2009
Blame the compiler
Remember when you first started programming? Those early days when you'd take some code out of a book or article, type it out, and then try to make it print silly things or draw funny pictures?
The thing I remember about those days was the temptation to blame the compiler for all the ills of my code. Something doesn't work right and you can't figure out why? Blame the compiler! Of course, this was never right. The compiler is very rarely incorrect.
My goal today is to bring back the joy of blaming the compiler. Of course, Ruby doesn't _have_ a compiler (yet!), so we have to play tricks. But that's part of the fun!
Let's blame the compiler.
See, all you have to do is extend BlameTheCompiler. And then you'll find yourself with one chance in every three executions to say "Hmm, I'm sure I defined that method. Something must be wrong with Ruby." Just like those early days of programming, you're half right. The other half is that you've got a little prankster running in your application.
It's a fun parlour trick. I would not, however, recommend sending code including BlameTheCompiler in as a bug report to the JRuby or Rubinius folks. They wouldn't find it as funny as you or I.
Two cellphones
People with two cellphones worry me.
(More six word stories. Also, an article as such in Wired.)
The Technology Behind Tag Better
I promised you the details on how we built Tag Better, so here we go. This is what I used to build the back-end bits. You’ll have to pester Chris or Alex to get the front-end details.
h2. Sinatra
Technically, it’s a Rails Rumble. Read between the lines of the rules and you’ll see it’s really a Rack Rumble. And so I went with my favorite for prototyping, Sinatra.
Happily, Sinatra had my back the whole time. I never came across anything that stumped me. Further, I didn’t pay any taxes for ceremony I don’t need.
Verdict: perfect tool for the job.
h2. Passenger
I hadn’t used Passenger much before this weekend. I’m pretty happy spooling up app processes in a terminal and watching the logs scroll past. localhost:3000 is my friend.
However, I’m an outlier in this regard. My teammates aren’t as interested in lower-level bits as I am, so I figured that using Passenger is the best bet to help them get the app up and running locally.
The benefit that I didn’t realize we’d get from this is running the same stack locally as on the production server. Besides some virtual host wrangling that Passenger Pane saved me from locally, getting the app up and running was painless.
Verdict: I am quite likely to keep tolerate Apache for that Passenger goodness, especially when I am the operations guy.
h2. Sprinkle + passenger_stack
The moment that I realized we’d have to set up our own server instance was one of brief, abject terror. I knew this could easily expand to fill a lot more of my time than I wanted. Luckily, I was wrong.
Ben Schwartz’s passenger_stack helped me get our Linode slice up far faster than I would have been able to by hand. I cloned his repo, tweaked it to our needs (disabled MySQL, eventually added a CouchDB recipe) and ran it on our server. Several minutes later, we had a working server. Pretty awesome.
passenger_stack uses Sprinkle, which isn’t getting as much play in the server configuration space as Puppet and Chef. Sprinkle does seem really well suited to standing up apps on a few servers. We might want to step up to something heftier once we had more servers, but Sprinkle and passenger_stack are simple to understand and don’t require any supporting infrastructure to use.
Verdict: Not too primitive, not too involved; just right.
h2. CouchDB
When I’m building any app that relies on an API as its primary data source, caching API response data is forefront on my mind. Serving the data locally, rather than making a request every time, means the app feels more responsive. An added benefit is not upsetting the upstream data provider.
I’ve built apps like this that use MySQL as a cache and it just never felt right. I’ve been tinkering with CouchDB and Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant lately. I decided to go with CouchDB for this one because of the excellent CouchDBX, which makes it easier for those who don’t even know what Erlang is to use CouchDB.
CouchDB ended up working pretty well. While we haven’t really leaned into it, it didn’t present any challenges while I was developing. Using CouchRest with Sinatra worked just fine.
Verdict: It just worked, which is exactly what I needed.
h2. Skipping traditional TDD
OK, so maybe only Jared Diamond would consider this a technology. But skipping the writing of tests to drive my design was pretty helpful. Consider Kent Beck’s flight metaphor. Doing a Rails Rumble is just like the taxi-ing phase. Or a minimum valuable product. Either way, you want to make a small investment towards validating an idea.
Notice I said traditional TDD. To tell the truth, I did write a sniff test script after I had the basic app working. But it wasn’t an xUnit-style test. It’s just a shell script that bangs on the app with fixed parameters. I do have to manually inspect it to make sure nothing is blowing up. What I’m really automating here is the pain of typing out Curl commands.
Verdict: worked great for the original purposes, but I’ll probably add a proper test suite as one of the first post-contest enhancements
So that’s what I think helped make our project go off pretty well. Really, what they did was help me get stuff done and then get out of the way. Isn’t that the best kind of tool?
Tag Better
Yesterday and today, I worked with Alex Bischoff and Chris Griego on a Rails Rumble project. In less than forty-eight hours, we set out to build a web application, using Ruby, from the ground up. While we didn’t boil the ocean, we did come up with something interesting.
