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Index

  • 4 min read

Novel Interactions

I started my career as a software engineer working on a lot of data visualization projects. After a couple years I switched to working primarily on backend services, and then after doing that for almost 8 years I had the opportunity to start working on frontend projects again. Since switching back I pay more attention to my digital experiences and notices the ones that surprise me or stand out. I wanted to share some of those experiences from 2021.

Apple Pencil + Adobe Fresco + Watercolors

Toward the beginning of last year I started drawing again and came across Fresco on my iPad. While the whole app is impressive the water colors really surprised me. There was something about the first time I chose a water color brush and could see the colors diffusing on the canvas while I was moving my pencil that was really intriguing. Add to that the pressure sensitivity and I continue to find this really interesting.

PokPok

This is a game that my daughter likes to play on iPad from time to time and it really feels like a digital toy box. One of the play areas is a town map where there are tons of interesting interactions. You can move cars, people, animals and have little interactions with the mail, car wash etc. It feels really well made, and like it was made to encourage kids to use their imagination. There are no objectives or dark patterns, just play and it’s great.

GitHub CoPilot

I’ve spent a lot of my career building tools and services for ML projects which has lead me to be critical of many “AI” projects. This year when GitHub CoPilot launched I was able to get into the beta and found out it’s actually a pretty powerful tool. Yes you can find examples of how it can be wrong, and you can find plenty of tales of woe about the bugs it will introduce, but I’ve actually found it to be a really useful coding assistant to the point that I miss it (but can still do my work) when I don’t have it. While it does make some useful code recommendations it also does a great job of helping me write the docs which is worth a lot to me and future team members.

GarageBand on iPhone

I remember getting my first MacBook (white clam shell) and spending a lot of time playing with GarageBand. I was blown away that this was built in for free and could do so much coming from Windows and headless Linux. I had a lot of fun with it, but then slowly I was doing less with music and hadn’t touched GarageBand in years. This year I took a musicianship course with UC Berkeley (through Coursera) which required ear training throughout the week. I used a lot of tools for this, but one that I found to be really fun and interesting was GarageBand on iPhone. After installing it from the AppStore I was able to load up a keyboard that let me practice intervals with some nice sounding samples. From there I went on to explore the various digital instruments and track options. It’s pretty wild just how much is available for creating and interacting with tracks on my phone.

XCloud

Does anybody else remember MSN Zone? I do, and I also remember getting kicked off the dial up connection halfway through a match of Star Wars Battlegrounds because somebody would call the house. Fast forward 20 years and I was able to stream games on my iPad while Rachael and I were in Chicago. Game streaming has been a thing for a while but I really was amazed with the overall experience of the XCloud app. Logging in on the go and loading up Halo Wars 2 in HD with no issues for a couple matches was awesome. Add on being able to see a bit of what was going on with Redux when I did the same thing on my desktop browser and I continue to find XCloud to be really neat.

Spatial Audio

We switched to Apple Music from Spotify last year when they announced the addition of Dolby Atmos/Spatial audio. I remember listening to Hybrid Theory (Linkin Park) first and was blown away. This was an album I had listened to on repeat for years, first with my Sony Walkman disc player and then my RCA MP3 player after that. I felt like I was hearing sounds on tracks for the first time and I continue to go back and check it out week after week. Now I search around for albums I had heard in the past to see what new sounds I might hear while also enjoying what people are doing with spatial audio in games and other mediums.

Listen to Jonathan x Friends - Best of Dolby Atmos + Spatial Audio by Jonathan & Friends on Apple Music. So last year had quite a few new and interesting digital experiences. Hopefully this year has just as many for me to share.

  • 2 min read

An Interlude

I started collecting notes here almost 3 years ago at my first PyCon. I had been working in Python for 3 years at that point and wanted to share some notes with anybody that might find them useful.

Since then I’ve veered into building a homelab, C#, rust, infrastructure, gardening and all kinds of other fun experiences.

More importantly my daughter was born, and is turning 3 this year. Over 2020 I became more and more aware of what I spent time on, and started to evaluate if I wanted to keep spending time on these activities. Many things have fallen to the cutting room floor, and writing up a post each month is one of those. I still do a lot of writing for work, and maybe if something from there manifest itself as a good topic I’ll share it, but I am not going to make myself sit down each month as I have in the past.

I do plan to have short journal snippets I capture each day that I will link to here eventually. Many of them will be software related as that’s what I spend so much time on each day, but all of them won’t be.

So yeah, hopefully the notes here have helped somebody. They will stay up, but I need to give myself permission to let this sit while I spend time elsewhere, maybe to return one day :)

As always if you read something interesting, or find a code snippet that could use expounding send me a message.

Till the next post surfaces 👋

  • 2 min read

Reading Highlights from Q1 2021

I read a lot of books throughout the year, but rarely write anything up after finishing them. While I don’t think I have enough to say about any one book after my first read, I want to capture a sentence or two about them to look back on, and to share with others. If I mention a book here that you want to talk about send me a message.

