Eric F. Savage

Ideas are like rabbits

Posted on May 12, 2011May 13, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

I’m not an advocate or follower of any particular productivity framework, or even that you should have one, but I’ve recently rediscovered a fragment of one that has been very significant. The short version is that writing down ideas makes room for more, the long version follows.

As hinted at in my previous post, I’ve been experiencing a bit of overwhelming intellectual stimulation lately. I credit this to my new freelancing ways. I can spend an hour, or a day following a thought, where before, I had to run it alongside my work responsibilities. Not to say I have no responsibilities to my clients, but I think I’ve set expectations to the point where I can balance things better.

Last week I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with tasks, and went back to a GTD technique which is to essentially write down everything you need to do. There is a cathartic aspect to this, as well as the feeling of “oh, well that’s no so bad” once you see the list. In the past, my list was 20, 30 maybe as many as 50 items. This time, I railed off over 200 in a row, and many more in the following couple of days. This did NOT instill a feeling of “oh, well that’s no so bad”.

Once my brain was sufficiently debriefed, I looked at the list. I noticed that most of the things were my own projects. Research this, test that, learn that, add feature X to library Y, and so on. It turns out that many of my todos were more idea-related than work-related. And almost everytime I looked at one, others would pop up. I guess this makes it more like mitosis than rabbits, but you get the idea, and rabbits are cuter anyways. Regardless, it was, and is, out of control, and it’s great.

This is not a new invention, it’s basically brainstorming, and there are other people doing it too. I think the part of it that’s new for me is that I’m not drawing any distinction between ideas and tasks, and I’m not seeing any value to doing so. I’m not getting overwhelmed by tasks I haven’t started because in fact, I have started them, by logging ideas related to them. For software at least, expressing ideas is not far removed from doing the actual work, so I’m almost tricking myself into being productive.

There are two problems, however. The first is that my list is scaling poorly, and there are no tools that work for me. I’ve tried mind-mapping in the past, and might try it here, but am not especially hopeful. The second problem is that I simply don’t have enough time to do it all, and I’m afraid no program will ever help there.

Freelancing vs. Contracting vs. Employment

Posted on May 11, 2011May 11, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

I’ve been freelancing for a little over two months now, and already it has been an exciting, rewarding experience. I figured I would share a few observations.

What do I mean by “freelancing” as opposed to contracting. I admit there is no official differentiation of the two, this is strictly my own, and I apply it narrowly to software/knowledge work.

I see freelancing as the extreme end of transient employment. They may be hired on a per project basis, or a per day basis. There isn’t any implicit availability, they’re booked (and paid) or you’re not. They don’t go to meetings that aren’t very relevant, or get unwillingly reassigned. If there are no projects where you can offer expertise, you’re done. If a company tightens it’s belt, freelancers are the very first to go, with no notice, no severance.

I see contracting as provisional employees. They aren’t vested in the company, but they essentially perform like an employee. They probably go to company-wide meetings, fit into the normal reporting structure, etc. After the freelancers go, the contractors are next in line. Usually contractors are given time to “wrap things up” or have a planned end date.

Employees are, well, employees. They work for the company, and only for the company. Hopefully if the company makes a lot of money, the employees benefit, where the previous types don’t. Many people think employment offers job security, but short of official agreements like tenure or unions, I disagree. I define job security as the ability to get a job, not to keep one. I’m not cynical about fatcat CEOs laying people off for fun, I’m just realistic in terms of what employment actually provides.

The reason I choose freelancing is that I want to be intellectually promiscuous, at least for now, and I want that arrangement to be very clear to clients. I have a self-imposed 20 hour per client per week cap. This may sound silly to you, and it certainly hasn’t been popular with clients. It’s a tough sell, and it has cost me some otherwise good opportunities. I admit I haven’t really mastered it yet, but I think I’m getting better at it, and am grateful that my clients have been accommodating. On the other hand, I don’t think that I’d be nearly as stimulated as I am now, but that’s a topic for another post.

