Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better.
Derek Sivers, in his 2007 O'Reilly post: "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails."
Manufacturing guy-at-large.
Let's get away from it all.
from A Conversation on Cool.
The best question
The best question is the one that gets the most interesting response, whether it answers the question or not.
The best interviewer is the person who elicits the most interesting response - not the one who asks the most interesting question.
The best interviewee is the one who is able to both yes-and the interviewer (it's not about agreement, it's about agreeability) and provide the most interesting response to the question at hand.
A real wine test
Hey, look: we're all intelligent people who make careful, considered decisions. And in the interest of maximizing our reward-to-cost ratio, I think that we should inform ourselves as to what really makes us happy.
It's been a number of years since I first heard the Freakonomics on whether expensive wines taste better, and it has informed the way I think about my own tastes in profound ways. But every time I bring it up with people who know wine, the conversation goes nowhere.
I'd like to hold an event. Call it an experiment, call it a party, call it interactive performance art. We find a venue - probably not a wine bar, but an event space with a liquor license - and all chip in on a big double-blind test. We pre-sell tickets to fund the purchase of a variety of bottles, and have some knowledgeable - and some not-so-knowledgeable - people curate the tasting selection. Then, while most of the crowd mingles, small batches of participants are called forward to have their preferences tested. As the night goes on, we all get to taste, and by the end of the evening we're ready to release results and show what we, as a group, all really like.
I think it might teach us all a lot about ourselves and the degree to which we really know what we like - and better yet, I think it'll be fun!
If you agree and live in/can get to NY, fill in your info below and I'll be in touch.
Chopshop
Why aren't barbershops tracking customer preferences?
I have never, not once, felt confident enough to point at the barbershop haircut charts when sitting down to get a trim. I suspect I'm not alone.
I've also never had a regular enough barber to develop any degree of aesthetic understanding and trust. This leaves me in a tricky position. I want to look good, and I want my barber to have some creative input. I want a stylist, really, but without a long-term relationship with my haircutter, that's difficult to establish.
It's only recently that I decided to load my phone with photos of haircuts I liked before getting a trim. It was somewhat effective, but it has this basic problem: those guys aren't me. And telling my barber that I want to look like him isn't really true. I want to look like the best version of myself.
So. An app that integrates with my barber's POS. When I'm done with my cut - right after they take the stupid mirror and show me my neck (in fact, the app should replace the mirror) - they take a quick GIF showing me from a bunch of angles. It's saved in my customer file, and accessible by my barber when I come in next month. It's something we can discuss and point at - a jumping off ground for experimentation. My haircut becomes a work in progress instead of a one-time gig.
For the customer: Consistency. For the barber: The opportunity to develop a long term relationship that can transcend staffing changes. The app becomes a whiteboard for discussing style.
Am I missing something? For the right kind of customer and shop, I think it'd be a killer match.
Scott Belsky
From "Finding Your Work Sweet Spot: Genuine Interest, Skills & Opportunity" by Scott Belsky (emphasis mine).
As you contemplate your next career move or a new project, you should take the intersection of your genuine interests, skills, and opportunities into consideration.
Contemplate the three circles of the Venn diagram above – one circle encompasses your genuine interests; one, your skills; and one, the stream of opportunities available to you. An intersection between just two of the circles doesn’t cut it. A love for basketball and a connection to an NBA scout won’t help you if you lack the skills to play ball. You need to find YOUR trifecta. When you engage with a project that finds this intersection, you’ve entered your zone of maximum impact. In such a state, you are a potent force of nature – your avocation becomes your vocation. You can work with full conviction, without ambiguity, and you can transcend your reliance on short-term rewards and societal approval.
As leaders, we must help our partners and employees find work at the ISO intersection. Legendary managers seek to understand the genuine interests and skills of their employees, and are constantly trying to create opportunities within the intersection. Want to change the world? Push everyone you know to work within their intersection. Mentor people to realize their genuine interests, skills, and to capitalize on even the smallest opportunities that surround them. When it comes to your own career, make every decision with a constant eye for work in the intersection.
