Tag: Bias For Action

Can’t Fight This Feeling

Can’t Fight This Feeling

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Yesterday I closed the book on my job with Amazon Web Services. It was a truly great gig; I was able to help numerous public sector customers advance their missions, grow both my technical and business skills, and work with some great people. But on Monday I start a new adventure as the Chief Technology Officer of Research Improving People’s Lives.

Officially, “RIPL is a tech-for-social-impact nonprofit that works with governments to help them use data, science, and technology to improve policy and lives.” But if you want a better sense of what I’ll be up to, these two opinion pieces by my colleagues are a great place to start:

I’ll have a lot more to say in the coming days about what led me to a new role, the emotions involved in transitioning from a job you love, and how to end your time at a company well. But since the cat’s out of the bag given my updated LinkedIn page, I wanted to get an announcement made here also.

Get In The Arena

Get In The Arena

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Several months ago I had a need to cache function results across multiple executions of an API client. A quick web search revealed several solutions, the best fit being cachier. However, it was still missing a few important features I needed, and thinking it was the quickest solution, I wrote up a wrapper to implement these features and published it on PyPI.

One of the features was particularly tricky to get working without modifying cachier itself. Though I did get it working, I regretted not instead simply seeing if I could build my needed capabilities into that library itself and avoiding the wrapper altogether.

Turns out I had some additional free time, and took a crack at an integrated implementation of three key features, and turns out the maintainer of cachier was grateful for the contributions. I was also able to make additional improvements, which benefit all of cachier’s users, not just the one user (i.e. me) of a wrapper which is unlikely to get popular.

This experience was a good reminder that open source software is not built by a mysterious group of “other people” but by ordinary folks who graciously offer their limited time for the public good. Considering how much I’ve benefited from such generosity throughout my career, I’ve been thinking about what responsibility I have to the broader community. I’m not the only one. Do I have a professional obligation, or even a moral one, to contribute? Quite possibly, but either way, it’s something I’m going to do as long as I’m able.

On The Turning Away

On The Turning Away

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I write this blog post sitting in my favorite coffee shop having begun yesterday a nearly three week micro-sabbatical. Not since I was laid off in early 2019 have I taken more than a few days of time off that didn’t involve travel or other busy-ness. I’m looking forward to spending some time relaxing, some time away from technology, and some time purposefully pursuing activities I haven’t had time to otherwise accomplish.

What sorts of activities? Well, for one I want to publish a new CDK construct, which I’ll talk about here once it’s published. Another is recording a podcast, which I’m happy to announce now has a brief trailer. Mostly it’s going to be similar to material covered on this blog, but perhaps with some conversations also. I’ve no idea if I’ll be able to keep it up, but I’m starting nonetheless.

I’ll also be reading quite a bit. Finished a book this morning, and started a second, the appropriately titled How To Do Nothing.

Finally, I’ll be drinking copious flat whites with the above view from my corner table. Life is good.

A Helpful Transmogrifier

A Helpful Transmogrifier

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Have a large CSV file and want a quick way to query it? Consider transforming it into a SQLite database. It’s easy! One command will do it:

$ sqlite3 "$sqlite_filename" ".import $csv_filename $table_name --csv"

Here’s a concrete example using airtravel.csv:

$ sqlite3 air.db ".import airtravel.csv air --csv"
$ sqlite3 air.db "SELECT * FROM air WHERE air.Month = 'JAN'"
JAN|  340|  360|  417

Neato! Admittedly the handling of headers and column names isn’t great, but that can be solved with a bit more script-fu (which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader).

That Last 20%

That Last 20%

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I got an email this morning from a reader who asked if I had an email subscription feature on this blog. I didn’t then, but now I do! Want my writing to hit your inbox the moment I publish? Just add your email address into the widget at the top of the sidebar and hit subscribe. Easy!

You know what wasn’t easy? Trying to get that widget to match the rest of the site. At first it looked like this:

Gross. Luckily WordPress supports adding custom CSS. Unluckily, that means I had to fiddle with CSS, which is a special form of hell. I couldn’t get it perfect on all browsers, but it’s not bad now:

While I was at it, I made a few other visual tweaks to the site, primarily shrinking the masthead height, which has always bugged me. Here’s the final code snippet. Not the prettiest, especially with all those !important keywords (generally they’re a smell that your CSS is too complex), but it gets the job done.

