The Popular

If you’re unaware, I’m a computer programmer. Often, while programming I’ll have things pop into my head. Sometimes related to programming, but often completely unrelated. (Hence the title “while {coding}”.)
One of the things that pops into my head often (and that I’m able to articulate fairly well) is the process of hiring and/or being hired as a programmer. These posts have seen the most traffic, by far:

How To Hire Me (or any other programmer for that matter) And the follow-up. This went insanely viral, especially among recruiters. I received emails about that post (and the published article that came out of it) for about 4 years.

A Tale of Two Interviews (a two-part story) compares two different interview experiences I had back in 2009. This was popular on Hacker News but I don’t think it reached much further than that. If you’re a programmer or other technical professional you probably have similar stories to tell.

But I’m Most Proud Of

My call to Play, which I still read from time to time, especially when feeling stressed.

Whither Bob Grossblatt. Not only did I write a heartfelt piece, it resulted in a nice correspondence with the man himself.

My Not-So-Hyper Loop. I worked on this for the better part of a week during a research hiatus when I should have been working on my research project! But no one knew what the Hyperloop was yet and it was just fun to imagine and do a little napkin math for a semi-practical application. No regrets.

The Cavity Model of Software Development. Every now and then I have an idea that I struggle to explain clearly. This is probably one of those… or it’s a terrible idea. I’m fine with either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Projects Over the Years

These are not thrilling posts, but they document the kind of things that pop into my head and occasionally make it into code.

Swisstime, a tool to help with time profiling in Python. Kind of like “println” debugging, but for profiling.

Wheeler, a programming language project which is still ongoing (for almost 10 years now) and might be for the rest of my life. RIP my other side projects.
(The language has evolved a lot since that early post but it is still very similar to what I described. Look for a new version in the next 6-180 months!)

Virtlib, a community technical lending library, which amazingly got strangers to actually lend books to each other, but mostly aided and abetted my perma-borrowing two or three books from my fellow Portland geeks.

Snippetology, allowing Django to do some CMS tricks.

Twimmetry, just a terrible, terrible hypothesis that Twitter user “realness” hinges on ratios of following/followed. At least the Twitter API was fun to play with (when I wasn’t crying).

ResearchedFacts.com which I thought was funny and I guess it kind of anticipated the “post-truth” era. I took it down because I was sure someone was going to sue me or die or both.

Odds n Ends

I’ve written a lot more. Not everything is a gem, but there are some useful thoughts about various things like managing expectations, conquering hard problems, and the importance of persevering.

That’s the intro. Please feel free to reach out via email or twitter, or pull request. See my main page for details.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my site and read this far. It is greatly appreciated.

Matt Youell
Portland, Oregon
October 2018

“NEXT YEAR???”

My heart would ache. How was it possible to be OK with that? Who was that patient? I couldn’t imagine.

I now do this every day. I set out on an adventure – maybe to create something, maybe to fix a problem. Hazards and roadblocks befall me. Software conflicts, server configuration, network connectivity, meetings.

And at the end of my day what I set out to do isn’t done but… the path seems clear for tomorrow.

I have a new monitor. It’s an LG 29UC97C-B, a 29–inch, curved, “ultrawide” monitor. It cost $500. Getting it was a tiny adventure in time and space.

I really, really, REALLY wanted the LG 34" but my 2012 Macbook Air just can’t push that many pixels.

I expected Apple might have a nice (if overpriced) offering. Not really. They are still selling their 2011-era 27" Thunderbolt Display which was kind of unimpressive when it first shipped. At $999 it’s almost what that dreamy 34" LG costs! No deal.

Apple does have some sweet displays on their Retina iMacs though. An interview with Marco Arment talking about his iMac got me thinking maybe I was on the wrong track. Maybe I need a new computer. So I went shopping. I had a $4k fully-loaded iMac in my Apple shopping cart before my inner fiscal-conservative woke up. Nope, nope, nope!

Back to monitor shopping, I began to see a divide: ultrawide monitors vs. 5k monitors. So many pixels. But I had my magic numbers: 2560×1600. That’s the max my Mac can drive. With that in mind I ran across a review for the Samsung S29E790C, a 29″ curved monitor running 2560×1080. I almost bought that on the spot. It’s well reviewed and looked good in the YouTube videos I saw. Then I spotted the LG. Not a lot of info was available. The YouTube reviews I found were in Russian and Mandarin. There was exactly one review on Amazon. Risky!