Ubuntu: See you in 2012

Posted on April 14, 2011June 2, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

As a follow-up to my previous post, I’ve just finished moving off my Ubuntu VMs. I don’t necessarily blame Ubuntu for this, but it’s just a little too laggy in a VM. I bet it’s only a few ms most of the time, but it’s noticeable and it’s frustrating when you’re in a good flow. Perhaps next year, if there have been improvements on both the Linux and VMWare side.

I did try VirtualBox, which seemed slightly more responsive but was very flaky, it would randomly lock up in strange ways. I also tried Virtual PC, which isn’t really an option since it lacks real multi-monitor support, but didn’t offer any improvements anyways.

Another issue which may seem minor but any programmer will tell is definitely not is that my code font, Lucida Console, doesn’t work the same on Linux. I’m not familiar enough with font mechanics to say how, but I tried everything including fractional font sizes to going through probably 50 other fonts, and it just doesn’t have the right density. Fonts on Linux are getting better though, I did enjoy the Ubuntu font in the OS UI.

Alternatively running Windows 7 in VMWare so far has been almost completely transparent. I haven’t done it enough to say it’s a total success but I’ve already gotten confused when I’m in full-screen, which is a good sign. Of course the downside is that licensing issues are tricky and expensive, but since these are for paying projects, I can recoup the $200 fee. I may try an OEM license for the next one, it appears to be legal and about half the cost.

To Git or not to Git

Posted on March 17, 2011March 17, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

You might notice from my past few posts that I’m basically going through my entire stack of tools and re-evaluating everything. This time it’s version control.

A little history

I’ve mostly used SVN, and before that, CVS. I’ve tinkered with some of the more heavyweight ones like ClearCase, TrueChange, and Visual SourceSafe as part of consulting gigs, but only enough to know that they were skills unto themselves, and ones I didn’t especially want to let into my brain. My personal repo up till now has been SVN after finally switching over from CVS a few years ago.

Why SVN?

The short answer is, because it’s easy. The longer answer is that it’s easy to set up, it’s fairly hard to break, and it has a decent Eclipse plugin. You might notice that I didn’t mention anything about branches, or rollbacks, or speed, or centralized vs. distributed. Those things don’t really matter to me if the first three requirements aren’t satisfied.

Branches are the devil

I don’t hate branches because they were a legendary nightmare in CVS. I don’t hate branches because svn merge rarely works. I hate branches because of the mental cost they inflict on a team.

Having a team work in multiple branches is, as far as I’ve ever seen it, a sign that your team is too big or your project is too monolithic or your effective management and oversight capabilities are lacking.

There are cases where branches don’t impose such a cost, however. If there are no plans to ever merge a branch back to trunk, they are simply an experimental offshoot where a few snippets might be pulled into trunk/master, that’s fine.

If everyone is switching to a new branch, that’s also fine. At one point we had to rollback to code from over a month prior, and weren’t sure if we were going to get back to trunk or not. Everyone switched to the new branch, and luckily everyone was able to switch back to trunk a few months later. It took days to merge back, and that wasn’t SVN’s fault, that was just a lot of human time that was required to pull two very different versions together safely and not leave landmines all over the place.

Not on my resume

I don’t put any VCS software on my resume, because, while it’s absolutely important to use one, I don’t think it’s that important which one I know or use (it is a good interview question, though). They aren’t really that hard to learn, and since everyone uses them slightly differently there’s no avoiding some ramp-up time. If an employer ever has me and another candidate so close that our VCS experience is the deciding factor, please, take the other person.

Dirty little secret

I don’t actually have the command line version of svn or cvs installed on any of my workstations. Nor do I have standalone GUIs or shell integration like Tortoise. I know the command line, and use it on servers, but I do all my actual development with Eclipse’s integrated client. I’ve actually even used Eclipse to manage svn projects that were Flash or C. I just find the command line so restricting and linear for what really is a very non-linear task. The eclipse subversion plugin took years to go from bad to passable, and it’s still not as good as the CVS version, which is one reason I never grew too attached to SVN.

