paraliteracy has its perks
I just read a frightening article over on Slate about an attempt by the GOP in California to make a grab for 20-some-odd electoral college seats via an initiative that would split votes along congressional district lines, rather than the winner-take-all model used in other states.
Coupled with a bit of help from Diebold et. al., I think that a lot of the confidence the Dems are showing about the next presidential election may be a bit premature…
_why has just released a new cross-platform GUI library for Ruby called Shoes that has the definite look of a Big Deal:
It seems like every project I work on uses more and more of _why’s code — at this point, I reach for YAML and Camping pretty much by default, and this library has the potential to get me back into desktop app development.
Three cheers for _why!
I went to no less that three different conferences this week, and presented (with varying degrees of formality and preparation) at each of them.
Overall, I’d say that the experience was less than stellar. Having to context-switch so much meant that I didn’t really get “into” any of the individual events, and still managed to get basically nothing done around the office. Since I was somewhat-actively participating, I didn’t even manage to grab many photos, despite lugging the D200 around all week.
So, what would I change going forward?
First, attending conferences here in Portland is convenient, but that doesn’t mean they’re without cost, either in time or mental bandwidth. Trying to stack three of them back-to-back was just not a good idea.
Second, it would be helpful to have a more focused agenda for what talks, sessions, and groups I try to participate with. Historically, I’ve been a pretty serious generalist when it came to technology, and while that’s helped me bridge a lot of disciplines and projects, it’s also kept me from really being involved in the “meat and potatoes” work in any of them.
Finally, I’m beginning to think that my future may lie in the non-profit, rather than higher education, sector. There pace of innovation and change in the academic market just isn’t the same as in the rest of the world, but serving the progressive non-profit sector would still let me sleep at night.
The slides from my FOSCON talk are available here:
Thanks to everyone who organized the event, and to all the attendees for making it so much fun. Next time, I’ll bring more tinfoil.
Thanks to some serious ass-kicking on the organizational front over the last few weeks, a handful of dedicated local Ruby folks have pulled together an even more ambitious FOSCON this year than in the past. It’s moving to a much larger venue: the Holocene, which in addition to being a very nice event space also happens to serve some very stiff mixed drinks, which should help to keep the party loose throughout.
The only blot on this otherwise stellar idea is that they have accepted some rather dubious speakers, including yours truly. I’ll be giving a talk on semi-paranoid security design for webapps, based on some of the recent work I’ve been doing in that area.
So, anyone who doesn’t already have plans on Tuesday night should come down and check it out. I may suck, but there ought to be a bunch of other great presentations, and lots of techie weirdness. All the details are on upcoming, if you need maps/times/etc.
I don’t usually blog other people’s photos, but this is important.
This phrase should be repeated anywhere and everywhere until people get it.
I’ve been having a really hard time motivating myself to work on anything independently lately. I’m still getting my work done, at a basic level, but when a potentially-interesting (read: hard, and open-ended) project idea comes up at work, I sort of think about it for a day or two, then say, “screw it,” and go back to maintaining the existing cruft.
There are a few causes I’ve been able to identify already — complacency being a biggie, since I’ve now been at my current job longer than anywhere else — but I think the one really major factor missing in my current work is mentoring. I’ve tackled some reasonably interesting problems in the last year or so, but once it’s done, I don’t have someone in the organization (or even in my local peer group) to present it to for constructive criticism.
To some extent, I think I may have set myself up for this problem by doing neither of the usual low-level techie routes to advancement: I didn’t finish college and “get my ticket punched,” and I didn’t stay in the private sector, slowly climbing my way up our of a pile of crappy J2EE development to the interesting “architect-level” work at the top of a technical team.
As I see it, the folks who come from the academic side don’t know what to do with me, ’cause my education is lacking in some pretty fundamental ways, and the commercial types can’t get over my lack of experience and unwillingness to “pay my dues” in production-line coding.
I’d love to figure out a good way of finding some more experienced folks to work with more actively on development projects, but I just don’t think that it’s going to happen unless I find a new job, and quite possibly move out of Portland. (The tech community here is great, but the more senior folks are all in the BigCo’s like Intel and Mentor Graphics, and I just can’t go back to cubicle-hell.)
I finally managed to herd the cats into getting together for a morning hackfest at Bus Project HQ. We had a half-dozen intrepid techies show up and work on various website and office IT projects, and I for one think it was a raging success. We probably accomplished more in six hours than one person working along could have done in a couple of weeks.
The major accomplishment was getting about 75% of the way through an upgrade of the primary website from its somewhat ancient underlying version of Drupal to a shiny new Drupal 5.1 environment. From the horror stories I’d heard elsewhere in Drupal-land, I expected this process to be considerably more painful than it turned out to be. We’re not there yet, but we can see the finish line from here.
On top of that, Lucas and Ian did some great work on a new monthly membership tool, which should save the Bus staff and monthly members a lot of time dealing with getting credit card numbers and other payment details. I was too wrapped up in the main website project to get to sling much code with them on Sunday, but they used camping, my current go-to webapp toolkit, so I look forward to being able to contribute more in the next week or so.
More importantly, we have a bit more community ownership of some of these projects now. If there’s been one major failing I could point to w.r.t. the Bus IT infrastructure in the past, it would be the continuing dependence on one or two “rockstar” tech volunteers who build and maintain all the critical systems. Their contributions have been incredibly valuable, but the inevitable brain drain when they move on to do other things means that a lot of things tend to just sort of fall into disrepair between major overhauls.
Since I don’t expect that I (or any of the tech volunteers who actually do the important stuff, instead of just organizing) will be around forever, my primary goal is to build a sustainable community of tech volunteers, rather than push any particular initiative or project. (That being said, we have some damn cool projects in the pipe that I think could have a pretty major impact on the Bus and its whole community going forward.)
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