How methodical and quality might keep up with fast and loose

I’ve previously thought that a developer moving fast and coding loose will always outpace a developer moving methodically and intentionally. Cynically stated, someone making a mess will always make more mess than someone else can clean up or produce offsetting code of The Quality.

I’ve recently had luck changing my mindset to “make The Quality by making the quantity”. That is, I’m trying to make more stuff that express some aspect of The Quality I’m going for. Notably, I’m not worrying too much if I have An Eternal Quality or A Complete Expression of the Quality. I’m a lot less perfectionist and doing more experiments with my own style to match the code around me.

I now suspect that given the first two developers, its possible to make noticeably more Quality by putting little bits of thoughtfulness throughout the code. Unless the person moving fast and loose is actively undermining the quality of the system, they will notice the Quality practices or idioms and adopt them. Code review is the first line of defense to pump the brakes and inform someone moving a little too fast/loose that there’s a Quality way to do what they’re after without slowing down too much.

Sometimes, I’m an optimist.

A strange world of mathematical and computational complexity

Over the past few weekends, I’ve been reading on two topics which are way out of my technical confidence. I’ve spent the majority of my software development career building web applications and neither of these are very coincident with web apps right now:

  • blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and autonomous contracts
  • machine learning, neural networks, general purpose GPUs, deep learning

With blockchain stuff, there are very interesting fundamentals underlying a sprawling system of hype and information asymmetry. Every time I go in, it’s “shields up!”, time to defend myself from people trading reputation for short-term speculation or actively spreading inaccurate information. In other words, here comes the snake oil salesmen!

That said, there are cool ideas in there. Solidity is a language built into Ethereum for writing programs that run alongside the blockchain. You wouldn’t want to build a normal application this way, but if you want some degree of confidence in a system, like voting or accounting, a system inside Ethereum and Solidity might make sense. Even more strange, to a web developer, you have to pay for the compute time that program requires in Ethereum itself. Strange and intriguing!

By comparison, machine learning is equally hyped but has little speculation. They both involve about the same level of mathematical and computational complexity. Which is probably how I’ve managed to avoid both so far: I’m far better at social reasoning, which is a big deal in web applications, than I am at math. But I’m trying to change that!

I found deeplearning.js and it seems like a nice gateway into the domain of building neural networks for machine learning, computer vision, etc. And it utilizes your GPUs, if present, which is pretty neat because GPUs are strange little computers we seem to have increasingly more of as the days go on.

No idea where this line of thinking is going. All I know is it’s more fun than reading about yet another client or server side framework. ;)

Just keep writing, October 16, 2017

I watched pal Drew Yeaton work in Ableton briefly and it was pretty incredible. He laid down a keyboard and drums beat, fixed up all the off-beat stuff, and proceeded to tinker with his myriad of synthesizers and effects rack with speed. I had no idea what his hands were doing as he moved from MIDI keyboards, mouse, and computer keyboard like a blur. Seems pretty cool!

I talked myself into and out of porting this website to Jekyll three times over the past week. Hence, the writing dropped off, which is silly because I just blogged about not tinkering with blog tools in the last month. WordPress.com doesn’t quite do the things I want it to and its syntax highlighting is keeping the dream of the nineties alive. I’m writing these short form bits in lieu of a sidebar thing for now. No idea how I’ll make do with the code highlighting.

The Good Place is an amazing show. Ted Danson, Kristen Bell, and the rest of the cast are fantastic. There is an amazing-for-a-comedy twist. Do not read the internet until you watch the first season of this show. It’s just started season two, get on board now!

One step closer to a good pipeline operator for Ruby

I’ve previously yearned for something like Elm and Elixir’s |> operator in Ruby. Turns out, this clever bit of concision is in Ruby 2.5:

object.yield_self {|x| block } → an_object
# Yields self to the block and returns the result of the block.

class Object
  def yield_self
    yield(self)
  end
end

I would prefer then or even | to the verbosely literal yield_self, but I’ll take anything. Surprisingly, both of my options are legal method names!

class Object

  def then
    yield self
  end

  def |
    yield self
  end

end

require "pathname"

__FILE__.
 then { |s| Pathname.new(s) }.
 yield_self { |p| p.read }.
 | { |source| source.each_line }.
 select { |line| line.match /^\W*def ([\S]*)/ }.
 map { |defn| p defn }

However, | already has 20+ implementations, either of the mathematical logical-OR variety or of the shell piping variety. Given the latter, maybe there’s a chance!