Why? I need to see everything that’s changed, that’s dirty. I diff every file individually before I commit. I often find changes I didn’t really need to make, and nuke them. Sometimes I find that I actually didn’t account for a situation the old code did. Many times just looking at my code in this way makes me think just different enough that I come up with a better way of doing it. I simply don’t have this visibility amidst the >>> and <<< of a command-line diff, because it’s not my native development environment.

Enter git

So, even though I’d be happy to continue using SVN, I need to see what all this git hubbub is about. It’s been around for over 5 years now, so clearly it’s not a fad. It’s also been vouched for by enough voices I respect that it deserved a shot. There is also Mercurial and Bazaar, but I haven’t seen nearly the same level of buy-in from trusted people for those.

My sideline view is that git is favored by the python people and the “ruby taliban”. Mercurial seems to be favored by the Microsoft and enterprise crowd, and bazaar is somewhere out back playing with package maintainers. Java is still mostly in SVN land, probably because it’s more mature, more corporate, and slower moving. 5 years isn’t a long time in Java years these days, so I’d bet that a high percentage of projects people are still working on are from when git was just Linus stomping his feet. The Spring/JBoss people seem to have gone the Mercurial route, while Eclipse is going git.

Git also has github, which is used by some people I know, while I don’t know anyone personally who is using Mercurial’s version, bitbucket (or even using Mercurial for that matter). So I ultimately went with what Eclipse and my friends were using over the other interests, and started with git. From what I understand the differences are slight in the early stages anyways, this was really more a matter of trying DVCS vs. VCS.

First steps

I started off with Github’s helpful handholding, which included installing msysgit. I imported my projects and used it in earnest for a few days. Once I was confident in my ability to actually get stuff up there, I dug a little deeper.

I read the Pro Git book, which I need to call special attention to because it’s really, really, good. It’s short, concise, has diagrams where you need diagrams, and ranks high in terms of how computer books should be written. If you don’t know anything about git, spend a night reading through this, and you will know plenty.

What about the secret?

So yeah, I was using the command line. Lean in closer so I can tell you why…BECAUSE THE GUIS ARE TERRIBLE. They’re not just ugly, they’re interface poisoning at a master level, think what an even more complicated Bugzilla would look like. And yes I say “they”, because there is more than one, and they’re all basically someone jamming the command line output into various GUI toolkits. Part of this is git’s design, but I know that someone will figure this out.

Git’s design allows for a huge number of permutations of workflow, which means there are a number of extra steps when comparing to something like subversion. On the command line, this doesn’t seem to hurt that much (in comparison). But GUIs don’t deal with situations like this very well. They can either be helpful and guide you down a path, or play dumb and wait for you to hold it’s hand. All of the Git guis I’ve seen so far do the latter.

Am I being a stick in the mud and saying that something as marvelous as git should be constrained to the simplicity of dumb old svn? Actually, yes. I should be able to edit some files, see a list of those files, diff them against the “real” version of the file (as in the one everyone else sees) and commit, with message. Then go home. I don’t care about SHA-1 hashes because I don’t remember them, I only need them when you need to tell me that two things are different. I don’t care about branches other than knowing which I’m in (we’ll get to this next). I don’t want to be bothered with any of this fancy information if nothing is broken (or going to break if I continue).

This isn’t actually a problem of git. This is a problem of people being indecisive when it comes to UIs. If you do everything, you fail. If you do nothing, you fail. If you do any subset of everything, you fail for some people. That’s OK, don’t worry, you can optimize as you go. Your first priority should not be exposing the power of git, it should be letting me put my code on the server so I can go home. Let me drop into all this fancy stuff with local branches and pushing tags and rebasing and such on a case-by-case basis, when I need it, and when I’m good at it.

What about the branches?

