Tag: Are Right A Lot

Into The Sunset

Into The Sunset

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I’ve mentioned before my penchant for minimalism, which is why for the past 8 years my code editor of choice has been Atom (in fact, I may have been a beta tester for it, my memory’s a bit fuzzy on that point). Which is why it bummed me out a bit to read it’s being shut down at the end of this year. Technology marches on, I suppose. I can’t blame GitHub Microsoft for wanting to consolidate development effort in their fully-featured IDEs, especially integrated cloud-based solutions like Codespaces.

Still, I’m going to miss Atom’s simplicity and customizability (I’d even contributed to a few plugins). It was robust enough to be a complete development environment (for my coding style, at least), yet snappy enough for quick one-off text file editor. For the former case I’ll probably get back into VSCode, and Sublime Text ought to do the trick latter. Though maybe I can use it for both?

Crossing The Rubicon

Crossing The Rubicon

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There are a plethora of resources for those just getting started with software development, and best I can tell, most of them will do the job adequately well. But there isn’t nearly as much on what is needed next: guidance on how to get from “early intermediate coder” to “seasoned software engineer”. In brief, here are some suggestions:

  1. Study existing high-quality code; if you don’t know what good looks like, it’s nearly impossible to produce it.
  2. Write a lot of code. There’s no substitute for practice and putting in your time.
  3. Find someone who can give you feedback on the code you write, and humbly iterate per the guidance.

In my experience, an efficient way to do all three is to find a couple open source projects that need support, dig into their code, and submit contributions. You start from a base of quality code, get to write more, and you’ll get feedback through pull requests. And the icing on the cake is that it’s all done in public.

Spend a few years of doing the above and you’ll be well on your way to next-level programming expertise. It’ll also teach you how to code with a distributed and decentralized community of stakeholders, and that’s no small thing.

Public Service Announcement

Public Service Announcement

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This is a slash: /

This is a backslash: \

Website URLs have slashes. If you say “backslash” or “forward slash” when describing a URL, I will judge you.

That is all.

Automatic For The People

Automatic For The People

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When I quit my first job after nearly 12 years, it was a shock to lose access to all the software I’d spent years developing. While I believe strongly in Egoless Programming, and resisting the notion of “my code”, so much reference material I’d built up was suddenly lost to me. I decided in that moment I needed to build up a portfolio that could not be taken away.

A few weeks ago I published Chrome Local Storage, a Python package that can read from and write to the Chrome’s browser’s internal storage, either one running locally or on an Android mobile device. The first draft didn’t have any CI/CD automation in place, but this weekend I fixed that.

It now automatically sets the version according to the git tag, runs some limited automated tests, runs a linter, scans both the code and dependencies for security vulnerabilities, and publishes builds to PyPI. All via Github Actions.

Did this project really need a complete pipeline? Not really, I doubt I’ll see much reason to modify it in the future. But I wanted to learn Github Actions, and I’d wanted to learn Poetry. Now I’ve done both, and have a publicly available reference to which I’ll always have access for when I need to build Python packages in the future. And if others need the same, they can use it as well.

Throwing In The Towel

Throwing In The Towel

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I’ve said before that I enjoy thinking about organizations, continuously optimizing them to give the highest probability of the desired outcomes. Organizational ergonomics, if you will. I’m also a mathematician by training and a nerd, which is what made Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organizations such a fascinating read, because it puts statistical weight behind its arguments.

In the same vein, I thoroughly enjoyed the following two articles that take a mathematical approach to understanding variability in project estimation (a perniciously difficult problem in all technical work):

The latter’s provocative title hopefully piques your interest enough to read further. You won’t regret it!

Shakespeare On Tech

Shakespeare On Tech

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Yesterday I got to integrate one of my favorite idioms into a conversation: hoist on his own petard. I was discussing ways in which less technical folks can still evaluate an interview candidate’s technical competency.