Tag Better is the groundwork for an app that enhances one of our favorite, but often neglected, sites: del.icio.us. Personally, I’ve tried other bookmarking tools such as a plain text file, EagleFiler and pinboard.in (which I think has an excellent chance of eclipsing Delicious). However, I’ve found myself back on Delicious, even after a hiatus.
Given Yahoo’s unsteady stewardship of the site, we figured it’s time to take matters in our own hands. Using their API, it’s entirely possible for us to build enhancements on top of Delicious. We decided to do just that.
h2. Triage and tidying
We started out from a gem of an idea that Chris had. When you’re trying to better organize your tags and bundles in Delicious, there are two modes you might want to operate under. The first couple times, you need to do triage. Get stuff roughly into order, and start creating a filing system. Once you’ve got everything under control, you switch to tidying. Now you just need to keep things clean or maybe switch things around that aren’t working well.
We tackled triage first. In specific, we wanted a way to filter down our list of tags, select a bundle, and add some of the filtered tags to that bundle.
h2. Try it out
To get started with Tag Better, you’ll first need to log in with your Delicious username and password (more on that in a moment.)
Once you’re logged in, you’ll see your tag bundles on the left and all your tags on the right. If you click a bundle, the tags that are included in that bundle are highlighted. Clicking a tag toggles its inclusion in the bundle. Changes in Tag Better are immediately reflected in Delicious.
That’s the core interaction. You can also logout, of course. And, if you feel the need, we offer a way to remove your bundle and tag data from our system’s caches.
We were just four short characters away from getting live filtering of your tags via the search box on the top right. Alex and I even got it working, but keyboard cat had already played us out at that point. I promise we’ll add it as soon as judging is over!
A couple other caveats: you might want to create a test bundle (in the Delicious UI) to play with, rather than one you’ve already organized. I don’t think there are problems in the code, but it never hurt to show caution. Also, IE support is probably “interesting”, at this point.
h2. Trust
Even though we need your Delicious username and password to edit bundles on your behalf, we have made sure to never store authentication information on our side. Your authentication data is stored in a cookie on your machine; if you don’t like that, you should probably skip out on using Tag Better as a hosted app. If you delete that cookie, we won’t operate on your data. Further, we’ve added the ability for you to remove your bundle and tag data from our system. That’s the only data that we save on our disks.
I mentioned trust and your authentication data earlier. It’s an important part of an application like this. We don’t want to screw your bookmarks up, and you don’t want us to do skeezy things with your bookmarks. Unfortunately, Delicious does not yet offer a delegated authentication API like Flickr and Twitter do. So, we’ve got two options.
On the one hand, you could trust us. This is up to you. I’d like to think that if you’ve met Alex, Chris or I, then you’re happy to use the application knowing we’ve got more amusing things to do than soil your bookmarks. Further, when the competition is over, we’ll open the source repository up to the public. If you’re a code-review sort of person, go nuts.
On the other hand, you could run it yourself. Again, once the competition is over, we’re going to release the code. Look over the readme, install the dependencies, and run it on your own hardware. Sleep safely at night knowing your password is safely ensconced on your personal machine.
Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit about the technology we used to make Tag Better. Until then, I hope you’ll give it a try. If you have ideas for feedback, leave a comment here!
Fun
Cannonball Adderley:
It's called "Fun". F-U-N, fun. That's something you can do, when everything is mellow.
Here’s to mellow times. Seemed appropriate for a Friday.
The mystery of good art
The trick about good art is that it has some mystery, an unknown. The problem is that if you get too close to the art, you risk unraveling the mystery. If you deconstruct it, engage it, or study it, the unknown becomes known. Thus, if I really enjoy a song (in particular), movie, etc. I stay away from taking it apart to see how it works. I’d rather enjoy it for a long time.
I have this problem where I over-listen to an album. It started in my teenage years. I learned all the bass-lines for Pearl Jam’s Ten. After that, I couldn’t listen to the album for ten years; I knew all the secrets, all the interesting bits. Rewind a year ago, and The Who’s Live At Leeds was my jam. Now, I can’t listen to it.
But I’ve been very rigorous about listening to Bruce Springteen’s Born To Run. It is such a perfect piece that I only allow myself to listen to it once a month[1]. No more. Similarly, I won’t let myself learn to play any of the songs on the guitar. I want to maintain that mystery.
I wonder if there is other art like this. Could you get overexposed to a Mondrian painting or a Hemingway book? Even with works that are more popular in their sensibilities, is it possible? Is there such a thing as too much Starry Night or Ghostbusters?[2]
The bottom line: enjoy good art, but take care not to over-enjoy it.
fn1. I even feel like I’m cheating if I listen to Born To Run in anything but album-form. To hear “Thunder Road” or “Jungleland” by itself feels incomplete, like I’m missing something.
fn2. Yes, I just put these on the same level, even though I’m not much of a van Gogh aficionado.
Testify
Two unrelated and great songs, one title.
“Testify” by Parliament
“Testify” by Stevie Ray Vaughn
Enjoy!
