was an additional blurb: In order to participate in the things that go boom, you needed your orange card certification. ...
I’m part of an initiative developing curriculum and training resources for developers. Here’s what I have so far on fundamentals and skills for a developer. Fundamentals Design and Structure • Design / Domain Modeling • Object Orientation / Design Patterns Development and Delivery • IDE mastery: IntelliJ, Eclipse, etc. • Code Reviews / Pull Requests • Testing: Unit testing, test coverage • Effective Debugging / Using a symbolic debugger * Working on an Agile Development team ...
Way back in 2004, I wrote a short review of Tate’s Bitter Java Basically, when this book appeared, Java was ~8 years old, and was at the peak of its hype cycle. Embraced by both the enterprise software world (okay, IBM) and the nascent open source community, Java was the golden hammer, fit for any problem. Except, it wasn’t. People who could program, but who weren’t familiar with domain requirements began writing Enterprise Software, and they began making a mess of it. My own company had to write-off about $7.4 million on a “failed software project” back in 2003. Suddenly, the C-levels stopped saying “Maybe we should rewrite our stuff in Java.” Historians term such retrenchment the Thermidorian Reaction, predictable after every revolution. For us in the industry, it was the heart of the doldrums between the Y2K largesse and the onslaught of Web 2.0. ...
So, my daughter found a cute trick about 3 weeks ago: If you set a bunch of dry oatmeal in a non-microwavable playset bowl on 5 minutes in the microwave, it catches fire. Lots of fun things result: You mommy trotting you out into the cold, lots of folks with sirens showing up, seeing the inside of a Crown Victoria as you shelter from the sub-zero temperatures. Thankfully, though the microwave was toast and there was smoke in the house, nothing happened permanently and everyone was safe. ...
I understand this is meaningless to anyone besides me, but I just wanted to jot it down. She said, “I don’t know who it is, but it’s not you. It used to be, and I think it’s sad that it’s not anymore.” And you know what, she’s right. I agree with her. Long about July 2011, I took a left turn and lost myself a bit. Not quite sure what to do with that.