After some hand-wringing I decided that if I want the big LG in the future, I should try the modest LG right now and see what happens. And that’s what I did. I ordered through Amazon but it was drop-shipped directly from Korea. Expedited Shipping was included and it was FAST. I got my monitor less than 48 hours after ordering. (I was lucky. Estimated arrival was anywhere between 2 and 5 days.) The only real hassle in the entire process was finding the right cable for it after it arrived. My Macbook Air has a Thunderbolt port (aka Mini DisplayPort) and the LG has a regular DisplayPort connector. The local Apple Store couldn’t help me so I had to find one on my own. A day later I was up and running.

So how is it? I’ve only had it for three days but so far it’s been incredible. I’m still getting used to how to work with it. I’ve been hunched over a 13" laptop for the past three years. I’ve found that virtual desktops are actually MORE necessary with this much space, so I’m learning how to manage my Mac all over again. I suspect that the novelty will wear off pretty quickly, but I do think my productivity is going to improve. I’ve built up a lot of habits on a small screen that I need to unlearn. I’m always running a text editor, a terminal window, and a web browser and switching constantly between them. I can already tell that I’m losing a lot of time tabbing between windows which could be sitting side by side. There’s probably a lot more to learn.

Measuring how long code takes to run is not exactly unexplored country. Still, nothing I found seemed to fit my needs. A profiler was overkill. Other timing tools wanted to measure one thing at a time. I wanted to run my code and at the end see a tidy little report of times for each chunk of code. Here’s what the output looks like:

————————————————–
Time in seconds
————————————————–
1.095976 | Startup
0.117262 | Load input image
0.018422 | Build masks
0.117944 | Populate layers
0.015563 | Build layers
0.019718 | Tone down green
0.092624 | Convert to floats
0.341209 | Resize
0.006941 | Image adjustments
0.056750 | Convert to bytes
0.916881 | Save as PNG

In this particular example I’ve labeled each chunk of code in an image conversion script. This report tells me how fast each chunk is. For example, I can see that the dominating times for this script are startup (over 1 second) and the final conversion of the output PNG (nearly 1 second). In an earlier incarnation of this script those times seemed very small because the dominating chunk of code was “Populate layers”, which took 12 seconds!

You can install SwissTime with pip like so:

pip install swisstime

Here is what typical usage looks like:

import swisstime
swisstime.start()

# Do some things
swisstime.tick("I did some things!")

# Do some more things
swisstime.tick("Even more things happened!")

print(swisstime.report())

(Alternatively you can just call swisstime.data() to get a list of time/label tuples that you can use to analyze times over many runs.)

There’s a lot to be said for solving a problem without code.

If you avoid writing code, you avoid spending time writing code. You avoid spending time thinking of different ways to solve the problem. You avoid fighting with your tools to get the results you want. You avoid testing of all stripes: unit, regression, acceptance. You avoid integration hassles. You never have to communicate with another team in another timezone about the code you didn’t write. You never have to optimize the code you didn’t write. You don’t have to debug the code you didn’t write. You don’t have to ship the code you didn’t write. You don’t have to support the code you didn’t write.

At some point code has to be written. Otherwise your cell phone would come with rotary dial and have a phone number like ‘Lancaster 3816′. But maybe a good first step before breaking new code is to imagine how things might work if you never touched the keyboard at all.

I got it.

I have to admit, at first it was flattering. I got a lot of attention. It felt so good to be wanted.

Over time I got used to it. Maybe I took it for granted. On a regular basis I got approached. A pattern emerged after a while: Most were duds. They didn’t have much to offer and would chat up anyone. Easy enough to ignore.

A small minority have been aggressive. I have to say, sometimes this works. The guy who called every 6 months for 2 years? He almost got somewhere with me. He was nice and took me to lunch once. The timing just never worked out between us.

Others are just cold and calculating. It’s clear they only want one thing and they aren’t beyond harassing me to get it. The stupidest thing is that I’m not what they think I am. I’m not a real person to them; I’m whatever they are projecting on to me at the moment.

I might say “No thanks” and be challenged with questions. Do I know what I’m passing up?, I’m asked. Other times I’m tempted to say “fuck off”, but that’s bound to result in more conflict than I want. For the most part I just ignore them and hope they go away.

I have some guilt. Some people would kill to get the attention I do. I should be grateful, shouldn’t I?

What a bitch.

I originally posted this to the much-esteemed West Side Programmer’s mailing list after a conversation about the possibility (or not) of a coming AI Apocalypse. With the release today of Tesla’s Autopilot I was inspired to share.

Setting: “15 minutes into the future“, etc.