Not the world’s safest weapon, to be sure

Look, if you’re going to try to impress someone with your vast knowledge of all things computing, you better be able to back it up. Because it’s easier than you think to detect BS. One of the simplest ways that an evaluator of any level of technical depth can detect a fraud is to ask them to explain their solution as if their audience was a smart fifth grader. If they can’t map the details to metaphors in a comprehendible way, it’s unlikely they truly understand them either.

We’re All Just Folk Now

We’re All Just Folk Now

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Back in 2014, I read The End of Men; having just been hired by a startup run by a woman, it felt like a good time to explore ideas about why men have traditionally dominated positions of power, and how and when that might change. I don’t remember many details about the book itself (and apparently it’s somewhat controversial in conservative and progressive circles alike), but I do remember coming away challenged to do my part in centering women as I moved forward in my career.

Fast-forward to this past week, during which I happened to have many interactions with female colleagues:

  • Two women presented a dashboard on team performance metrics to our team
  • I got career advice from the female founder of a major cloud consulting company
  • Three times I met with various female peers to discuss leadership transition opportunities
  • I provided coaching to a woman just beginning her career in technology
  • I partnered with a woman to conduct four back-to-back interview sessions

While there’s still more work to do to undo historic inertia, realizing that I’m surrounded by so many capable women from whom I can learn is an opportunity I hope only gets less rare.

Don’t Be Late

Don’t Be Late

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I’ll be the first to say that UX is hard, but honestly now, do I really need to specify a dinner reservation time-of-arrival down to the second?

If I had to speculate, the implementor probably just copied an existing time input widget without consideration of the use case. Situations like this are a reminder of a downside of code reuse; yes it might say some development time, but is it best for the customer?

Hooray For Heuristics

Hooray For Heuristics

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Besides the two resolutions I made for 2022, I’ve decided to try out a meta-resolution: every year from here on out, I will resolve to read the same number of books as years I am old (inspired by the coincidence that I finished 42 books last year, which happened to match my age). I track all my reading on Goodreads, where you can follow along if you’d like.

Given the above challenge, I wanted to determine how much of a time investment was going to be involved, and especially wanted an easy way to break it into daily reading targets that would keep me on pace. To do so, I needed two pieces of data: an average book size in pages, and an average time spent per page. My gut feel for these values was 300 pages and 1 minute, which led to a nifty conclusion: if I let A be my age, and aim to read A pages per day, which takes roughly A minutes, I should be able to easily complete my goal of A books over the course of the year (365 > 300, but I expect I’ll miss days here and there). Plugging in my current age of 43, that means a modest investment of 43 minutes per day is all it takes to achieve what otherwise sounds like a difficult goal. Isn’t that neat?

Neat enough that I wanted to validate my assumptions. For average book size, I downloaded the last 10 years of my reading records from Goodreads (I’ve been doing this a while): 84218 pages divided by 288 books gives an average size of 292 pages. My guess was pretty dang close, cool!

To measure my reading speed, I timed how long it took me to read 10 pages of three representative books: Multipliers (business/engineering non-fiction), Lifting the Veil (religious non-fiction), and The End of Eternity (science fiction). Resultant times were 6.5, 10.5, and 10.5 minutes for 10 pages, respectively, which averages out to 0.9 minutes per page. Once again, my intuition was reasonable.

One final statistic worth pondering: if I can hold to this meta-resolution, how many more books can I expect to read before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Thanks to Google, I know average life expectancy for a male in the United States is 75, so we’ll say I’ve got 32 years left. Thanks to Gauss, I can easily compute a sum from 1 to N with the formula N * (N+1) / 2. The sum of 1 to 75 is thus 75 * 76 / 2 = 2850, and now we need to subtract off years 1 through 42, which sum to 42*43 = 903, for a final result of 2850-903 = 1947 books. My Goodreads backlog is only 99 books long, so I guess I better start adding to it. Any suggestions?