t3rse Blog

The New Boy

Thu, 03 May 2012 03:20:23 CST

When I was 9, we moved back to Africa after a stint in California and Oregon over 5 years. I went from my suburban Portland elementary school to a strict and proper British school where I was only referred to as The New Boy. It worked out okay; I'm not sure how long it took but soon enough I was David again. This is my first week at Vertigo, and I'm excited to step again into the role of The New Boy. I upgraded my JAPH to a "JAVH" commemorate the experience:

 
map{print "$_ "}
split(/\d/, 
        join('', 
               map /(\w)\w/gi, 
               qw(Jaubsctd1a Aenfogthhiejrk2b Vlemrmtniqgnov3c Hoapcqkresrt)
        )
);

Everything Ends

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:59:29 CST

They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

From Confucius, Analects

Yesterday I said goodbye to Daktronics, my employer for the last 3.5 years. It was bittersweet. I’m excited for the future but there were many friendships I built in that time that I am leaving behind. Even though I got to work on some exciting projects like Australian Horse Racing systems and large scale IPTV, the thing I liked most of my work was the people around me.

After my goodbye email, I got a lot of kind notes in response. I treasure each one because even though we had performance reviews and official metrics, I think the best measure of performance is what your peers have to say. I can step away knowing that I made a mark and it was appreciated.

The future is on its way and I am looking forward to it. But until the full force of its impact I’ve got a little time to think about the last few years, the friendships I’m going to keep, and the lessons I will be carrying forward.

Chase It

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 04:33:24 CST

This is where so many people go wrong, the say "I don't have the talent, I never did... "

I say if you had the desire, you had the talent. What you didn't do was chase it.

A blurb from an interview with Janny Wurts, fantasy author, illustrator amongst other things.

The Real You

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 06:28:56 CST

"The real deep down you is the whole universe
You are something the whole universe is doing
the same way a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing"

Sampled on Depth - Self Like Ocean

Confucius on Job Interviews

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 05:15:13 CST

The Master said, 'Yu, shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; - this is knowledge.'

From Confucius, Analects

What's In a Name?

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:29:37 CST

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

From Confucius, Analects

Trendy Typefaces

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:44:06 CST

Consider your haircut in high school. Is that school photo one that you'd use as your headshot for publications?

From Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans..., a little charmer I've been reading lately.

A RESTful L'esprit de l'escalier

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:12:48 CST

I was asked about REST and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I have met people who have read Dr. Fielding’s dissertation and aren’t afraid to use it. I remembered Rob Conery’s recent blog post on the topic:

I don't know any single term more explosive and zeal-inducing than REST and "what it means to be RESTful".

I will dare to admit publicly that I’ve abused REST to ditch SOAP as a serialization format. I did not sit down and carefully think about resources or collections. I went operational. I have written things like:

    [ServiceContract(Namespace="http://foo.bar.baz", Name="ApplianceService")]
    public interface IApplianceService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "SwitchOn")]
        OperationStatus SwitchOn();

        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "SwitchOff")]
        OperationStatus SwitchOff();

        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "Time")]
        string GetTime();
    }

But I also appreciate beautiful RESTful APIs. I appreciate when people have taken the time to really understand something and make it beautiful. Especially in scenarios that are very clearly resource oriented, REST not only makes sense, it is a model of elegance. Some place between the hacks and the purists there is a zen like balance. Now, just to find it.

The Dark Matter Developer Behind Me

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 04:20:08 CST

Scott wrote a blog post about so called Dark Matter Developers. There are many valid points however I thought I'd lend my own experience with one of these developers who is utterly disinterested in conferences, blogs, and twitter.

He works like a fiend. His exploits are whispered in murmurs by other developers after he has left the room. He prefers C++ but uses C# when necessary. He will grudgingly use WCF for a RESTful service but will admit that he prefers writing things from scratch with HttpListener. It's not like he isn't on the web, I see him reading documentation on the MSDN library from time to time. I also saw him reading the ATOM spec because he needed to in order to implement it in full for a custom server.

There is a notion out there that the devs who don't look at blogs or treat the Program Manager for the products that they like as a celebrity are the slackers for whom programming is just a job. It might be true for some, even most. But in my experience, there are a large contingent of Dark Matter Developers who are fiendishly productive and utterly disinterested.

I'm not like the developer behind me but you better believe I respect him and try to learn from him whenever I get a chance. As a person who usually errs on the side of chasing every shiny new thing, he is a perfect foil, a reminder that being a good developer, more often than not, is to just Do The Work rather than follow trends or even new technologies that are not mature.

Embracing RavenDB as t3rse

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:05:05 CST

I have been having a lot of fun getting to know RavenDB. It started off with my first wanting to have a quick way to model some data for a prototype I was building at work but has blossomed into a core piece of a forthcoming t3rse application (to be announced!).

Ayende posted a few days ago on the process of embracing RavenDB and something he said really struck me:

In 1980, a 10 MB hard disk (that is in megabytes, about 2 songs or 3 pictures) cost around 4,000 $ US. Adjusting for inflation, that comes at about 11,000 $ US in today’s dollars. Just to compare, today a 10 MB of disk space would cost you about half a dollar.

It seems kind of crazy now to put those costs in terms of today's data, but it's true. The rest of the post is true as well and although I'm still a little shy (mainly because of my own learning curve at modelling data for this environment right) I think I'm going to start using RavenDB a lot more as a commodity and less as a curiosity/learning experiment.

Although he highlights it in the post (which I'm having trouble finding directly on the site - I read it in Google Reader) is how using NoSQL allows for a lot more flexibility with data structures. I could not agree more and can honestly say this has been one of the bigger pleasures of using it to this point.