I recently purchased a Canon EOS 250d (also sold as the Canon Rebel SL3.) I thought, “hey, the 200d has been around forever, it probably won’t be hard to get it working for video streaming and recording my talks.”
I was naive. If you own one, you may have the same problem. (NOTE: I HAVE A SOLUTION...
I help folks practice to get better at writing software. So sometimes I’m asked, “how do you practice well in general?” A lot of my answer comes from The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. I find that the good books basically agree about what makes good practice. I’m also quoting this article for a few...
(This visa used to be called the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa and is now called the Global Talent visa. Same thing.)
People ask me why I moved to Inverness. Lots of reasons, of course. But one thing that seriously helped was a flexible visa to get me and my family into the United Kingdom. One reason...
In a moment, all of you readers are going to hate Matt Bird. I get it. I hate him too.
He’s a professional screenwriter who also wrote a great book about how to write. You’d think that might excuse him a bit, but no, I’m not letting him off the hook. Some crimes are unforgiveable. You’ll see.
Here...
After about 3.5 years of writing and researching about Ruby performance on AppFolio’s company blog, I’m going out on my own, to work for myself.
My hope is that having moved to the Scottish Highlands, I can make a living selling my books Rebuilding Rails and Mastering Software...
My kids are mercifully distracted for a few moments. The giant jumble of colored blocks on my calendar has a gap right now. No due dates are marked in red in my overgrown to-do list.
I am free to practice. I have skills I certainly want to practice.
And here I am, staring dully at the teddy bear next to my monitor, not practicing. Why? Here’s one: I am afraid of wasting this precious practice time, of throwing it away on nothing worthwhile.
What if I’m practicing wrong? What if there’s some better way to do it, and I’ll be sad that I bothered? What if I’m a sucker because I’m putting in hours that do me no good?
I can’t magic my fear away, but I can talk through it and explain it. I always feel better afterward. Care to come with me on this little journey?
Many of you know that I’ve been AppFolio’s Ruby Fellow for over three years. I feel like it’s been a great run, both for me and for AppFolio. I hope it’s been a great run for the rest of you. I know many of you have said very kind things about my articles about Ruby performance.
My time as Ruby Fellow...
You’ve probably seen the little excerpts of Orangutan Jungle School on YouTube (or elsewhere.) If you haven’t, they’re awesome, and worth watching.
Here’s a fairly representative example.
But basically, people doing orangutan rescue are doing a lot of filming what goes on with their six-hundred...
A few months ago, a CTO at a conference asked me, “how do you encourage a blogging culture at your company?” I’m a reasonable fellow to ask. Not only have I written a huge amount for AppFolio’s engineering blog and encouraged other AppFolio engineers to do so, I also did something similar at OnLive with even more success. By “more success” I don’t mean the blog was more popular (it wasn’t,) but that about half the posts were written by engineers other than me, which is the hard part. Writing a lot is all well and good. Getting other people to write a lot is an accomplishment.
The hard part isn’t getting a few posts started. The hard part is blogging with any regularity. And it is hard. But there are some things you can do to make it easier.
I’ve been fortunate to work in DevOps and with great Ops folks in my career, including doing enough of that work to get a feel for it. The tools are fun and it’s nice to be able to do basic tasks, but the incredible, invaluable thing was just watching how experienced OpsFolk responded to different events.
It’s not just the smooth, immediate way that they handle warnings and outages, though that is impressive. It’s also their basic understanding that new features, even features meant for robustness and resilience, are basically trouble. It’s not that an undisturbed system will necessarily keep working… But a system you disturb will invariably develop problems of some kind. Deployments tend to break things, and deploy-free weeks like holidays tend to be downtime-free.
But the important part isn’t the fact that they’re right. The important part is seeing a completely different attitude toward the software we write. Our way is valid for what we do, their way is valid for what they do, but it gives us completely different principles (that is, “unwritten rules that underlie everything we say and do”) about software.
Just like “everybody else has an accent,” it feels like everybody else has a mindset - our mindset is just “the right thing.” But seriously, what are the unwritten rules in software development?
And it’s not even just Ops or DevOps. There are a lot of mindsets in the world, and developers are just one of many.
If we’re the fish in the bowl, what does the water look like?
And what would the opposite look like? If software developers get our superpowers from this mindset, what superpowers do other folks get from very different mindsets?