.navbar {
    display: none;
}

.site-header {
    height: 300px;
    min-height: 300px;
}

.site-title::after {
    margin-top: 0.5em !important;
    margin: auto;
}

button.wp-block-button__link {
    height: 34px !important;
    margin-left: 0px !important;
    padding: 0px 5px !important;
    background: #fab526;
    font-weight: bold;
}

input#subscribe-field-1 {
    padding: 5px !important;
    border-bottom: 2px solid #ddd !important;
}

.search-field::placeholder {
    color: #B9B9B9;
}

If you happen to notice any weirdness on your device/browser of choice, do let me know, eh?

Progress Report

Progress Report

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At the beginning of this year I made two resolutions:

  1. Post on this blog at least once per month
  2. Learn a new programming language

For the first one, so far so good. For the second, not so much. I read a book on Clojure, but haven’t yet had a reason to use it beyond tutorial exercises, so can’t really say I’ve learned it. Maybe it’s just that these days I’m thinking more about systems than software, and thus language choices seem less important?

Speaking of book reading, though, I’m well on my way to achieving my meta resolution (to read the same number of books as my age, every year, for the rest of my life). According to Goodreads I’ve completed 39 books so far against a goal of 43 (seven books ahead of schedule). Should be no problem to get to the finish line and beyond.

Here are the five star highlights:

Honorable mention goes to Range, which I can’t recommend enough for anyone who feels like they’ve missed out on their calling by meandering through a number of life experiences. Generalists make the best leaders and problem solvers, so embrace the variety of perspectives you can bring to the table. Real life is not like golf or chess or programming only in assembly.

Resolute Comprehension

Resolute Comprehension

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I really like New Year’s resolutions. As a lover of habit, the beginning of a year is perfect time to calibrate a new routine. This year I have two resolutions:

  1. Post on this blog at least once per month
  2. Learn a new programming language

The latter was inspired by this article, which is stupidly long but thoroughly enjoyable. As a non-fan of OOP I found myself nodding along quite frequently. He advocates pretty hard for functional languages; while I’m familiar with the paradigm having used it in Python, I haven’t done much with purer forms. In 2022 I intend to change that, probably by learning Clojure.

Erlang and Go are also on my to-learn shortlist, the former for its first-class support for concurrency, the latter because it’s the new hotness for performant APIs.

In other news, I’m working on publishing my first CDK construct, which I’ll share here when it’s ready. I do wish I didn’t have to write it in TypeScript, but sadly I’m at the mercy of the JSII compiler. Why TS doesn’t have first class support for comprehensions boggles my mind. This is the closest I could get:

Array.from(nodeProps.entries()).map(e => new HyperledgerFabricNode(scope, `Node${e[0]}`, e[1]));

Compare that with a Python equivalent:

[HyperledgerFabricNode(scope, f'Node{i}', p) for i, p in nodeProps.enumerate()]

For shame, TypeScript. For shame.

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect

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I was privileged to have access to computers from an early age, from the humble TI-99/4A of my early elementary years to a snappy Pentium in high school (can’t remember the exact model, but it was pretty expensive; perhaps the 133MHz version?) The influence this access had on my life cannot be overstated.

Young Jud on TI-99/4A
Train up a child in way they should go

Now that I’m firmly in middle age, and on a career path where I’m regularly evaluating technical talent, I’m reminded of that privilege, and how so many didn’t have it then, and some still don’t have it now. How much untapped potential there must be within these groups!

If we’re going to overcome the lack of diversity in tech, it starts with access; early access, when life-long perceptions are formed. As the saying goes: the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago, but the second best time is today. Gotta get planting!

Mutually Assured Destruction

Mutually Assured Destruction

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Automation is great and wonderful and everything, but it does provide ample opportunity to do damage quickly. Great power, great responsibility and all that.

Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster with More Energy
Automation is a lot like coffee

Over the weekend I was working on a Python library to interact with an internal ticketing system. I was adding the capability to generate a bunch of tickets at once, and wasn’t paying attention to the folder I was pointed at. Let’s just say I heard from multiple folks first thing Monday morning about the 50+ emails in their inboxes notifying them of new issues that needed their attention. Whoops!

Lesson learned: double-check your inputs when writing automation scripts. Also own up to your mistakes, better to apologize fast than lead with an excuse.