Three cars drive toward an intersection. All are self-driving. A family of psychotic beavers succeeds in felling a tree just as the cars come to the intersection. The tree is going to fall on one of the cars, killing the occupant. The car detects the motion of the tree and accurately predicts the seriousness of the situation. It begins to calculate what its evasive actions should be. Because of proximity to each other, the car (Car A) is also in contact with Car B and Car C, each of which have a different perspective. The cars quickly determine a course of action based on pre-programmed directives and information collected/determined on the fly. The information gathered and/or calculated includes specific details about the passengers: physical characteristics, age, health, income, projected lifetime earnings, dependents, likelihood of future offspring, debt, credit score, political affiliation, organizational memberships, criminal convictions, size and nature of social networks, employer, employer’s placement in a network of companies and organizations with respect to each car’s manufacturer, likely legal actions taken by parties in the web of relations of each passenger, likely outcomes of all legal actions, negative publicity likely to be drawn by every possible scenario of this event, impact of that publicity on the stock price of each involved car manufacturer in every possible scenario, and legal ramifications to executives and board members of those companies.

What happens?

The cars all crash while waiting for server instances in the cloud to spin up.

No, I’m kidding. Here’s what actually happens: The cars decide that while the accident is entirely avoidable w/o injury to anyone, having such an amazing near miss will result in a feel-good news story which will cause an unwanted fluctuation in the stock price of their respective manufacturers.

Luckily the cars also understand that death is an unacceptable outcome. The three cars leap into action to allow the tree to fall across all of them at once. This distribution of the crushing load merely cripples each occupant permanently instead of killing one of the passengers. Since the story is sad but not considered tragic nor feel-good the media ignores it and the manufacturers’ stock prices remain unaffected.

“Don’t wanna be that white dude Million-Man marching.”

That lyric has gone through my head every time I’ve thought about writing this post. In fact the bulk of this post has been sitting in the hopper for about 2 months. It’s awkward to talk about.

(For those readers who aren’t aware, I’m a boring white guy heading into middle age.)

I don’t remember exactly when I saw the Black Lives Matter phrase. I probably saw the hashtag whenever it first trended. I just remember thinking, “Well sure, all lives matter.”

And don’t they?

“They should just say All Lives Matter”, I thought to myself. I knew something was off there, but I couldn’t say what at first.

“Black Lives Matter” was just a little offensive. Somehow the back of my brain interpreted that as “Black Lives Matter MORE”. I think by singling out a group and saying “this is important”, it somehow comes across as superior. It took me a while to understand.

I’m all over the place politically, but in recent years I’ve found a lot of alignment with the left. I’ve never once felt comfortable calling myself a liberal (or worse, progressive) in no small part because of the “woo”. You know the woo. You have to say things the right way. You have to feel the right feelings, usually guilt or self-hatred. You have to support whatever is the cause du jour. I’m not big on woo, and #blacklivesmatter had some of that woo feeling at first.

I have a lot of liberal friends and acquaintances though, so I did as I often do about these matters: I shut the fuck up about it. Social media fights are just not my cup of tea.

But as the weeks went by I got more used to seeing the phrase. As more stories came out about black folks being abused and killed by police, something started to click.

Nothing mysterious happened, I just realized that Black Lives Matter is about a relationship. Sometimes in a relationship you can “know things” but they still aren’t felt. I know I love my wife. I know she loves me. But sometimes we need to hear it. Sometimes you feel like things have slipped away. You feel like you aren’t valued. You aren’t wanted. You aren’t loved.

All lives matter. That’s a fact. But it’s not what people need to hear right now.

Right now people need to hear Black Lives Matter and – more importantly – know that it is truly felt and meant.

“Don’t wanna be that white dude Million-Man marching.”

Still, understanding something, or at least forming my own understanding, is only one step. What to do after that?

Well, whatever it is, it’s not this. I’m sure these folks mean well, but this seems like more white liberal paternalism (which is its own systemic problem). It’s not about you, dear bleeding hearts. It’s about the few bad apples in positions of power, and it’s about the system that tolerates abuse, and it’s about the victims of that abuse.

I don’t have any answers, just a little more clarity than before. For me, for the time being, the job is listening.

A small point of clarity. This post is about “Black Lives Matter”, as a concept. There is also a political movement/organization under that same name. This post is not a discussion of the organization.

This philosophy is great. Share honestly. No filters. No posturing. No editing. Not even deleting! You grab a slice of your experience and send it out into space. It’s such a strong departure from a lot of social sharing ideas.

Is that enough to make a compelling social media platform?

