Art is passion

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered pot holder.
—Raymond Chandler

Programming and web development is often a cold silent world. We sit in front of ever larger screens, growing ever more quiet as we move all our conversations, all our lives even, on to a souless ‘cloud’ of information. It can be pretty bleak. The push towards this empty void is accelerated by some constant code mantras. Often progress means faster; it means raw numbers and a race towards small benchmarkable improvements. Its a society of technique, of sharpening blades and micro-optimizations. For me, at least, theres something missing. It’s what Raymond Chandler points to above. Passion here is the difference between Technique and Craft, between Hacking and Art.

Hacking is so 1998

I want to retire the word hacking.

I’m sick of it. It implies the completely wrong metality that I would aspire to. hacking conveys butchery, it suggests unproffesionalism. Most of all it suggests a ‘git it done’ attitude that is pretty opposite the idea of making art. Is code art? I’m not going to go in to the ‘what is art?’ circle – its a trap. The art is almost irrelevant, it is the act thats import. The act of creating.

I don’t want to be hacking – I want to be creating.

Art is balance

The more I think about it, life itself is really about balance – or at least the pursuit there of. Not to get all Geoge Lucas – but there are a lot of forces at work and in ourselves that drive what our lives – our art, our work – are about. Here, I believe that the artist, above all, is able to stradle the line between these powers and emotions.

As a programmer here are some of the tightropes you’ll have to walk:

• Pride vs Humility: Taking pride in your craft while being humble about its origins. We’re all just re-formulating old ideas.
• Winning vs Respect: The drive to win and be the best is productive until it means sacrificing knowledge you can gain from your competitora
• Shipping vs Perfection: This is also similar to Quality vs Speed. The need to get something out often is more important then the need to atain perfection in your work. Artists face this every day and the knowledge of self in this respect is often what create uniquness. Jackson Pollock once famously said, when asked about when he knew one of his iconic paintings was ‘finished’ – “how do you know when you’re finished making love?”. Artists rely on thier insticts, not their critics for “shipping”.

Striving

To be an artist is to make art. Where hacking is an act, art is a lifelong goal.

I’m not an artist, but I’d like to think I’m trying.

I’ll still be working full time as CTO for Paperless Post and I’ll even be flying back every month for a couple of days (which I’m trying to align with NYC.rb and NYC.js).

I’m very excited for all the new people and new food and looking forward to seeing a lot more of some of my favorite people who happen to live in California.

I’ll be visiting for a week from June 2 – June 8 to look for an apartment and figure out some other details. If you’re around and want to meet up and talk shop over a Pancho Villa gut-bomb, let me know. As my wife says, I’m trading bagels for burritos.

After freelancing (or hustlin’ – as I called it) for the past year and more, I’m finally settling down. As of last week, I’m now the CTO of Paperless Post. Though I truly loved working with a number of the clients I helped out over the past year, Paperless Post made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – not just monetarily. The team they’ve assembled is not only extremely talented, but is a pleasure to work with and constantly challenging each other to do great work. It would take nothing less to get me to commit to a project full time. That’s not all, though. For my friends and followers in the open source community, you’ll be happy to know that at PP we’re already using a number of my projects including Sammy.js. I actually worked to get into my contract that my responsibilities as a member of the community and a maintainer of these and new projects is part of my job. This means that I should actually get some dedicated time to work on Sammy and hopefully extract some of the cool ideas that we’re working on and get to share them with the community.

Paperless Post isn’t what you’d think of as a typical web startup. Sure, theres funding, competitors, crazy deploys, late night coding. However, they’ve actual made a business and the world outside of silicon alley has already noticed Its not a twitter mashup or a buzz word filled rails app with some missing vowels in the name. Our goal is not to constantly push the envelope, its to do a couple things really well and with style. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be helping to shape the future of this product.

The past couple of weeks has been a serious roller coaster of emotions but somehow thanks to my wife and friends I’ve landed on my feet and I’m better for it. Thanks especially to my former clients for being so supportive during this crazy transition.

I realize its already half way through the month, but I needed to get the obligatory year in review out. I had to bother. Why? Because last year was BIG. I ended 2008 leaving my former job to pursue greater things. My big goal for the year was to do awesome work, start building a reputation, and give back to the community. I’m very proud to say I accomplished all of those. I did so by working my ass off. Straight hustling.