Trophy
via Timoni.
Rubyday photos
From yesterday.
The Rashomon Effect
from Wikipedia:
The Rashomon effect is a term that has been used by a number of different scholars, journalists and film critics to refer to contradictory interpretations of the same events by different persons, a problem that arises in the process of uncovering truth.
The idea of contradicting interpretations has been around for a long time and has implications to ethics in journalism. It is studied in the context of understanding the nature of truth(s) and truth-telling in journalism...
It is named for Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, in which a crime witnessed by four individuals is described in four mutually contradictory ways...
In The Simpsons episode Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo, Marge comments that Homer liked Rashomon, but Homer replies that he remembers it differently.
I can only hope that the Rashomon effect colors my idea of the fallibility of my own perception in a profound way.
Hackweek Days 3-4
For reasons I'll get into below, I've got a bit less to show for the past few days.
The major theme of the past eight months of my life has been to form a new path towards long term stability, satisfaction and happiness. Some of that has been personal: I've spent a lot of time with friends; I've done my share of dating; I've been about as physically active as ever. But a major component has been my career.
I'm skeptical about anyone who claims a high degree of authority over their own emotional state. I tend to think that statements of ultimate preference (e.g. "I could never be happy in finance" or "I'm not satisfied unless I'm building something") tend to fall to post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies. I want to be happy, and I refuse to let my career get in the way of my happiness.
That said, I have a particular set of goals vis a vis my career, and high on the list is to be appreciated for my ability to break down complex problems on a range of subjects. And it so happens that the types of problems I'm interested in solving are largely strategic rather than technical, and it so happens that I see the most interesting strategic problem solving happening in the tech world.
I have spent most of my adult life learning skills, but software development is not one of them. I'm probably more comfortable at a command line than the average person, and I can talk generally about a tech stack, but I am not a programmer. Except in certain contexts that fact doesn't bother me. I'm not an engineer either; nor am I a certified welder or a particularly well practiced machinist or carpenter. But I've got all of those skills nonetheless, and I've put enough time in on those types of projects to communicate well with people whose careers are dedicated to those crafts.
I don't want to be a developer any more than I want to be a bike mechanic. Skills are like tools - I like having them, but I'm wary of committing to any particular one, lest I view the entire world through a single lens. Some problems require a hammer; some require knowing the first damn thing about how serial port emulators work. I want to be a general purpose problem solver; I want to bring a wide variety of skills and experience to the table. I want my range of conceptual frameworks to be broad. I want to be intellectually agile.
Also - and I don't mean this to be trite - I like computers.
So Zach and I spent most of yesterday doing an overview of the tech stack required for a basic web app. We've got a couple of ideas that would fall across hardware and software, and it would seem that an RoR backend would fit our needs nicely. We'll still probably be programming our hardware in C, and will have a bit of HTML/CSS on top, but the meat of it - and, really, the fun stuff - would be Rails.
So today, we got about a third of the way through the Codecademy Ruby class. The Codecademy site is pretty slick. It's weird doing programming classes in this context, though. I took a few CS classes in college, but that was before laptops were ubiquitous, and I never really got comfortable with the format. Doing Codecademy is a lot cleaner - I like having the instruction and the execution all in one interface - but there's something about it I haven't gotten totally used to yet. I suspect that'll go away, but it was there a little bit today.
I'm excited to bang this class out over the next few days. I'd also like to be making concrete progress on a project, though, and it's hard to know how the two mesh. Not wanting to be a developer puts me in a weird position in the tech world. I'm a bit of a spectacle - a guy who swatted nails for a few years and can talk with some conviction about the benefits of climb milling. For the most part, that's fine with me, but the romanticism that the tech world has for physical objects - and old ones in particular - strikes me as a bit condescending and disrespectful. And all things being equal, I'd rather not be the one being condescended to.