Next, all we need is:

  • a syntax to curry a method by name (which is in the works!)
  • a syntax to partially apply said curry

If those two things make their way into Ruby, I can move on to my next pet feature request: a module/non-global namespace scheme ala Python, ES6, Elixir, etc. A guy can dream!

Strange Loop 2017

I was lucky enough to attend Strange Loop this year. I described the conference to friends as a gathering of minds interested in programming esoterica. The talks I attended were appropriately varied: from very academic slides to illustrated hero’s journeys, from using decomposed mushrooms to create materials to programming GPUs, from JavaScript to Ruby. Gotcha, that last one was not particularly varied.

In short, most of the language-centric conferences I’ve been to in the past were about “hey look at what I did with this library or weird corner of the language”, though the most recent Ruby/Rails conference are more varied than this. By comparison, Strange Loop was more about “I did this thing that I’m excited about and its a little brainy but not intimidating and also I’m really excited about it.”

Elm Conf 2017

I started the weekend off checking out the Elm community. I already think pretty highly of the language. I would certainly use it for a green-field project.

Size, excitement, and employment-wise, Elm is about where Ruby was when I joined the community in 2005. Lots of excited folks, a smattering of employed folks, and a good technical/social setup for growth.

A nice thing about the community is that there is no “other” that Elm is set against. Elm code often needs to interface with JavaScript to get at functionality like location or databases, so they don’t turn their nose up at it. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Further, most Elm developers are probably coming from JavaScript, so its a pretty friendly relationship. This is nice shift from the tribalism of yore.

It’s also exciting that Elm is already more diverse than Ruby was at the same point in its growth/inflection curve. Fewer dudes, more beginners, and none of the “pure Ruby” sort of condescension towards Rails and web development.

Favorite talks:

  • “Teaching Elm to Beginners” (no talk video), Richard Feldman. Using Elm at work requires teaching Elm to beginners. Teaching is a totally different skill set, disjoint from programming. When answering a question, introduce as few new concepts as possible. Find the most direct path to helping someone understand. It’s unimportant to be precise, include lots of details, or being entertaining when teaching. You can avoid types and still help students build a substantial Elm program.
  • If Coco Chanel Reviewed Elm, Tereza Sokol: Elm as seen through the lens of high and low fashion. Elm is a carefully curated, slow releasing collection of parts ala Coco Chanel. It is not the hectic variety of an H&M store.
  • Accessibility with Elm, Tessa Kelly: Make accessible applications by enforcing view/DOM helpers with functional encapsulation and types. Your program won’t compile if you forget an accessibility annotation. A pretty good idea!
  • Mogee, or how we fit Elm in a 64×64 grid”, Andrew Kuzmin: A postmortem on building games with Elm. Key insight: work on the game, not on the code or engine. Don’t frivolously polish code. Use entity-component-system modeling. Build sprite/bitmap graphics in WebGL by making one pixel out of two triangles.

The majority of the talks referenced Elm creator Evan Czaplicki’s approach to designing APIs. He is humble enough that I don’t think this will backlash like it did with DHH’s opinions did with Rails.

By far the biggest corporate footprint in the community and talks was NoRedInk. Nearly half of the talks were by someone at the company.

Most practical talks from StrangeLoop

Types for Ruby: it seems like they’ve implemented a full-blown type system for Ruby. It’s got all the gizmos and gadgets you might expect: unions, generics, gradual typing. It applies all its checks at runtime though, and they didn’t say if it does exhaustive checking, so I’m not sure how handy it would be in the way that e.g. Elm or Flow are. On my list of things to check out later.