It’s not as easy as it seems to just share video. It’s embarassing to just record whatever, whenever. You’re confronted with your ego and social boundaries that you may not be used to. I feel incredibly self-conscious using the app. More than when I record regular video with my phone. Part of that may be the hand-over-heart mechanics (looking like a dork) but part of it may also be the lack of control. I’m basically putting the people around me on live TV. It’s TV that only 5 other people will see, and it’s only for 4 seconds at a go. It’s still out of my hands where that video goes and who sees it.

Aside from feeling self-conscious, your daily life is likely pretty boring. Which means your videos are pretty boring. I’m lucky enough to live in an interesting place and I see some interesting things every day. I have a lot of raw material to work with and even so most days are pretty boring. Now, aggregate that over thousands or millions of people and as a content consumer, you’ll never be bored because you can always look at other people’s boring lives all day. But as a content creator, you’re challenged to come up with something novel on a regular basis.

Who is this app for? I’m not quite sure. You’re definitely at an advantage using it if you’re an experienced daily vlogger, but judging from what I’ve seen over the past year or so I’m guessing the target audience is younger folks, probably teen girls. If it’s aiming to be a Snapchat killer, I can only say I’m not in the target demographic.

How is this app going to grow? It’s had a hell of a launch. Casey did a great job of building hype beforehand, and the throttling of new users only added to the hype. But that only gets people trying the platform. Why will people stay on Beme?

For me, I like the idea of being able to share things I see. I’ve even found that when I see something interesting and I don’t put it on Beme, I feel guilty, like I’ve let people down. In reality I haven’t let anyone down. I have very few followers so far and even so, no one is expecting anything of me. I wish I was letting people down; I wish I had that many people who cared. But I don’t see how that can ever be the case because there is no virality.

I’ve been a loyal Twitter user for over 7 years. Twitter does the viral thing quite well. I can say something funny or stupid and that can be retweeted through the network. I get rewarded with more followers, but more significantly I get more chances to interact with other people. As things stand right now I can’t do anything like that with Beme.

The lack of virality seems like a glaring weak spot in the entire effort. It’s certainly possible to build a social platform without an overt viral mechanism. Snapchat did it. But Snapchat also has different mechanics, a different origin story, and a long build-up. (Maybe Beme consists of a lot more nudes than I am aware?)

I worked at a startup years ago that decided they needed to pivot and build a social media app. None of the brass in the company actually used Twitter in any meaningful way, but we went ahead and build a niche Twitter clone anyway. Shockingly, no one used it. Beme reminds me of that experience. Plenty of people are using it because it was well-launched. But Beme doesn’t complete the circuit in a few key ways and that makes me doubt people will continue to use it unless the developers move extremely fast to shape things into a more compelling experience.

Beme feels a little ahead of it’s time in the wrong way. This app would absolutely rock for Google Glass. Maybe there is some bigger picture that Beme is playing to which we can’t see yet?

You can follow me on Beme as user: built

In the shower the other day I realized I was not-singing a song. My brain was singing but my vocal apparatus felt shy. I started to work on this and began to sing, being very aware of what my mouth and voicebox were doing. With that awareness I noticed the odd pinch my mouth does when I pronounce an ‘S’.

Speech therapy started in kindergarten.

“Ssad Ssam Ssells Ssilly Putty and Sseaweed by the Sseashore.”

“Again. Hold your teeth together.”

“Sshlad Sam Sshlells Sshilly Putty and Seaweed by the Sseashore.”

“Again.”

Speech therapists, if I have to generalize, are a fairly kind lot. Mostly women, mostly well-meaning, mostly pleasant. But you can imagine after a certain amount of time goes by that even the pleasant and the patient will throw up their hands. I graduated from speech therapy in 5th grade, not so much by right as by exhaustion.

My lisp cleared up within a year or two after therapy stopped. Maybe it was a rough junior high experience. Maybe I just found my own path.

The lisp is, I’m told, detectable but not overly noticeable. That is to say, I’m passing.

My ‘S’ sounds fall into a sound similar to a “ssh”, though far short of Sean Connery.

I’m also told, when I use the technique taught to me in speach therapy, I can make the lisp disappear. It never sounds right to me. I learned how to make my mouth do the right thing, but I never internalized the technique. I don’t know if this was Fuck You, or ADHD, or just an inability to change my every waking word.

I remember around the time therapy started, seeing Henry Kissinger on the TV and asking why that guy got to have a lisp and I didn’t.

As an adult, I still don’t have an answer. Why did I have to lose my lisp? What did it save me? I was still an outsider, still bullied, still a nerd and a faggot and whatever else.

Back in the shower, I’m trying to sing. Shushing out my ‘S’s when something flips in my brain.

I can take it back.

I can take my lisp back.

Can I take my lisp back? It’s been a long while.

Should I?

Whose language is this?

It’s mine.