But, whatever. Sorting hashes is fun, and I relish the opportunity to flaunt my command of logical structures. I'm enjoying learning a new skill, and if history is any guide, I'm sure I'll find a way to put it to use.
John Burroughs
A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
Scoop
via fffound.
Puff
via fffound.
xkcd on Internet Privacy
Perfect.
Josh Levin on Mediocracy
I think the larger issue that this points out is that everyone wants every team to have a great stadium, a beautiful downtown ballpark...I was incredibly sad when RFK stadium stopped hosting the Nationals here in DC. It is fine for not every team to have this impeccable ballpark...There should be some acceptance in American society for not everything being above average. There needs to be a below-average stadium, for us to maybe appreciate what we have in this world...A bad stadium with a good team: there's something to rally around there.
Josh Levin on the always excellent Hang Up and Listen podcast.
Hackweek Day 2
Unsurprisingly, it's trickier to troubleshoot a handmade PCB than it is to make a PCB by hand. We (and by "we" I mean Zach, with my mostly moral support) spent a bunch of the day ringing out one weird bridge to ground. It's frustrating work, and we ended up only isolating it partially before putting our mind to more tangible problems (we'll return to it tomorrow or Thursday).
Meanwhile, I spent a lot of the morning setting up a new domain to use for hosting projects. I also explored a few more APIs, and then spent the middle of the day refreshing my shell scripting chops. I took a UNIX class in college but couldn't invoke sed to save my life, and I suspect that our next step in getting some simple data transfer going will involve a serial port monitor, cURL and the Google Docs API. Suffice it to say that I've got a bit of re-learning to do before I can start learning again.
In the afternoon, we pulled out my XBees and did a refresher on their configuration. The new version of XCTU is available for Mac (thank god), but the interface is foreign to me and I had to familiarize myself before I could give Zach anything resembling a primer. By the time the evening rolled around, though, we had them up and running again, and Zach had played around with a high-temp temperature sensor enough to get it reading data to an arduino.
Tomorrow we'll probably throw a few of these things together - XBee, the temperature sensor, and a AC rated relay - and get a feedback loop going that will boil water and then shut the hot plate (the same one we did our reflowing on) off. I would like to then use cURL to schedule the whole thing by making a PULL request from Google Calendar, but we'll see how the afternoon goes.
Hackweek on! Spencer out!
That Transitional Time
From the past month-ish of my life. Click 'em to "embiggen," or whatever.
Hackweek Day 1
Zach and I started the week with The Public Radio.
When last we visited it, we had assembled - destructively - our first PCB. Today we started fresh, beginning with solder paste application.
We spent a little while trying to find a reflow curve for our solder paste, but gave up after Sparkfun (of course) fell flat on a datasheet (Note to self: get proper solder paste, and get it in a fucking syringe. Enough with the toothpicks.) So we found one for some Kester paste and shot for that. With my non-contact thermometer and our crappy hot plate, reflowing went damn well.
Then, we basically looked at it real close. I've got a line loupe, and recently threw down for an eyeglass style magnifier. Add a multimeter and we were able to figure out where all of our bridges were pretty easily.
On to fixing. We had a bit of trouble getting our wick + torch to agree with each other, but eventually got all (but possibly one - but it's going *down*) bridge fixed.
The net effect: The Public Radio is basically ready to have its bootloader installed. With any luck, we should get it programmed, tested, and bumping HOT97 tomorrow.
Meanwhile...
Lunch.
I spent a good part of my afternoon working to get data passed to a Google Spreadsheet. It turns out that the quickest way to do so is to create a form, which by default dumps text inputs to the next row of a spreadsheet. The standard format puts a timestamp on the first column and then text strings in each subsequent column. I wanted to start by passing data from a command line, mostly because I was pretty sure that implementing cURL was going to be straightforward. There's plenty of info about cURL and the Google Data Services API, but once you get to the complicated stuff, everyone's building PHP scripts - something that was a little much for me to take on for the afternoon. So I reached out on twitter, and within a half hour a friend from college got back to me with the syntax I was looking for.