Highlights:

• Getting married!
• Speaking at 4 technical conferences including ones in Japan and Scotland.
• Starting a fund that raised ~$1000 for RailsBridge and the Anita Borg Foundation.
• Releasing Sammy.js and seeing a number of large organizations and companies use it in production.
• Contributing to, releasing, and maintaining over 40 open source projects.
• Working with a number of really awesome companies with very talented individuals including Paperless Post and Wejetset
• Traveling a lot: Japan, Scotland, 3 trips to the West Coast, Boston, Philly, Virginia.

I can’t really complain. I’ve set some new big goals for this year. The biggest is bit of a step backwards. Last year, I worked a lot. A little too much if you ask my wife and some of my friends. So this year is the year of accomplishing a lot while working less. As much as I love coding, there are other things I love more. Namely, my wife. In an attempt to break it down into actual achievable goals:

• Only work with clients that I want to work with. A side luxury of working my ass off is that I’ve been offered a bit more work then I can feasibly do myself. Which puts me almost exactly where I want to be – being able to work on projects I genuinely find fun and interesting. Lucky me!
• Take it down a notch with the open source shenanigans. This is slightly unfortunate, but I’m almost as overwhelmed with open source projects as I am with client work. I’m not going to dump or stop supporting the popular highly used projects, like Sammy or qadmin, but some of the lesser known used ones are going to become unsupported and I’m going to try to slow down with creating new ones. Try.
• Cook more, write more, read more, learn more, see more people. My new meetup/idea code should address some of these. Very excited for the first meeting next week. Buying a kindle has actually made me read way more. I’m trying to spend more time on actual dedicated learning.

At the end of 2010 I want to look back and think about how much fun I had and how much I learned. So, friends and colleagues, heres to those goals and a great new year.

Highlights included:

• Going to RubyConf without actually going.
• Eating and drinking fine food and wine in Napa/Sonoma for 4 days non-stop. (Full list of vineyards and restaurants with menus on request).
• Spending time with my lovely wife.
• Seeing friends I don’t get to see enough.

Though this blog may tell a different story, I actually have been writing a lot of code as well:

• Most notably, the production, public-facing Sammy.js application I’ve been working so diligently on finally launched: Wejetset City Notes Interactive. I learned a ton writing and deploying it, and I promise to share a bunch of those lessons, soon.
• With the help of the amazing rvm I’ve started getting all my gems tested and working on Ruby 1.9. I think everyone should be doing the same, so if people are interested in my approach, maybe I’ll write a tutorial.
• I’ve even been porting other peoples gems to 1.9. Specifically I have a fork of the oauth gem that works on Ruby 1.9.1 without any dependencies. It should be merged and released to the master oauth gem shortly.
• It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve been working on a big rewrite of qadmin thats being used in production in a couple places. Its a lot easier to configure and extend and really just needs to have its documentation thoroughly updated before I can do a real release.
• I’ve also updated my portfolio to include links to my talks and some other new projects.

I’m hoping to get some more blogging done and OSS releases out in the next couple of days so stay tuned!

• Two weeks ago I released Sammy and since then its been getting a lot of great feedback. It was mentioned in a github rebase and Nick Plante wrote a great post on DDJ. I’m really impressed with what people have done with it so far. Alex Lang, especially, has fulfilled a vision I had by embedding Sammy as the client controller for a couch app. Also make sure to check out his Boom Amazing presentation tool using Sammy as the proxy for controlling a slideshow contained in a massive SVG. I’m crossing my fingers that they’ll be a video of his RailsWayCon presentation. Sammy also has a mailing list now and (hopefully) soon a dedicated IRC room.

• Gembox was featured as a great tool for viewing RDocs on RubyInside. This inspired a little flurry of activity and commits with more to come. Thanks to Samuel Elliot Gembox works in passenger pane.

• EngineYard finally posted the videos from Scotland on Rails and you can view my talk in full quicktime glory. Really you should just take the whole weekend and watch all the videos. LOTS of fantastic talks.

• Goruco is tomorrow! If you’re attending and reading this, please come find me. I’ll probably be milling around with a bearded dude (@mrb_bk).

WTF

This weekend after reading a couple posts and a lot of tweets I started getting really frustrated about the situation surrounding Matt’s talk at GoGaRuCo. My frustration and anger did not stem from being offended by Matt’s talk, nor did it stem from thinking that everyone who was offended was wrong. It came from a gut reaction to all this horrible negativity thats spreading like wildfire.

I was at GoGaRuCo. In fact I was also speaking. I watched every talk, attended the after-parties and had one of the best conference experiences I’ve had. I learned a ton, met a ton of interesting people, and heard about things from a ton of different perspectives. I’m not going to say more then that. It was awesome.

