stevengharms.com

Probably the most significant constant in the entire history of this blog has been where I have spent several hours of my day each work-day. For a great many years, I have been an employee of Cisco Inc. As of the 19^th of this month, that will end.

I will commence employment at Carbon Five, a consulting and application development firm in San Francisco, on the 24th of this month. I am elated about joining Carbon Five’s team of energetic and innnovative developers. I will be doing Ruby and Rails development and I hope to learn more about mobile development, async server technologies, and sexy Javascript front-ends.

Since last Winter Carbon Five has hosted a fortnightly “hack night.” Through the winter and spring they saw me struggle and batter my way through the rewrite of my LatinVerb library and my metaprogramming presentation. Ultimately this co-working session facilitated a relationship which is about to turn into a working relationship. Here are the things I like about them:

1. Team
   1. Management: Friendly but clearly with a sense of standards and high expectations but with great trust in the developers to do what’s right, well
   2. Staff: Excited, energetic, motivated, funny on Twitter
   3. Size: Forty-ish or souls with whom I can have actual relationships
2. Culture
   1. Standardized hours (exceptions allowed)
   2. Fancy coffee machine that scares me
   3. Developer-sensitive culture: don’t burn out, do good work on good equipment in a nice place
3. Agile Methodologies: Paired programming (flexibly), User Stories
4. Client Engatement: I’ve never worked whith a money-paying customer, I think that’s an experience to have!
5. Technology: The team there is trying out new ideas and tools all the time.
6. Proximity: They’re a 3 block walk from my home. Granted, two of those are SoMa wide north-east/south-west blocks, but it beats the heck out of driving or taking the train anywhere. They’re also surrounded by several gyms so I can get some fitness work in.
7. Type of Work
   1. Application development (including “heavy lifting” of the back end)
   2. Startup / Idea bootstrapping
   3. Design

When the door opened, I felt that the time was right for me to make a change.

I will miss my friends and contacts from Cisco terribly. The people at Cisco and my experiences there defined many of my friends and many years of great memories. Nevertheless I am so excited about my future with Carbon Five. I find so much peace in Ovid these days that I’ll repeat the quote I gave in my “sign off” email:

“As pliable wax, stamped with new designs, it is no longer what it was; does not keep the same form; but is still one and the same;”

Quoque mutabo

When involved in the Ruby frequently one hears things about how great the job market for Ruby programmers is. It is great — especially when compared with the stagnation in other markets, regions, and disciplines. Recruiters bombard the Meetup groups, attend the meetups, show up at hackathons, and contact you via LinkedIn. It’s nice.

Matsumoto-san created Ruby, and present with a slide reading “Great Pleasure” — happy runs deep

Given the numbers of Ruby jobs, or, “opportunities,” I frequently see other Rubyists touting happiness in the job as the ne plus ultra of work motivation. The commentary is frequently of the form: “Leave your present situation for a Ruby situation because there is a great quantity of opportunity for Ruby jobs and, let’s face it, if you were to write Ruby all day how could you not be happy?” The happiness-as-virtue-in-extremis is further encouraged since one of the community’s most visible luminaries wrote a wonderful book that described how to have “a remarkable career in software development” and encourages developers to think long and hard about the happiness and peace generated (or not) by their current position.

In sum, Rubyists think it’s pretty darn important to be happy at your work. I’m proud to be part of a community that has “taken the red pill” but some of the commentary promulgated can, betimes, seem a bit insensitive if not naïve. Let me say first, nzkoz is not insensitive or callous, but it’s the example that got my gears turning on this topic.

“If you’re a developer doing a job you hate, you are useless or totally doing it wrong. So many people hiring right now…”

Source @nzkoz

There are many good reasons to not leave something you hate (i.e. that which earns you your daily bread) besides being useless or “doing it wrong.” Furthermore this tweet may just oversimplify between the extremes of “like” and “hate.” Make no doubt, I understand the spirit (yes, it was funny!) of the tweet and the 140-character limitation.