Q1 2021 List

  • A Philosophy of Software Design — a good read that will impact how you think about writing your code. Many of these ideas have permeated out into general software culture (I think, maybe I’m in a bubble), but I would recommend this.
  • Why we make things and why it matters — an interesting read on crafts and why we should embrace them.
  • Humankind — good, but long at many points
  • Kubernetes Getting Started — as advertised
  • The Unix Administrators Handbook — I had a former manager recommend this book to me. I’ve read it through twice now and I always learn something new.
  • Fluent Python 2nd Edition — A really good book on Python exploring areas that are not always tread, and Luciano does a great job of answering “why” as he goes.
  • Django Crash Course — as advertised, a good alternative or secondary first Django tutorial.
  • A Scoop of Django — A good read. I don’t feel like the answer of why is always explained to the level I would like. It’s hit and miss, sometimes it is, sometimes there is a link to a blog that I may get around to reading one day. A good book none the less.
  • How to Invent Everything — probably my favorite book so far this year. This is a lot of fun and I look forward to reading it with my daughter one day.
  • Think Julia — I’ve heard a bit about Julia and decided to check this out. A pretty good book revisiting a lot of programming first principles in the context of learning them with Julia.
  • Math for Programmers — I really enjoyed this. I try to keep math as a regular reading topic, and I like it when math is demonstrated via programming.
  • 1 min read

Entropy

noun: entropy; plural noun: entropies; symbol: S
  1. a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. “the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time”
  2. lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. “a marketplace where entropy reigns supreme”
  3. (in information theory) a logarithmic measure of the rate of transfer of information in a particular message or language.

Everything we build and learn requires constant maintenance and labor.

  • 2 min read

Finding good defaults

At heart many of us are tinkerers. We like to take things apart and see how they work. We enjoy spending hours customizing our tools, scripts and applications. But all of this adds up. It means that our tool works different from all the others. For somebody else coming behind us it may mean piecing together all the flags and tweaks no matter how well we documented or versioned tweaks in our repo, time will bring a divergence between the system and the repo.

A lot of this has set in for me over the years teaching programming, speaking with family about their devices, and onboarding to new code bases as I change teams.

I want to try out something new over the next few years, and that is finding good defaults. If I feel the need to tweak/change a tool out of the box, I’ll try other options. I have some theories around this.

  • Good defaults save us time
  • Don’t require extra conversations for team consensus
  • Help manage complexity
  • Build on expertise
  • Teach us to expect good defaults, and to build our software with good defaults
  • Good defaults help others join in

Against this list I also believe there is a counter culture around defaults wrapped up in programmer/hacker/software engineer reputation that drives us to distrust or question anything we haven’t pulled apart and customized. This creates an extra challenge.

I know that each domains “good defaults” will be different, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. My hypothesis is that they can save us time, help us build what matters, and help those who are join in, or come after. Lets find out.

  • 2 min read

Setting up a CI pipeline for Rust in Teamcity

Towards the end of last year I started working on a project in rust that would listen to a message queue and send an email. Additionally it used rocket to expose some diagnostic endpoints to check on the health of the service, change log levels, etc. When starting new projects I default to setting up a build pipeline for them to. For this project I setup pipelines in teamcity which was overall pretty easy, but sharing here for anybody else that may go down this path.

cargo-make

For new projects I like to capture the build, admin and CI steps in a way that makes it convenient for others to run on their local machine. Make and it’s derivatives (cmake, cake, etc) provide a useful task abstraction and Rust has the powerful cargo-make project that lets us capture task and mix together inline simple commands with scripts, dependencies etc.

For this project you can find my cargo make file here. I also experimented with using Powershell for my scripts/wrappers. I’ve been using this in my day job where our projects run on Win, macOS and Linux. Overall I’m pretty happy with the experience, but it is another tool to install and maintain along with various platforms missing support.

cargo test

Rust comes with a build tool and test runner built in via cargo. Running test is easy out of the box, but I needed to make use of a couple tools to get the cargo test output into a format that a CI tool parses. I ended getting test and coverage data in the junit and lcov formats that way various tools and platforms can be used across time and projects.

Teamcity

With those tools orchestrated via cargo make it's time to setup the build and test steps in Teamcity. Overall the process was pretty easy, but I ran into a couple bumps I'll highlight.

  • The cargo step doesn't support custom commands, so I don't use that by default
  • I wrote CI.ps1 as a wrapper to use in each step.
  • Enable the xml-report-plugin And with those two things the pipeline is ready to go. From there you may want to add your own environment variables, plugin, agent deps etc.

Next steps

With this pipeline up an running the next steps are:

  • Setup build caching with something like sccache
  • Work on local and CI build times
  • This has been written about a number of times I would need to make both of these better before taking the project further. As the project grows these would only get worse, and make the project unpleasant for others to work on.

Done

That’s it for now. I learned a lot along the way about Rust, cargo, and hooking it up with Teamcity. I’m not sure I’ll have a write up on artemis anytime soon. It was a good project, but I ultimately took another path. Hopefully this helps somebody, and as always feel free to reach out.