The next step here (if you believe my pseudo-engineer ass) will be to built a PHP web app that can pass data to the same spreadsheet. Some of this will transfer right from what I did today, but the complexity level - and the potential things I can do with it - will increase pretty quickly. A PHP script will allow me to get and push data, and will also handle some computation as well. From there, I hope to add an additional layer - a basic embedded system that can post data from a wireless connection (likely XBee and/or GSM) directly to a Google Spreadsheet. I'm planning on getting the web app mostly built tomorrow (it'll be extremely simple, but will be the basis for a lot more) and hope to be getting data from a wireless device later this week.
The net effect: A good amount of progress today, capped off with a (somewhat...) interesting meetup in the evening. Plus, Zach got a little real about his twitter account.
Shit's real.
Grey pinstriped suits
I went to the headmaster of this school and I said, "I got an 800 in my math and I love art. Obviously I should go into architecture, because it's where the two meet." And this headmaster was very smart, and he said something to me that was extraordinary. He said "You know, I like grey suits and I like pinstriped suits. But I hate grey pinstripe suits."
And...I went to architecture school, and in fact I did *two* degrees in architecture before I realized that it was the grey pinstriped suit, and that *really* the mix of the [math and art] was computers. "
Nicholas Negroponte on the Seminars About Long-Term Thinking podcast.
If you need me, I'll be: This Week
This week is hackweek for me and Zach.
We've been working, slowly, on a handful of projects (products?). Some require skills we don't have; some require time we haven't had the guts and/or availability to put in.
I'm not bothered by the things not being done. I'm bothered by the skills unlearned, the effort not put in, the mental and emotional shit that I've put in my own way (nb. I'm not talking here about actual shit that actually happens - I accept that God laughs, etc. - I'm talking about self imposed shit, which I suspect is the lion's share of what most of us deal with most of the time). These are the problems that keep anyone - everyone - from taking care of the crap that matters most to them.
But fuck that, right?
In the interest of keeping ourselves on track, here's a brief overview of the week's agenda. Some of it's pretty hazy, but that's what you get.
- The Public Radio. We've got a couple PCBs and need to populate, reflow, program and test them.
- GSM data. Getting activities on an Arduino to a Google Doc, web app or Twitter feed.
- Temperature sensing. I got a high temperature waterproof thermometer a while back, but never got around to figure out the communication protocol. The plan is to be able to accurately test for temperature in a pot of boiling water, and relay that (via xBee/GSM/possibly Bluetooth & a PC) to a Google Doc, web app or Twitter feed.
- Barometric pressure sensing. Ditto for "Temperature sensing."
- Bluetooth. Getting data from a Bluetooth enabled sensor node to/from a PC.
- iOS dev. I just want to make a static app to start. Then build something that'll post data to a Google Doc/web app/Twitter feed.
- Google Docs API. See above. My impression is that it's easiest to send http requests to a Google Doc Form, which then dumps the data entered into a spreadsheet; we'll see.
- Twitter API. See above. Useful to trigger IFTTT actions... and just as a general exercise.
- Simple web app. I'd like to be able to trigger physical/electromechanical actions from a web interface, and then return the results to the same interface/a Google Doc/Twitter feed. For instance, I want to ask my web app what the temperature is at my xBee, and then have that temperature returned to my output streams. My plan for now is to do this in Ruby; we'll see.
That's the meat of it. In addition, I've got a couple of additional pet projects that'll need some attention:
- Get Zach to be posting shit actively.
- Some interesting bike-related design.
- Some interesting coffee-related design.
- Some freelance design.
- The Hardwired meetup on Monday.
- Bike rides MWF mornings.
- (Possibly, depending on my condition) running w/ dog TTh.
- Write up & publish a post re: Geoff Pullum & George Orwell.
- Post a big batch of photos.
I'm expecting it to be a good week.