I think it would be a a worthy feature-add to this discussion for the brave Rubyists who have followed their bliss to tell the story of the form:

Yes, I left my job at BigCo as a senior developer after 15 years. It was the scariest thing I had done to leave that comfort and to joing RubyRazzle.com, not least of which because my autistic son Jeb requires private education and my eldest daughter, Jenny, required orthodontics after a freak crocodile wrestling accident. While RubyRazzle seemed likely to succeed, there were no guarantees. Heck, while some people were thinking about “Will I use Redis” I was thinking “How much extra is it to get my wife Suzy medical coverage deriving from that skiing accident she had years ago. Obviously, RubyRazzle didn’t have the cash inflow that BigCo had. Less salary, less generous benefits, risk….but on the other hand I couldn’t see that same faded pine-colored carpet again where my chair had worn grooves in without thinking that I had somehow thrown important years of my life away. So on June 12th, I walked out the door of BigCo to a job that gave me a small house worth of options, and a salary 15K smaller…

I believe this is the mental conversation that keeps our fellow Rubyists locked in positions they don’t leave. It’s easy for Paul Graham to grab college grads and stuff them into a loft with a half-dozen MacBooks and create a startup: there’s no lifestyle to lose. But as a recent thread on Hacker News shows, better developers are out of the Ramen-and-IPA phase of life and need to see how they, too, can follow their happy without feeling unduly irresponsible to their spouse and/or children.

If we in the Ruby community are committed to this as a standard, we need to talk about how to make things work for all those in the tent.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

It’s not often that one mentions Wordsworth and science fiction in the same sentence, yet his famous line kept coming to mind as I read this oddly moving and beautiful report from NPR which muses about what sorts of life may be wandering out in the Universe now that our base assumptions have forcibly been widened by our discovery of arsenic-based life forms.

Says the author, Krulwich:

Imagine a cloud of stellar dust several light years across quietly drifting through space. Powered by its own bursting stars feeding it oxygen, carbon, life-giving chemistries, could it not become a slightly lonely but vastly oversized life form? An enormous space traveler?

Accompanied by this sentiment is one of those beautiful, extravagant, lush space pictures that makes me thankful that the government wastes my tax dollars keeping NASA (barely) afloat.

The article goes on to remind readers that if there are extraterrestrial life forms they are, by definition that is easily forgotten, going to be extra-terrestrial and will have evolved on a planet not like Terra. As such we should be prepared for life that looks like intellgent slime mold, or beings that have latticed themselves into meteors, or gigantic Water Bears who have mastered tricks like enduring the vacuum of space in a self-induced stasis before returning to a life-friendly region and getting back to the usual things like eating and reproducing.

Thanks to Frank Herbert, the notion of intelligent gas-based creatures is no foreign idea to yours truly. Herbert’s work The Jesus Incident describes a generated, theocratic society that subsists on a distant, rocky planet where wandering (seemingly) indifferent gas-blimp creatures called “hylighters” tack and jibe though those stranger skies with the aid of the rocks and outcroppings befitting such a harsh surface. Ulitmately the diety of the society (an AI ship) watches the humans grow to understand that life as an ecosystem is stranger, more beautiful, and more important than their own short-sighted avaricious and political plans.

In one moment of rumination the ship remarks that the great void of space has the capacity to surprise even him. And perhaps that is the beauty of being the intelligent, wandering cloud fed by stars, that it could wander slowly across the cosmos beholding the folly and beauty that is the panoply of life and lives across the heavens.

Only Portishead will do for a conclusion…

I post well-considered, well, better-considered ideas here. For incidental thoughts, check out my Twitter feed.

This evening after my classes I was sitting outside of the school at the ‘Dillo stop waiting for the, uh, ‘Dillo to come round. While waiting I was reading a textbook when I felt something alight to my lower calf. I looked down and sow a mosquito.

I hate those bastards.

And so I thought: “By God, it’s a mosquito mid-suck! If I kill it i will have bug guts and, uh, until-recently my blood on me.” About the same time another more primal message came in “Kill that ugly thing stealing your vital hæmocytes.” Before I could be more than just barely conscious of these ideas I smacked the insect into oblivion.

Sure enough, and to my chagrin, said action resulted in a bloody smear on my calf.

So the addition is “When you know you have two choices, but that they will both lead to a disappointing / irksome / irritating end, and, having chosen one, you realized one of the said bitter ends and were, as you expected, disappointed / irked / put out.”

Guy 1: So my boss took us out to lunch Guy 2: Cool! Where? Guy 1: Bennigan’s Guy 2: Ugh, what’d you get? Guy 1: Well it was between the club and the burger, neither of which looked good and pretty much assured disappointment. Guy 2: So which did you get? Guy 1: The club. Guy 2: And it was…? Guy 1: Really average and a bit overcooked, just like I expected. Guy 2: What a total bekanntschlechtwahl Guy 1: I am full, but not content ( shout out SB )

Previous Additions to the German Lexicon

…When you do something thinking you will save yourself doing something you don’t want to do, but then forget that you were smart enough to do that and wind up creating more work for yourself, because you just did the thing you didn’t want to, so as to remember that you did something “smart” with the thing you wanted and now you must do it in addition….

e.g.