The ‘controversy’ around Matt’s talk started as a couple smart individuals being angry and frustrated at another smart individual for making a mistake. It’s become a blame game and a reason for people to blame a single talk for the ails of an entire community that had the same issues before. I want to stay positive, so here are three simple rules of ANY community:

• You can not fault an entire community for the actions of a single individual.
• In any community there will be opposing opinions on definitions of moral correctness for n issues.
• If you actually want to change the community, you have a better chance of influencing the future community through education then the current community through preaching.

Going from the last one, lets define a problem set and move forward.

The Problem Set

Lets rip open this silver lining. If anything good comes out of this let it be that it brought a bunch of long standing issues back in to the limelight. The big complaint out of this all has been that there are not enough women in the Ruby community. It’s pretty obvious that this is an issue. I mean, out of conference of 200+ there were less then 10 women. In fact, this conference probably had more women then any other Ruby conference I’ve been to.

I’m not going to try to deduce the myriad of reasons why this is true, instead just mention something that might lead to this situation.

Ruby is not taught in Schools. If we really want to make Ruby a language and community for everyone, the only way to ensure that people actually get exposure is to get it into schools. It would be awesome if I learned Ruby in college, but beyond that – it would have been AMAZING if I had HacketyHack when I was a kid. I whole-heartedly believe that Ruby is a great first language and the veritable cornucopia of implementations and uses could convince anyone with a slight inclination to do great things with it.

FTW

Let’s actually make this happen. How can we get more women in software development? How can we bring more women into the Ruby community? I don’t have the answer and honestly, I’m not a fantastic teacher or community organizer. However, I’m a pretty decent developer and as a freelancer I’m making some decent money so that I can give some of that money to people who are much better teachers and community organizers. With that said, I’ve started a pledgie and put $500 dollars in it. After 1 month, I’m going to donate any money I’ve collected there to a charity to support either teaching Ruby/development in schools, or supporting women in development. Depending on how much we raise, I might donate to multiple organizations. If you have suggestions about specific organizations please tweet @aq or email me at aaron at this domain.

Please donate! Even if its only $2. I’ll be posting updates to twitter and here to.

Let’s try to ensure that GoGaRuCo 2025 is an awesome gathering

Instead of:

if Book.exists?(:title => title) # SELECT #=> true/false
  book = Book.find_by_title(title) # SELECT #=> Book
  ...

Doing this:

if book = Book.find_by_title(title) # SELECT || nil
  ...

Because you can do assignments in-line with logic and because ActiveRecord#find_by_ doesn't raise an error and just returns nil if it fails, this works. Also, if the book does exist the second snippent only results in one query instead of two. Even though that might only take 5ms, multiply that by 1000 x 35,000 and that saves a lot of time.

Something I found out the hard way is that there is a bit of a gotcha with the order of operations. Doing side-by-side in logic assignments like:

if book = Book.find_by_title(title) && company = Company.find_by_name(name)
  ...  

Is actually equivalent to this:

if book = (Book.find_by_title(title) && company = Company.find_by_name(name))
  # book => (boolean)  
  # company => (<Company>) 

So pretty please place parentheses:

if (book = Book.find_by_title(title)) && (company = Company.find_by_name(name))
  # book => (<Book>)  
  # company => (<Company>) 
  

Outside of coding, I did get to hang out and meet with a lot of people over the last few weeks – including: Nate, Naveen, Greg, Jonthan, and a bunch of others (secret).

I’m also in the process of hooking up some office space so I dont have to work from home (and thus get a lot more done). Thanks to Tina I should be moving into a neat desk in DUMBO next week.

So now that I’m truly a free agent, things should start picking up here again (yay).

It will be my first conference talk (hopefully of many). I’m sure its going to be amazing experience. Everyone who can, should register and get their tickets ASAP. Its an amazing deal for the number of top notch speakers. I would go even if I wasn’t speaking. If you cant make it, I’ll probably end up giving the same talk to the #nyc.rb crew at some point, too.

It was serendipitous that Apple is releasing the new Keynote with iPhone control.

Kat and I are also planning to make a vacation out of the trip: eat and drink our way through the UK. If you have suggestions on that front, let me know.

As this is a whole new year, with a whole new work schedule and set of goals (see: Big Moves), I’m going to try something NEW. Every Monday I’m going to post a little recap of the previous week of work. The idea is to give a little insight into what I’m spending time on.