Level up your concurrency skills with Rust. Learning Rust’s concepts for memory and concurrency safety, i.e. resources, ownerships, and lifetimes, can help you program in any language. Putting concurrency into a system is refactoring for out-of-orderness and most likely a retrofit of the underlying structure. Rust models memory like a resource, ala file handles or network sockets are modeled by the operating system. Rust resource borrowing in summary: if you can read it, no one else can write it; if you can write it, no one else can read or write it; borrows are checked at compile time so there is no runtime overhead/cost.

GPGPU programming with Metal. Your processor core has a medium sized arithmetic logic unit and a giant control unit (plus as much memory/cache as they can spare). A GPU is thousands of arithmetic logic units. Besides drawing amazing pictures, you can use all those arithmetic logic units to train/implement a neural network, do machine vision or image processing, run machine learning algorithms, and any kind of linear algebra or vector calculus. Work is sent to the GPU by loading data/state into buffers, converting math instructions to GPU code and load that into GPU buffers, and then let the GPU go wild executing it.

Seeking a better culture and organization of open source maintainership (no talk video). Projects are getting smaller, more fragmented, and attracting no community (ed. the unintended consequence of extreme modularity?) Bitcoin and Ethereum have very little backing despite the astronomical amounts of money in the ecosystem. We need a new perspective on funding open source work. Consumption of open source has won, but production of open source is still in a pretty bad place.

How to be a compiler. Knitting is programming; you can even compile between knitting description pseudo-languages. Implemented Design by Numbers, a Processing predecessor, as transpiler to SVG.

Random cool things people are really doing

Measuring and optimizing tail latency. Activating instrumentation and “slow-path” techniques on live web requests that run so long they will fall into the 99th percentile. Switch processor voltage to “power up” a processor that’s running a slow request so it will finish faster, e.g. switch a core from low power/500MHz mode to high power/2GHz mode.

Really using functional ideas of composition and state in production, consumer-facing applications (e.g. the NY Times) and using ML-style type checkers with JavaScript (e.g. Flow and Elm).

My two favorite talks by far: Making digital art with JavaScript, WebGL, vdom and immutability. Scraping/querying/aggregating image data from various space missions (e.g. Jupiter and Pluto flybys).

Facebook stopped using datacenter routers and started building their own servers that program the networking chips a router would use from CentOS, basically giving them programmable routers that deploy like you would update infrastructure like Nginx or memcached. I wonder when/if treating network devices as software will scale down to your typical large company?

Strange Loop takeaways

  • a conference of diverse backgrounds and experiences is a better one
  • my favorite talks told a hero’s journey story through illustrations
  • folks in this sphere of technology are taking privacy and security very seriously, but the politics of code, e.g. user safety and information war, were not particularly up there in the talks I went to (probably by self-selection)
  • way more people are doing machine learning applications than I’d realized; someone said off-hand that we’d “emerged from the AI winter in 2012” and that struck me as pretty accurate
  • everyone gets the impostor syndrome, even conference speakers and wildly successful special effects and TV personalities like Adam Savage

If you get the chance, you should go to Strange Loop!

Here’s a thing, October 05, 2017

As I endeavor to re-establish writing here as a regular and consistent project, I’m reminding myself of two things that helped me in the past.

First and foremost, it’s about the writing and the finished product over the page views and vanity metrics. No one’s biography or Wikipedia page says “and lo they were followed by many social media influencers and gathered many thousands of impressions!”

Second, no weblog is better than the one you already have. Resist the urge to roll your own tools and just write.

By virtue of Apple Music’s “For You” tab, I came upon the musical landscape of Tim Heckler. If wooshy, atmospheric ambient experimental/electronic music is your thing, you should check it out.

Also, you should listen to lots of Nina Simone.

exa in 30 seconds

What is it? exa is ls reimagined for modern times, in Rust. And more colorfully. It is nifty, but not life-changing. I mostly still use ls, because muscle memory is strong and its basically the only mildly friendly thing about Unix.

How do I do boring old ls things?

Spoiler alert: basically the same.

  • ls -a: exa -a
  • ls -l: exa -l
  • ls -lR: exa -lR

How do I do things I rarely had the gumption to do with ls?