Guy 1: “I put my manila folder on the outside of my bag so that I could get to it without unbuckling the bag, Once I did that I remembered I’d put the folder in the convenient side access flap instead, so then I had to buckle the bag back up and then open the access flap to get it.”

Guy 2: What a total hossenfeffer.

Dedman has been on my case for many moons now to read this book and I finished it today.

Setup

The dead move to a city (the city) after undergoing a crossing which has no objective standard (wandering a desert, a forest, going underwater, etc.). The dead or, more precisely, the living dead, rest in the city until those who remember them die at which point they go into a different beyond.

Good setup.

The population starts swelling as a pandemic wipes out the population: sending people into the city by the barrel-load and, given the setup, the people who remember them, into death quite quickly. Thus the city swells and then empties, with only a few hundred survivors wondering why they’re still there.

The reason is that they’re still remembered by the last person on earth who is trekking across Antarctica trying to find some contrary evidence to the inescapable conclusion: “I am the last person on Earth”.

…et La Peste

As I was reading this story I was more and more reminded of Camus’ The Plague, which contemplates how humans relate to one another as a city vanishes ( in this case, the much more pedestrian aspect of the population dying ). In Camus’ Oran we watch as the people we love vanish bubo-covered body by body. In this we have a much more mysterious Nothing that erases parts of the city ( appropriate for the generation that grew up to The Neverending Story ). In both of these scenarios the intractable end can’t be avoided, and against Camus l’Absurde, the characters find the Existentialists resolve to be good, to live a jubilant life ( or afterlife ), even when there’s no reason to it.

Some of the Amazon reviews seem to forget there is a beauty in Brockmeier’s style of delivery, a calm sort of collected sobriety with a Romantic nostalgia that was what I liked best of the sci-fi / horror / Gothic romance The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The Last Man

I’d also say that there’s a certain similitude between this book and Vonnegut’s amazing Cat’s Cradle. You can read more about that after the jump, I don’t want to spoil your read of Cat’s Cradle.

In all, a fine book, but I’d suggest you wait for paperback or a library rental. At 250 pages without much re-read value you might be best saving a few dollars.

(more…)

I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz, it’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by frank herbert where herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, i’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.

I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there is a story of his called rappacini’s daughter (one of the first best gothic stories ever written) where he writes abotu a man who puts a poison in the lips of his daughter (who is of course, beautiful) and if she kisses someone she’ll kill the kissee.

In any case, there’s a story around that, but see she’s manufactured but natural.

In the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Deckard encounters a wild animal ( in this future vision, the animals are all gone: goats, horses, dogs, etc. Those that remain are venerated under the hyper Christianity of that world called “Mercerism”. The wild animal he encounters is a grasshoper, he turns it over and looks at the bottom and realizes that it is in fact a simulation, a machine grasshopper. This has some meaning relative to the previous experiences he went through.

Origami, origami is amazing. I found this page at Discovery and was amazed by this stunning dragon and then i was even more stunned by the origami flower. As amazing as the dragon is, the flower is more amazing because it’s natural, it’s unnatural natural. It’s like Zen gardens, the goal is to mirror the natural ways and assemblages of natural foliage, but to do it in a way with patterns that show human intervention was involved, the natural unnatural as it were.

And that’s a lot of typing without much sorting into a coherent post. Maybe it’ll turn into something more solid later.

It has been said that he who has much knowledge has much worry.

Sayeth Steven: He who has sexy laptop has much interest in bags.

Following my new favorite lusty consumerism for guys site: Uncrate, I found this bag.

What was particularly interesting to me was this comment:

“Product of Australia - Assy in China”

And suddenly I thought of a half-Chinese, Dickensian Australian reflecting upon his life and thinking this line.

“It was in late 2005 that my father found himself working in Guangdong province as an advisor to the then-nascent Huang textile plants. After 3 months in the Chinese industrial capitol, he found himself sharing the evenings with my mother, a manager at the Huang assembly facility. After a hasty decision to engage in the holy estate of matrimony, and an even-more-hasty return to Queensland, I was born in Brisbane where the provincial Chinese heritage was to run head-on against the rough-and-tumble easy of Australian life. My life could be summed up in the tags of so many textile products shipped to Australia from Guangdong: Product of Australia, assembly in China.

“All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that
the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if
you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all
means, do not use a hammer.” — IBM maintenance manual (1925)