Git does branches right. I could go into more detail, but Pro Git does it so well I won’t bother, so just go read that. What git does not do very well, and I’m not sure if anything can do as long as humans are involved, is mitigate the mental cost of a distributed branch. It does make merging much more feasible, and allows for a larger number of cases where branches are not going to cost much, but they still need to be used with discipline and restraint.

The new idea that git adds is the local branch. I haven’t had a chance to use this much yet, but this is the feature that may ultimately win me over. I can look back and say “when have I ever needed a local branch?” and the answer would be “a few times, but not often”. But if I look back and ask “when would I have benefited from a local branch” and answer would be “hmm, I don’t know, but probably more often than I needed one”.

The example of the hotfix scenario (where you need to fix/test something from last week’s release and trunk/master isn’t ready) isn’t very compelling to me as an SVN user. It’s easy to make an SVN branch for something like this. I svn copy and switch it if my local copy is clean. If not, I can check out the project again, or if its a big one, I copy it over and svn switch it. Not as easy as git, but then again, I don’t generally have to make alot of hotfixes either.

The issue scenario (work one one issue per branch, merge when/if complete) is more compelling. I’d like to say that it isn’t and that I try to start and finish one issue at a time, but obviously that doesn’t happen enough. I like the fact that it’s so cheap to make a branch that I might as well just do it all the time. If I didn’t end up needing it, no harm done. If I did end up needing it, because some other issue suddenly got more important and the one I’m working needs to chill, then I’m glad it’s there.

The real win here is that nobody has to know about my branch, which means they never have to wonder what’s in it, or if its up to date. This means there is no cost to my team because I have a branch that is 2 weeks out of date. There is cost to me, but no more than having multiple versions of the project checked out, or a set of patch files sitting there waiting for me to get back to it.

One more thing

The fact that every developer has a full copy of the repository on their computer, basically for free? That’s really nice. Sure, you do backups and the chances of your computer being the last one on Earth with a copy of the repo is slim, but the peace of mind is undeniable.

The Verdict

The only reason this is really a decision at all is that git is harder to use for normal stuff. The command line can be scripted, so if someone got the GUI to the point where you start with an SVN-style workflow and deviate as needed, there really would be no argument to using SVN from what I can see.

My decision is that git is the winner here, despite that massive failing because I have faith that a combination of two things will happen. I will learn the GUIs better because it’s worth my time to do so, and someone will eventually figure out how to make it smarter and simpler.

I could not fault someone for sticking with SVN, even for a new project, because you can always import it later, but I will be starting new projects in git.

Why don’t websites have credits?

Posted on March 10, 2011June 7, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

Engineers of any discipline are largely an anonymous bunch. You don’t know who designed the fuel pump in your car, I’d even wager it would be extremely difficult for you find out if you wanted to. You don’t know who wrote the code for the OS X Dock or Windows Start bar or who wrote the Like button on Facebook. These people made decisions that affect you deeply every day, and you have no idea who they are.

The most interesting part of this is that those people are OK with it. If you ask them (myself included) they will tell you that it doesn’t matter, that what really matters is the quality of the work and the enjoyment you had doing it. Unfortunately, I think we’re wrong.

Should they?

I can’t seem to come up with a good framework for who figuring out who wants credit, never mind who deserves it. If you so much as make a photocopy during the production of a movie, you’re probably in the credits with some high-faluten title like “First deputy assistant duplication specialist”. Music credits are tied to royalties and managed very closely. Most authors wouldn’t think about publishing something anonymously, nor would artists or sculptors. Artists always sign their work.

This is not even strictly a software issue. Video games list credits, often in the box and at the end of the game, and they even have a IMDB-like site. Nor is it an “arts & entertainment” issue, any credible scientific paper will cite other works and acknowledge contributions. Patents have names on them, even when assigned to a company.

A few software packages have listed credits. If I remember correctly, Microsoft did it on old versions of Word and Excel, and Adobe had it on old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. I’m curious why those were removed, or at least hidden. “The Social Network” had something about Saverin being removed and re-added to “masthead” of Facebook (although I don’t know what or where that is).