The past two weeks have been all over the place. I was in Rochester with my fiance’s family for a week doing the whole Christmas thing, then it was back to NYC for a quick turnaround and out to Mendocino, CA for the week (pictures here).

• I became a Rails core contributor. This was one of the most awesome things of the past little while. I had a Eureka moment where it was like, “Hey, there’s something I can add here to make this better” and then realizing that not only do I have the ability and time to do so, but its really not that hard. I ended up contributing a good refactor and a full test suite to Jeremy Mcanally’s rg rails generator plugin. I learned a ton from the whole experience and super psyched to continue contributing.


• I started collecting some common code. A lot of this code and helpers were already in the quirkey_tools plugin I’ve been using and developing for the past 3 year. My new strategy is a little different: Split all of these different parts of quirkey tools out into individual plugins and gems. Halpers is just a collection of helpers + a Rails Template (totally functional – just make sure you’re on EDGE if you want to use it). My favorite part about it, is that you can start a new rails app using the template and the template will install itself (halpers).


• I did some more work on sinatra-gen. I promise a full blog post/tutorial on this, but I’ve become completely enamored by sinatra and I wrote this nice little generator to create sinatra app skeletons of all different varieties. The latest version includes support for defining actions/routes inline with the generation.


• RELAXIN’. Probably the most important. I relaxed the shit out of the past two weeks.

What I haven’t been doing is blogging and that’s a problem. Looking into my archives, the times when I was blogging the most was when I felt most productive and clear headed. With that said this is going to happen more often.

On to the news: As of the end of this year I will no longer be working full-time with Intersect. The decision has little to do with the company and more to do with my desire to pursue a bunch of different projects and ideas I have brewing. Intersect has been extremely supportive and understanding and I’m really going to miss working with them everyday. They are some of the most talented and creative people I know.

With that said – What’s the plan?

Day to day is up in the air – but here are the things I’ll be focused on in the coming months.

1. Giving back to the community. This is probably the most important for me. I’m working on setting specific goals- but the important part is committing to and creating open source projects. Also writing a lot more here and on mailing lists. I’ve fallen in love with the idea of open-source and github really makes it so easy – it’s hard not to contribute.

2. Partnering with people to facilatate ideas. My dream is to not just work for hire and find client/developer relationsships but find people and ideas that I can help bring to life on the web beyond just building applications. I’ve found that my real skills lie beyond coding and are more in tune with solving challenging problems in creative ways.

To that extent if you are anyone you know is interested in teaming up on an idea or project – feel free to contact me (aaron at this domain). I’ve also put up a portfolio of some of my recent work if you want to see what kind of projects I’ve worked on recently.

3. Learning. Over the past 6 months with the help of Steve Shapero and mrb I’ve been filling in the gaps of knowledge I have in computer science. In a lot of cases, I had learned the concepts in practice but now got the terminology and theory behind them.

Now, I’m diving into new realms, like Cocoa and iPhone development. I’m also making an effort to push my knowledge of Ruby by diving into different frameworks and libraries – merb, sinatra, etc.

Next steps?

Read, write, do.

Using some simple software I wrote with mrb – columnlog – you can now follow my every internet movement in a single place.

So it’s been a little while. I’ve missed writing and I am resolved to make QuirkeyBlog full of words once more. This summer has been amzingly busy, but I can say that, though this blog has heard nothing of it, I’ve gotten a a lot done. I’m going to be a little self-serving and separate them out so look out for more after this.

Another brash decision – I’m going to keep this blog preety strictly about development and projects. Twitter will henceforth (such a great excuse to use that word) be my personal log. You’ll soon see new outlets for my other disparate interests.

In other words, Stay tuned . . .

The biggest improvement was down sizing my pocket – the move from a costanza-sized-full-of-useless-cards-and-reciepts type beast was a major relief to all of my jeans. In a typical modern epiphany after just a couple weeks with out that extra weight you realize that you don’t miss it and there’s rarely a time when you don’t have what you need in the jimi’s constrained proportions.

The only problem I’ve found is something that may be particular to NYC. Where the entire world has really started to move away from cash – the purveyors of this city specifically restaurants and coffee carts are particularly paper only. This made the jimi’s two folded bill restriction a little hard to manage to say the least. I found myself stuffing bills in the corners of my pockets.

So where to from here? I think I’m going to pass on the Jimi and I’m looking very enviously at the sweet looking Dosh wallets they sell at wejetset – maybe I can finagle myself a deal.