Adam Keys is Thinking

I enjoy a well-crafted application. I place a high value on attention to detail, have opinions on what design elements make an application work, and try to empathize with the users of applications I’m involved in creating. Applications with a good aesthetic, a few novel but effective design decisions, and sensible workflow find themselves in my Mac’s dock. Those that don’t, do not.

The applications I observe fellow creators using to create often don’t fit into their environment. They don’t fit into the native look-and-feel. They ignore important idioms. Their metaphors are imperfect, the conceptual edges left unfinished.

In part I notice this because as creators we tend to live in a few different applications, and time reveals most shortcomings. But in part, I notice this because the applications are in fact flawed. Flawed to the point, that you would think given my opening words, that I would refuse to use them. And indeed, I refuse to use many of the applications that others find completely acceptable for making the same kinds of things I do.

Increasingly, it seems the applications that people who create things live in offer a disjoint user experience. I’m thinking of visual people living in Photoshop or Illustrator or developers living in Emacs or Terminal.app. We use these applications because they best allow us to make what we want and get in our way only a little bit. But, it’s a tenuous relationship at best.

What’s this say about what we’re doing and the boundaries that we operate along? Would we accept the same kinds of shortcomings in say, a calendar application or a clock widget, if those were central to our workflow? That is, is there something about the creative process that leads us to accept sub-perfect tools? Is it inevitable that someone seeking to make new things will find their tools imperfect? Is the quest for ever-more perfect tools part of how we grow as makers?

I hate closing with a bunch of questions, but this piece is but an imperfect tool for discovering an idea.

Ed. Closing could use some work.

Embedded within the migraine that is American politics are some very interesting ideas. Economics, markets, ethics, freedom, equality, education, transportation, and security are all intriguing topics. Recently, I figured out that the headache comes not from people or trying to make the ideas work, but in politics. Getting a majority of the people to agree on anything is a giant pain of coordination. When you throw in fearmongering, power struggles, critically wounded media, and the fact most people would rather not think deeply about any of this you end up with the major downer that we face today.

All that said, here are some pithy one-liners about politics:

• If I were part of the Democratic leadership, I’d be wondering how you take the high road in a race to the bottom. And win.

• If I were a Republican, I’d be wondering how to dig myself out of this giant hole I made by winning a race to the bottom.

• If I were a libertarian, I’d be wondering how to convince people that the Tea Party is different from what I believe in.

• If I were a leader of the Tea Party, I’d be wondering what I’m going to do when someone who claims to be a part of the Tea Party blows up a building or goes nuts with an assault rifle.

• If I were a politician, I’d wonder how much I have to compromise my values and what I really wanted to accomplish but still get enough votes to keep my job.

• If I were skeptical of climate change due to human activity, I’d be wondering how I’m going to find a spaceship, because this line of reasoning leads to the conclusion that the Earth is about to become very inhospitable.

• If I were a nihilist, I’d wonder…nothing.

There, have I offended everyone?

Last March my wife and I joined a gym, started working out with a trainer, started trying to eat better, and set out to improve our health. Amazingly, we’ve stuck with it (after two previous failed attempts in years past) and are both in much better shape than we’ve been in for quite some time.

One of my personal reasons for doing this was what I’d been hearing about the correlation between working out, eating better, and brain function. Lots of people who read way more into this than I do had been saying that if you eat better and exercise more, your brain will work better.

I’ve noticed this first hand. The day after my first serious run, my mind was in overdrive. I had lots of great ideas, I worked through them quickly, and I didn’t procrastinate when it came to exploring or realizing them.

Today, I had the opposite experience. I went out for a rather large Tex-Mex lunch. Lots of starch. I got home and took a nap, as is often my wont. Usually I wake up ready to get back to work after my naps. But today was different. My brain was thoroughly sluggish. My body’s energy was going towards digestion, not thought.

I guess this is something of a break-up letter for me. You see, I’ve long enjoyed the large, starchy lunch. But, I’m not sure I can put up with it anymore. If its a choice between starchy, tasty lunches and a high-functioning brain, I’m going to have to choose my brain.

Sorry, lunch-time gutbombs. We had a good run, but I’m going to have to quit you for a while.