So it would seem that we might be in the minority here, perhaps due to convention rather than any specific reason. And if there’s one thing that bugs an engineer, it’s deviating from standards with no good reason.

So let’s do it.

Why do it?

Pride in your work – Sure there is some pride in doing a good job anonymously, but wouldn’t be just a little more motivated or happy now that your name is on it?
Being a stakeholder – We’ve all done projects we didn’t believe in, and consoled ourselves with the fact that “it’s not my project”. Well, now it is.
Reputation – We’ve got our resumes, but credits will verify them.
Honesty/Transparency – There is no good reason to withhold this information, so it should be out there.
All that money they spent on school – Show your parents your name on a website and watch them smile.

So who’s get listed?

I think the short answer here is, everyone. Movies do it, why not websites? It could be just a big list of names, or something more detailed with contributions, dates, whatever makes sense. Let’s just start throwing some names up there, and let the de facto standards evolve on their own.

If you know of any major sites that do this well, put it in the comments. Similarly, if you can think of a good reason why this shouldn’t happen, I’d love hear about it.

Linux for Desktop, finally?

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

I love linux for servers, and I like the idea of using an open source desktop, but it’s never worked out between us. Once a year or so, I go grab the friendliest desktop distro and play with it until it breaks or I find out that some key piece of software is missing or too many versions behind.

I have an aggressive, but reasonable time limit for tinkering before I have to give up. If I cannot get up and running in 4 hours or so, it’s back to Windows. I just don’t have the patience for this type of work to be hacking undocumented config files to do stuff that “just works” in a commercial OS.

I’ve tried various combinations of red hat, suse, debian with gnome, kde, even regular X back in the day. They all failed, usually miserably, often long before the 4 hour time limit.

I should state that this is not because it is bad software, the people writing are doing good work. It’s just been a little too hot rod/DIY for my taste.

This year, the attempt had a bit of a wrinkle, in favor of the candidate. As I’ve recently gone freelance, I’m trying to use a virtual machine per client. This has a number of benefits that I will get into in a future blog post when I’ve had more time to use it. This means that I’m not looking at a linux desktop as a full-on OS replacement, but as a guest OS for my development work.

So I don’t have to complain about how bad Gimp is, or even bother setting up IM or email clients or play music or connect my phone. I will run all of those in the host OS, which in this case is Win 7 Pro.

So last night, I set up Ubuntu 10.10 in VMWare player. The “easy install” was, in fact, easy. It just booted up, at the right resolution, without any warnings. JDK 6 was already installed. I found eclipse (3.5, not 3.6, but doable) through the “Ubuntu Software Center”, as well as MyQL Query Browser and Chromium. apt-get mysql-server and … everything still works. Install subclipse and m2eclipse and we’re basically done.

So I’ve got a complete dev environment up and running and I haven’t had to edit a single config file*, or even reboot the VM. So kudos to the Ubuntu team!

Of course, in true open source fashion, now that all the major bugs have apparently been ironed out they’re dropping Gnome as the default window manager in favor of shiny new Unity, so who knows what the future holds…

*I did have to edit a VMWare config file to enable the back/forward button on my mouse, but I don’t think this has anything to do with Ubuntu. Seriously, it’s 2011 and this isn’t the default or even a checkbox in the settings screen? For those who need it, put:

mouse.vusb.enable = “TRUE”

into your .vmx file and bounce the VM.

Logging Like it’s 2002

Posted on January 21, 2011September 22, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

Cons

I’ve had some serious versioning issues with slf4j, due to some methods being removed or changed, so you end up with older code throwing errors when you use a newer version, thus requiring that you only use the old version and introduce the chance for strange errors in code expecting the newer version. For this reason, I don’t feel very comfortable specifying any version of slf4j, and I will leave it to the user to add it if they wish.

Conclusion

So JUL seems like the best choice for a stable, single-purpose library to use, as it’s the least imposing on whatever uses it. It should be noted that I haven’t actually used JUL yet in a real app, so perhaps I will find out that there’s an actual reason for its lack of popularity. If that’s the case, I will likely use slf4j, and try and find out which methods cause issues so I can avoid them, and not be the person someone else curses for requiring it.

