In Engineers We Trust (to Get Shit Done)
Sharing is caring -Hi, I’m Buford, CTO over here at Rentify, and here, the engineering team has only one simple rule: Get Shit Done.
On San Francisco
I didn’t know I was in love with San Francisco until I landed back in SFO from New York. On the way back on the 101, you get a great view of the San Francisco skyline as you come over the hill near Bayview. Somewhere inside of my chest, I had a stirring. Some might call it an emotion. And it forced a smile to thin my lips. I was home.
SF, at first glance, is small, and dirty, and full of hipsters and tech assholes and people who know better than you. But upon exposure, almost half a decade of the Bay Area, SF can give you a lifetime of laughter, mind-opening experiences, and wealth.
It’s a mere 7 miles by 7 miles, with every neighborhood its own microcosm of culture, class, and weather. I’ve lived in five different neighborhoods in SF, and each time it felt like I moved to a different city. You might overhear something like, “I didn’t know they let stuck-up bitches out of the Marina” in the Haight, or something like, “My startup is about renting poodles to people who want a pet for only a few hours at a time, and we just got oversubscribed in our seed round,” in SOMA. You could be sun-tanning in Dolores Park and freezing your ass off in the Sunset. A massage in Lower Pacific Heights ends differently than a massage in the Financial District and ends extremely differently from a massage in the Castro. It’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into.
I had only seen one homeless person in my life before I came to SF. Where I’m from, the whole town knew our homeless man, and we named him Bicycle Bob, because he was also the only person in the whole town who didn’t have a car. In SF, owning a car is a liability, bicycles are all the rave, and there are far too many homeless for you to try to name them all. Whenever you go to a movie in San Francisco, you’ll see a big notice that informs you that the city of San Francisco is dedicated to acheiving 0 waste by 2020, which is only possible because of the copious amount of homeless people digging in the trash to recycle everything they can for change.
The average price for a 1 bedroom apartment where I’m from is about $500, which is a little less than the $2300 I’m paying now for a smaller apartment, but then again, my already good salary has tripled since I moved to SF. Do you know what a high salary means in one of the most expensive places in the country? It means that the rest of the country is cheap! Visiting the rest of the country (or even the world) is like spending play money. Seattle, Portland, Tahoe, Barcelona, Madrid, Sofia even Vegas and Paris barely hurts the billfold. Thinking about where I was born is sometimes frightening to consider that it would’ve taken me 15 years (or longer) to see all the places I’ve seen in 5 by living and working in SF.
It’s nonsense to think that just anyone can move to SF and start living like a king. The trick is to work in tech. If you say that you’re a software engineer, welcome to 6 figures. If you actually have a degree in Computer Science, welcome to having to change your phone number because of the 5 to 10 recruiters that will call you daily to encourage you to accept your $150k+ salary at a hot new startup. If you actually work at a hot new startup that manages to become successful, well let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Sometimes when you’re working at your hot new startup, you’ll forget that you’re a human being. You are defined by how much code you write, learning the tricks that will make you a [insert programming language] ninja, and getting out as many features as you can before your caffeine and sugar highs cause you to crash. A normal 50 hour a week job can easily turn into 100. You’ll spend nights and weekends at the office, and you might sleep at your desk, and you might take your computer with you to European beaches so you can bang out some code while ‘relaxing.’
After a while, you’ll burn out, and you’ll take a breather. SF offers bars on every street with strong beer that will guarantee that you are drunk enough to make some fine mistakes you’ll regret. SF offers people marching down the street in assless leather, intoxicated people in costumes running a marathon, cultural and musical festivals, airshows that cause at least 5 domesticated animal deaths per year, fucking critical mass assholes on bicycles who think they own the road, and more.
After that, you will question what you want to do with your life. You’re so open-minded now but confused because of all the possibilities life has to offer. Your friends will only confuse you further because they have great ideas that they are pursuing, ideas that you would like to pursue yourself. You’ll want to start your own company, work for a technically mind-blowing startup, buy real estate, travel the world, or write a book detailing all your adventures. You’re pulled in so many different directions that you’ll learn the number one most useful skill in SF - how to say no to an opportunity (or at least focus on one at a time).