  • exa -rs created: simple listing, sort files reverse by created time. Other options: name, extension, size, type, modified, accessed, created, inode
  • exa -hl: show a long listing with headers for each column
  • exa -T: recurse into directories ala tree
  • exa -l --git: show git metadata alongside file info

Generalization and specialization: more of column A, a little less of column B

  1. Now, I attempt to write in the style of a tweetstorm. But about code. For my website. Not for tweets.
  2. For a long time, we have been embracing specialization. It’s taken for granted even more than capitalism. But maybe not as much as the sun rising in the morning
  3. From specialization comes modularization, inheritance, microservices, pizza teams, Conway’s Law, and lots of other things we sometimes consider as righteous as apple pie.
  4. Specialization comes at a cost though. Because a specialized entity is specific, it is useless out of context. It cannot exist except for the support of other specialized things.
  5. Interconnectedness is the unintended consequence of specialization. Little things depend on other things.
  6. Those dependencies may prove surprising, fragile, unstable, chaotic, or create a bottleneck.
  7. Specialization also requires some level of infrastructure to even get started. You can’t share code in a library until you have the infrastructure to import it at runtime (dynamic linking) or resolve the library’s dependencies (package managers).
  8. The expensive open secret of microservices and disposable infrastructure is that you need a high level of operational acumen to even consider starting down the road.
  9. You’re either going to buy this as a service, buy it as software you host, or build it yourself. Either way, you’re going to pay for this decision right in the budget.
  10. On the flip side is generalization. The grand vision of interchangeable cogs that can work any project.
  11. A year ago I would have thought this was as foolish as microservices. But the ecosystems and tooling are getting really good. And, JavaScript is getting good enough and continues to have the most amazing reach across platforms and devices.
  12. A year ago I would have told you generalization is the foolish dream of the capitalist who wants to drive down his costs by treating every person as a commodity. I suspect this exists in parts of our trade, but developers are generally rare enough that finding a good one is difficult enough, let alone a good one that knows your ecosystem and domain already.
  13. Generalization gives you a cushion when you need help a short handed team get something out the door. You can shift a generalist over to take care of the dozen detail things so the existing team can stay focused on the core, important things. Shifting a generalist over for a day doesn’t get you 8 developer hours, but it might get you 4 when you really need it.
  14. Generalization means more people can help each other. Anyone can grab anyone else and ask to pair, for a code review, for a sanity check, etc.
  15. When we speak of increasing our team’s bus number, we are talking about generalizing along some axis. Ecosystem generalists, domain knowledge generalists, operational generalists, etc.
  16. On balance, I still want to make myself a T-shaped person. But, I think the top of the T is fatter than people think. Or, it’s wider than it is tall, by a factor of one or two.
  17. Organizationally, I think we should choose what the tools and processes we use carefully so that we don’t end up where only one or two people do something. That’s creating fragility and overhead where it doesn’t yield any benefit.

The notes, October 04, 2017

I’m intrigued by folks having luck building virtualized development environments for localhost setups. It sounds like fun to work in this kind of workflow. I never want to do the legwork to make this work, though.

I did the preliminaries for this last year and ended up turning back from it. I understand Docker and virtualization superficially at best. I don’t want to impose it on teammates. It’s still too hard to search for Unix-y error messages and fix your development environment. Trying to figure out if your host Unix, Docker, or a virtualized Unix are the problem is not something I wanted to do to someone else.

Is Amazon Lightsail a move by AWS into the space occupied by Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.? Related to virtualized localhost setups: someone write me a thing to drop my dotfiles from macOS onto a Digital Ocean, AWS, etc. instance and do development from an iPad, keyboard, and SSH client.

Hammerspoon is a really cool to do all-the-things with your keyboard and some Lua. I use it to launch/switch to my most frequent dozen apps and some light Markdown helpers. But, something about it is correspondingly creepy. It can, theoretically, scoop up every keystroke. (Which probably every bit of open source I install via Homebrew could, to be honest) But maybe I could replace it with a clever bit of Alfred workflow and scripting. Catch a triggering keystroke and then give me a constrained list of apps to switch to. Yes, this is a very strange way to hit Command-Tab! I wonder how well a few custom Alfred workflows fit into a dotfiles repo.