Scripting Language

Posted on January 19, 2011June 7, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

On a mailing list I’m on, a few very smart, very experienced programmers were discussing the term “scripting language”. I had nothing of non-semantic value to add to the conversation, but I’ve heard this debate enough times that I figured I’d put my stock response here.

To the question “is X a scripting language?” the answer is “yes”. If the person is unhappy with this answer, the answer is “no”. At this point I ask “What will the correct answer to this question get you?”, and things unravel from there.

All rules someone can come up with to determine if something is a “scripting language” will be violated by at least one language they consider to be one. I assume there’s some fancy logician term for this, I’ll call it a paradoxical assignment until someone corrects me.

The term is vague, and the assignment of the term is typically in place of a more meaningful assessment such as “it’s not compiled”, or “it’s short”, so when someone asks this question, just dig a little deeper, and if someone says “just use a scripting language”, use Perl.

The Where and When of Music

Posted on November 12, 2010June 23, 2011 by Eric F. Savage

The idea that music can bring you back to a time and place is not a novel idea. There are songs you hear that make you remember the first time you heard them, or a specific event like a wedding, but I think there’s an even more powerful level. When I’m addicted to a song, it can get tied to a place as well as date, and when I’ve moved on from that place, I basically put that song back in its box, and file it away. It will come up in shuffle again someday, but it loses its primacy. Here are some of mine:

I Love a Rainy Night – Eddit Rabbit: Listening to the 45 in the playroom at my house when I was 5 or 6 years old.
Now That We Found Love – Heavy D and the Boyz: Involuntarily being subjected to this song every day on the bus to school. I think my blood pressure jumps 20 points just from hearing this.
Dig Your Own Hole – Chemical Brothers: Playing Starcraft in the basement of our hell-hole apartment on Tremont Street, wondering if I’d ever be able to find a programming job with no experience
Aenima – Tool: My friend/roommate at that same apartment Andy had a fancy stereo and a huge CD changer, but I think he only had 1 disc, so he pretty much played this album 24/7. I still can’t bring myself to buy a Tool album despite otherwise liking the band
Remixes – Ratatat: The second StyleFeeder office in it’s vacant, magenta glory.
A Thousand Suns – Linkin Park: The fourth (and current) StyleFeeder office. I seem to have no interest in listening to this album at home or in the car, but put it in a few times a week here

Earlier to Bed, Earlier to Rise

Posted on October 16, 2010October 15, 2010 by Eric F. Savage

About 6 months ago I shifted my schedule by 4 hours, literally overnight. Whatever I was up against, whether it was insomnia, sleep addiction, Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, or just being a night-owl, it was getting worse. Also, the summer was coming, I had a shiny new grill, and I wanted to get home early enough that I wasn’t using it in the dark. Much to my surprise, it actually wasn’t very difficult. Here’s how I did it:

Consistency – Probably the most important part. Go to bed at the same time every night, no matter how tired or wired you are. Lay there for hours if need be, in a few days you’ll be asleep earlier. Get up at the same time, no matter what, even on weekends. I had a few nights where I got 3 or 4 hours of sleep and needed energy drinks to get me through the day, but that changed fairly quickly. I was able to ease up on the schedule after a while, but I try not to deviate by more than an hour or two.
Don’t do it alone – I’m not sure I could have pulled this off by myself. Reeny didn’t even really have to do much, other than some encouragement and being an early-riser herself.
Get up first – I try to get out of bed first. Some mornings this aspect is what gets me moving. If she can get up, why can’t I?
Measure success daily – The point of this is to get up early, not to become an early riser. Even after 6 solid months, I know that I’d slip back to my old schedule within a matter of days on my own if I allowed it. But that’s OK.

Also, I changed my schedule a month or so before I changed my work schedule. I think this helped alot, because I didn’t have that additional stress.