(For the impatient: skip directly to the `attribute_mapper` gem.)

In the past couple months, I’ve worked on two different projects that needed something like an enumeration, but in their data model. Given the ActiveRecord hammer, they opted to represent the enumeration as a has-many relationship and use a separate table to represent the actual enumeration values.

To a man with an ORM, everything looks like a model

So, their code ended up looking something like this:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base

  belongs_to :status

end

class Status < ActiveRecord::Base

  has_many :tickets

end

From there, the statuses table is populated either from a migration or by seeding the data. Either way, they end up with something like this:

# Supposing statuses has a name column
Status.create(:name => 'draft')
Status.create(:name => 'reviewed')
Status.create(:name => 'published')

With that in place, they can fiddle with posts as such:

post.status = Status.find_by_name('draft')
post.status.name # => 'draft'

It gets the job done, sure. But, it adds a join to a lot of queries and abuses ActiveRecord. Luckily…

I happen to know of a better way

If what you really need is an enumeration, there’s no reason to throw in another table. You can just store the enumeration values as integers in a database column and then map those back to human-friendly labels in your code.

Before I started at FiveRuns, Marcel Molina and Bruce Williams wrote a plugin that does just this. I extracted it and here we are. It’s called attribute_mapper, and it goes a little something like this:

class Post  {
    :draft => 1,
    :reviewed => 2,
    :published => 3
  }
end

See, no extra table, no need to populate the table, and no extra model. Now, fiddling with posts goes like this:

post.status = :draft
post.status # => :draft
post.read_attribute(:status) # => 1

Further, we can poke the enumeration directly like so:

Post.statuses # => { :draft => 1, :reviewed => 2, :published => 3 }
Post.statuses.keys # => [:draft, :reviewed, :published]

Pretty handy, friend.

Hey, that looks familiar

If you’ve read Advanced Rails Recipes, you may find this eerily familiar. In fact, recipe #61, “Look Up Constant Data Efficiently” tackles a similar problem. And in fact, I’m migrating a project away from that approach. Well, partially. I’m leaving two models in place where the “constant” model, Status in this case, has actual code on it; that sorta makes sense, though I’m hoping to find a better way.

But, if you don’t need real behavior on your constants, attribute_mapper is ready to make your domain model slightly simpler.

This year was my fourth RubyConf. I’ve always come away from RubyConf energized and inspired. But, I’ve yet to follow through on that in a way I found satisfying. I have a feeling I’m not alone in that camp.

This was the first year I’ve given a presentation at RubyConf. At first, I had intended to use this watershed-for-me opportunity to ask whether Ruby was still fun. There’s been a number of “drama moments” since my first RubyConf; I thought it might be worth getting back to my early days of coding with Ruby, when I was exploring and having a great time turning my brain inside out.

As I started researching, it turned out that there are a lot of people having fun with Ruby. Some are doing things like writing games, making music or just tinkering with languages. Others are doing things that only some of us consider fun. Things like hacking on serious virtual machines, garbage collection, and asynchronous IO frameworks.

So, back to my talk. I saw my failure to harness the motivation what I’d seen at previous years at RubyConf as an opportunity to figure out ways to line up some tactics to make sure that after the conference, I was able to create awesome things, contribute them back to the community, and enjoy every minute of it.

Thus, I came up with a sort of “hierarchy of open source developer needs”. At the bottom is enjoyment; there’s little sense doing open source work if you’re not having fun. Once you’re having fun, you probably want to figure out how to find more time for making codes. Once you’re making more codes, you want to figure out how to get people interested in using your stuff. I’ve taken these three needs and identified several tactics that help me when I find myself in a rut or unable to produce. Call them patterns, practices, whatever; for me, they’re just tricks I resort to when the code isn’t flowing like I want to.

The talk I ended up with is equal parts highlighting people in the Ruby community that are having fun and highlight ways to enjoy making things and contributing it back to whatever community you happen to be part of. I hope that I avoided sounding too much like a productivity guru and kept it interesting for the super-technical RubyConf crowd.

If all of this sounds interesting you, grab the slides (which are slightly truncated, no thanks to Keynote) or watch the recording from the conference itself.