  • 2 min read

The joy of repair

A few weeks ago the Z Upper Right Assembly broke on my Mini 2. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what was wrong I only knew that the tool head couldn’t raise on the right-hand side. In an email to Adrian (at Lulzbot) we figured out the part had a hairline crack. In a year without covid I could have gone down to LVL1 to make a replacement part, but not this year. Luckily Lulzbot was easy to get a print from, and really fast too (kudos to them, and that’s nice to know for the future).

With this being my first repair I was a bit nervous. I had never taken my mini apart or tinkered too much instead opting for that with my prints. The good news is Lulzbot has amazing documentation for each printer that make repairs relatively straight forward. Beginning to end taking things apart and getting them back together per the doc took me an hour, and then it was go time. My first print was rocktopus which came out great. Seeing the right-hand axis work as expected was a huge relief, and gives me some confidence that I could do more for in the realm of mods and repairs in the future.

Why does this matter? Because if you can’t fix it, you don’t own it, and I was blown away how easy it was to fix my Lulzbot. On top of that it was fun. Outside of gardening I don’t have the opportunity to just fix stuff with my hands that much, and I miss that. Something to look into this year maybe?

  • 2 min read

Reading highlights from Q4 2020

I read a lot of books this year, but rarely write anything up after finishing them. While I don’t think I have enough to say about any one book after my first read, I want to capture a sentence or two about them to look back on, and to share with others. If I mention a book here that you want to talk about send me a message.

Q4 2020 List

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

  • I’ve been really interested in the idea of quality and how we achieve it in what we build. Everybody uses a different definition of “good”, and I enjoyed the exploration of the topic in this book.

Blockchain Chicken Farm

  • Having grown up in rural kentucky and working in industrial chicken farming, then pivoting to writing software after high school this was a fantastic read. A lot to reflect on, the shared humanity, and the audacity of the software industry shined beginning to end.

Subprime Attention Crisis

  • A good exploration of the dangers in the ad based internet economy. While the ad industry has made a lot of tools available to those who couldn’t afford them outright, I think we can do better than the current ad economy. While shrinking sectors can hurt, I think we need to be careful not to accidentally lead individuals to believe we need to maintain the ad economy at the invasive scale we are at today.

Understanding Computation

  • As advertised. Computational theory using Ruby. I enjoyed the read and will probably revisit Part II sometime. It is a big book covering a wide range of topics and I don’t think I internalized Part II enough.

The Hardware Hacker

  • A collection of articles from “bunnie” relaying his experience and some philosophies while manufacturing in the open. The term shanzhai has popped up here and in other reading over the last few years.

Angular Development with Typescript, Second Edition

  • What it sounds like. Reading this for work, and it was helpful as I got going with Angular.

Programming Typescript

  • What it sounds like. A good read after going through the docs at typescriptlang.org.

Vader Down

  • Vader being Vader. Fun short read.

Shadowfall

  • This popped up as new at the library, and I was a few chapters in when I realized I had missed the first book in a series. So far I like it. It’s in the same vein as rogue squadron, and the author is working to write characters in a complicated environment. Curious to see how the series wraps up and if the character arcs land.
  • 1 min read

Org templates and checklist

Last year I read the “The Checklist Manifesto” about the outsized impact a checklist can have on an individual and teams.

I also started using org-mode to keep a daily journal of what I'm working on, design notes, todos etc. Having spent a few weeks with org-journal I decided it was time to create my own templates. For my first template a checklist seemed like an easy target. I made a few like PR Review, and New Service which can be found in my dotfiles along with their bindings.

True to the goal, I’ve got a lot more consistent in my reviews and with capturing review artifacts. The service checklist has been turned into a dotnet template that saves even more time.

Yay checklist!

  • 2 min read

Use data structures for your business logic

A few months ago I was reviewing a PR that handled relationships between entities. As I was working through the code I started to notice a pattern that made me go back to the original feature ticket for a quick review of the acceptance criteria. As I suspected there was a list of around 10 “if this then that” scenarios detailed, all of which manifested as conditions in the code. Grabbing a pen and paper I started to draw out the criteria and as I suspected all the scenarios were captured by relationships and operations for a Tree.

Going back with this information I paired with the team on an update to the PR where we reduced the amount of conditions tied directly to the business domain, and refactored names so that future maintainers could interact with the code understanding a tree, but maybe not understanding all the business logic around the entities.

in case it’s helpful the C5 project has some collections not found in the .NET Standard library for interacting with Trees. In general an interesting project I’m glad I learned about.A similar opportunity emerged on the same project when we needed to make sure a value was unique over a series of operations. In this scenario while working on a collection of objects we were able to use a HashSetto exit if Add returned false instead of setting up a LINQ query. This resulted in less nesting, less code, and a simplified condition.

The Point

The reason I am writing this is that we should be using data structures to represent the business logic of our applications. This seems obvious, but too often I have seen implementations brute force conditions leaving data structures as an optimization, or a concern for “technical” projects. While we can use a series of conditions and predicates to meet requirements in a crude way, using data structures provides an abstraction that can elevate terse business logic to a construct future maintainers can derive extra meaning from.