Gird your greyscales
Logan Hicks has some really great subterranean photography going on. (Via Infrastructurist)
And if you like that, you’d probably also like some Russian submarines, their interiors, and their underground bases.
While we’re dwelling on intriguing/depressing concrete structures: one dude’s home built into a former missile silo and the Oak Ridge plant where the materials for the Manhattan Project were refined.
Getting to know your bookshelf
The Book Stalker - Rands figures you out by your bookshelf:
Where’s your bookshelf? It’s this awkward moment whenever I first walk into your home. Where is it? Everyone has one. It might not be huge. It might be hidden in a closet, but in decades of meeting new people, I’ve never failed in finding one and when I do I consume it.
Here’s mine from almost two years ago (plus more):
I’ve since expanded to two shelves and look forward to the day when I can devote a whole wall to just reading. As I often tell myself as I sit down to start, “reading is the best”.
Free Parking Is Not Free
Free Parking Isn’t Free. Turns out those parking lots, while sometimes handy, are actually pretty gnarly, if your goal is to build a nice place to live:
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, as automobile use became prolific in the United States, parking became a problem, congesting streets and overflowing into neighbors' lots. In response, most municipalities instituted off-street parking minimums requiring developers to provide all the parking that the residences or shops would need on-site. This seemingly sensible notion has created a cascade of problems. It encourages sprawl by spreading buildings apart to make room for more parking (requirements usually demand more area for parking than the building it supports). It also weakens urban design, as urban buildings are torn down to make room for desolate surface lots, and hulking parking garages sprouted in downtown areas. It discourages revitalization of existing historic buildings, since developers have trouble meeting modern parking requirements in neighborhoods that were built before auto dominance. And the requirements drive up the cost of development: parking spaces can cost between $10,000 and $50,000 – typically more than the cost of the car that occupies it. High parking requirements can raise the price of homes and apartments by $50,000 to $100,000, a serious challenge to affordability.
When I have more money that I know what to do with, I’m going to start buying up parking lots and turning them into parks. It’ll be my little way of sticking it to people who drive over-large cars.
Kill your menubar darlings
The Menubar Challenge - everybody, clear out your menubars! It’s one of my secret productivity weapons, I highly recommend it. Also, read everything on Minimal Mac; it’s the best.
Here’s my current attempt to use as little as possible in my menubar:
LittleSnapper normally isn’t running, so that doesn’t count. If I could, I would run DropBox and FastScripts without menubar icons. I’m still not sure I like having a clock visible at all times, but at least analog clocks are classy-lookin'. I’d love to remove the battery icon, but it appears doing so disables the “your battery is tapped” warnings, leading to spontaneous laptop sleeping.
My setup
Shawn Blanc has been cataloging sweet Mac setups. Last week, he published a description of my own creative den. If you find this sort of thing as intriguing as I do, also check out The Setup.
Balmer =~ Tarkin
Steve Ballmer:
Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.
OK, maybe that’s Grand Moff Tarkin. Either way, I’m considering this my birthday present from John Gruber.
Code re-use as technical debt
I have extremely mixed feelings about code re-use. I think it’s largely a red herring, never working out as well as developers would hope. After all, developers are like golfers; always optimistic about how well an approach will work or how far down the fairway their ball landed.
But here’s a real stab in the side of code re-use: in many cases, it’s tantamount to technical debt. Embrace technical debt:
For example, early on at IMVU, we incorporated in tons of open source projects. This was a huge win (and we were delighted to give credit where it was due), because it allowed our initial products to get to market much faster. The downside was that we had to combine dozens of projects whose internal architectures, coding styles, and general quality varied widely. It took us a long time to pay off all the debt that incurred – but it was worth it.
Using someone else’s code will help you keep moving now, but you stand a good chance of needing to rewrite it later.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. By the time you know you need to replace someone else’s code, you’ll have learned about the domain it covers and how you need to solve that problem in your domain.
Keep it in mind: just because you can drop someone else’s code into your app and use it, doesn’t mean it’s all roses and butterscotch.
rufus-tokyo goes 1.0.0
rufus-tokyo 1.0.0 - I’ve been tinkering with Tokyo Cabinet and Tyrant lately. It’s great stuff. Grab this gem and start tinkering!
Differently hackish keyword arguments for Ruby
maca’s arguments - keyword arguments support for Ruby, now. Wickedly clever hack that does reflection on Ruby 1.9 and uses ParseTree for Ruby 1.8. Simpler than I thought it’d be, I wish I’d thought of that.
Caveat: I haven’t tried it yet. It might punch kittens. In fact, if you think parts of Ruby are “too magical”, this definitely punches kittens.
Interviewing to seek values
Adam Wiggins, per usual, is on to something. Values:
Sharing values is the most important part of effective collaboration. If you don’t have significant overlap on values between you and your teammates, you’re going to have a tough time getting anything accomplished.
I’m starting to think that figuring what the other person puts a premium on is the most important part of a technical interview. Is the other person passionate in the same way you are? Are the things they obsess over complimentary to what you would rather gloss over? If the answer to these questions is yes, you’ll probably make awesome things together.