I wrote the proposal for this talk right after Why disappeared himself. His way of approaching code is what inspired me to write a talk about getting back to coding for fun. “Just for Fun” starts with a tribute to Why the Lucky Stiff. The sense of fun and playfulness that Why had is important to the Ruby community. I’ve tried to highlight some of his most interesting playful pieces. And in the end, I can’t say “thanks” enough. Why has inspired me a lot and I’m glad I got to meet him, experience him and learn through his works.

Even if you don’t take a look at my presentation, I strongly urge you to give a look at some of Why’s works and let them inspire you. My favorites are Potion and Camping.

Some other things I mentioned in my talk as interesting or fun:

• Greg Borenstein’s code, writings and tumblings
• Project Euler
• Marc-Andre Cournoyer’s codes and book
• Philip Kromer’s Wukung

The awesome Samson and Delilah, “Emilioooooo!”, Belushi and a skinny tie, contemplating the important stuff, The Rule of Least Power, step into the cypher, and Molly.

Given all the hubbub about Kindles, Nooks and their utility, I thought this bears repeating to a wider audience:

The Kindle is great for books that are just a bag of words, but falls short for anything with important visuals.

I’ve really enjoyed reading on my Kindle over the past year. You can’t beat it for dragging a bunch of books with you on vacation or for reading by the poolside. That said, I don’t use it to read anything technical with diagrams or source code listings. I certainly wouldn’t use it to read anything like Tufte, which is exactly why his books aren’t available on the Kindle. Where the Kindle shines is with pop-science books like Freakonomics and Star Wars novels¹.

If you love books and reading, the Kindle is a nice addition to your bibliophilic habit, but it’s no replacement for a well-chosen and varied library.

¹ Did I say that out loud? Crap.

I’m a little conflicted about how and if one should write test code for declarative code. Let’s say I’m writing a MongoMapper document class. It might look something like this:

[sourcecode language=“ruby” gutter=“false”] class Issue

include MongoMapper::Document

key :title, String key :body, String key :created_at, DateTime

end [/sourcecode]

Those key calls. Should I write a test for them? In the past, I’ve said “yes” on the principle that I was test driving the code and I needed something to fail in order to add code. Further, the growing ML-style-typing geek within me likes that writing tests for this is somewhat like constructing my open wacky type system via the test suite.

A Shoulda-flavored test might look something like this:

[sourcecode language=“ruby” gutter=“false”] class IssueTest < Test::Unit::TestCase

context ‘An issue’ do

should_have_keys :title, :body, :created_at

end

end [/sourcecode]

Ignoring the recursive rathole that I’ve now jumped into, I’m left with the question: what use is that should_have_keys? Will it help someone better understand Issue at some point in the future? Will it prevent me from naively breaking the software?

Perhaps this is the crux of the biscuit: by adding code to make certain those key calls are present, have I address the inherent complexity of my application or have I imposed complexity?

I’m going to experiment with swinging back towards leaving these sorts of declarations alone. The jury is still out.

Southern American English

OK, here’s the deal. Wikipedia has it all wrong.

1. Texas is not part of the South. Texas is its own unique thing. Sure we have dumbasses, but they are our dumbasses, wholly distinct from your typical Southern dumbass.
2. In Texas, the way you refer to “you all” is “ya’ll”; it’s a contraction of “ya all”.
3. They neglected to mention the idiomatic pronunciation of words like “oil” (ah-wllllll) or “wash” (warsh).

Please take it under consideration: Wikipedia is edited by a lot of damn Oklahomans.

A bumpy subway wall, loving things for their Unix-y qualities, Kurt Vonnegut looking dapper, the final movement of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony (originally his fifth), and a music video by Talib Kweli that makes me want to go get my hair cut. Oh, and I can’t leave out the connection between prototyping physical things and applications operating on large data, Ben Scoffield’s take on database taxonomy and a screed on reading one book per week.

(Editor’s note: I recently took to using Tumblr again. For a while, I’ve been curating interesting stuff here. But Tumblr has evolved into a really fantastic application for doing this. So, my policy going forward is to post my stuff here and curate other people’s awesome stuff over there. That said, I’ll probably do “best-of” posts, like this one, to keep you interested and informed.)

Another meme-ish “film” by yours truly. This time, the idea is you do something in five seconds, plus a two second intro and a one second outro. Here’s what I came up with:

This is an adaptation of possibly my favorite improvised joke. I deploy this joke when a conversation is interrupted by some disturbance or noisy distraction. Right before the conversation is going to continue, I say “…and that’s how I met the president and the pope on the same day.” Works pretty well.

Funny aside: I found out about this on the Vimeo site, thinking there was a competition this weekend. Turns out, it was last weekend. Figures.

Trinity gift is $10 million for pedestrian bridge. Catering to pedestrians, in Dallas? Surely you jest!

I’ll just sit here and quietly hope that the plans for an urban park around the Trinity aren’t derailed by everything that is politics.

What happens when you take scenes from Ghostbusters and see how New York used to look and how it looks today? Pretty awesome, actually. In two parts.

The birth of Born To Run. On the creation and evolution of the song and album. Great read for Bruce-o-philes.

Time is the New Memory:

The time problem is not easy to see in today's mainstream languages because there are no constructs that make time explicit. It is implicit in the system. We don't even know that's what we're doing when we use locks to try to make this work.

I’ve been thinking about how we represent time in programs for a while. The problem is that concurrent programs are all about time, but mostly, we only use two mechanisms to represent it in our programs.

The semi-explicit way is through locks. When we insert locks around some bit of code, we are giving hints to the system that things should only proceed in a certain order. This ordering gives us a notion of time, but it’s not horribly comforting.

The completely implicit way we represent time in our programs is by ordering calls to functions and the lines of code within those functions. Line 10 always executes before line 11, etc.

The problem that Rich Hickey, who has some fantastic ideas about this time stuff, has in the article I quoted is that time is managed manually and implicitly. When you start writing large concurrent programs, this falls apart. We need better constructs to deal with it.

Think of it like the shift from unstructured programming to structured programming to object-oriented programming. At first we just had a long code listing; no functions, just line after line of code. This became mentally untenable, so we shifted to structured, procedural programming. But some of our data was global and it was often hard to tell what functions belong to what data. So we moved to object-oriented programming and encapsulation.

Hopefully Rich Hickey, Simon Peyton-Jones and other functional programming folks can lead us to is a nice way to structure our programs around time. I’m eager to have my brain melted by what they conjure up.

Here’s a fun game. “The Government”:

Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of “the government,” strike out “the government” and see what results.

Often, simply striking out “government” reveals a completely different, and far more useful, commentary.

Polyglot persistence:

I think that many of the NoSQL crowd either fail to either recognize, or to properly describe that their preferred databases don’t replace applications like MySQL and Postgres, just as Ruby doesn’t replace Java. Instead, the explosion of these new options for persistence just work better for some domains (and worse for others).

Ben Scofield’s spot-on here. One of the many transitions we’re undergoing is from “I’ll use MySQL most of my career” to “I’ll tinker with a different database for every project over a couple years and then pick and choose the best as time goes on”.

A programming language zoo, a week of FP heaven, rewriting PHP with Haskell and a game for kids of any age to learn the untyped lambda calculus. Did I ever mention it’s a good time to have a fascination with functional programming languages?

(With due apologies to the creators of New Math, the writers of 30 Rock and the lovely iPod people.)

Why I do Time Tracking

At one point, I tracked every context switch during my work day. I kept a legal pad next to my mouse and I would write down the time whenever I switched between coding, emailing, surfing, talking to someone in my cube or walking around to find someone I needed to talk to.

People thought I was odd. They’d ask what I was jotting down when I noted my context switch, so I briefly explained it. “Okaaaayyyyyy?”, they’d say. An unintended side-effect was that people did end up bugging me about random things less. In fact, it was way more effective at that than putting up a sign that said “unless something is on fire, email me”. So it goes.

I never ended up running any aggregate numbers on the data. But, it did give me an idea about the frequency and cost of my context switches. I wish there was a better way to track this sort of thing passively. I’m sure it would still shock me how much time I go in and out of focus.

If you’ve never tried this sort of experiment, it’s worth running for a week or two. You’ll almost certainly notice something worth trying to cut out by glancing over the list of things you’re spending time or wasting focus on.