If I were walking down the sidewalk and I bumped into SF, it would bash me in the head with a server, smash a Mission burrito in my face, pour a microbrew down my throat, ask me if I had any marijuana, and pay me an exhorbant amount of money via my iPhone and a Square device before it skipped off with a photo of my dick on Instagram.
Thanks San Francisco, for a good time.
Sharing is caring -Testis, testis, 1, 2. Phew!
That moment you’re checked to see if you have cancer.
Warning: this article contains some not safe for work subject matter, and an inappropriate view of life.
The Fear
I was 14 years old playing Super Nintendo when my little brother’s neighborhood friend raised her thick plastic glittery shoe, and, without warning, planted it straight into my crotch, crushing my left testicle. It was the worst pain I felt in my life. I crawled to the bathroom and threw up. Hours passed before I was able to feel around and assess the damage. My left testicle was swollen, and that’s how all this started.
Growing up, it bothered me, and I worried about it, but health issues have always paralyzed me with fear. By the time I turned 20, like most of my health issues, I learned to live with it. Around this time, MTV show host Tom Green publically documented his testicular cancer removal. Assuming the worst, I thought this was me. I thought I had testicular cancer just like Tom Green. My left testicle had been a little bigger than a racquetball for the last 6 years. During my youth, I was always taught that if you didn’t have money to do something, then you simply cannot do it, so I simply did not go see a doctor. Growing up without money or without knowing your basic fundamental human rights can really do a lot to shape a person’s outlook on life.
My defense mechanism for everything is humor, and believe me, I made lots of jokes about it with my friends. Everything from naming them David and Goliath to getting drunk at house parties and showing it off to people who were drunk enough to dare me to prove it.
By this time, I was neck deep in handling full-time college, a full-time job, lots of side projects and consulting, a part time internship, and maintaining some semblance of a social life. Right after, I moved to California and my career took off.
Before I knew it, I was 29 (still can’t believe it). For 15 years, my testicle was still the size of a racquetball. For 15 years, I did nothing. Then something (still unknown) happened a few months ago that caused it to double in size. Suddenly, I had a grapefruit swinging between my legs. It was difficult to sit down, impossible to cross my legs, and alarming in more ways than I care to document on this blog.
The Diagnosis
I did what any person this day and age would do; I self-diagnosed myself on the Internet. It was clearly evident that I had testicular cancer from the symptoms: rapid abnormal growth, fatigue, a heavy feeling in the testicle, dull pain in my scrotum and abdomen, and a big fucking lump. Tired of having to smash my testicle up into my pelvis region every time I put on my underwear, I gathered my balls and called One Medical. Finally, I saw the doctor. Fifteen years of fear and a self-diagnosis can really do a lot to shape a person’s outlook on life. Imagine how I felt whenever the doctor told me that I had a hydrocele, or a hernia, and I might have cancer, but he recommended a specialist. All my nightmares were true.
Next was the urologist. Make your jokes now, because he had a difficult time finding my testicle in the mess that was attached between my legs. And then this moment happened:
The best treatment to make this go away permanently is a surgical procedure, he said. You’ll need a few weeks to recover and it’s —
Do I have cancer?, I asked a little too abruptly.
I’m not sure, he said. Let’s find out.
Internally, I proceeded to freak the fuck out. He performed a high frequency ultrasound, and spent a long time looking at blood flows, my epididymis, and the general structure of my testicles. He looked stern and frowned often while he did this.
Nope, he said suddenly. Looks okay to me.
For 15 years, I worried and struggled to ignore reality in hopes of one day it would all go away, and it all could’ve been avoided for a five minute ultrasound. After, he did mention that it’s still possible there is something he can’t see in the ultrasound because of how large the hydrocele was, but he wouldn’t know until he opened it up to take a look. Open it up? As in cut open my scrotum?
The Procedure
A hydrocelectomy is a procedure to where they incise your scrotum, pull out the hydrocele itself along with your testis (I repeat, they pull your testicle out of your scrotum). They then puncture the hydrocele, drain it, cut out excess material, careful not to harm tiny blood vessels, and sow it all back up. General anethesia? Yes, please.
The day of the procedure, I was a little nervous. I rather liked my testicles, even if they were abnormal, and I was apprehensive about having them dismantled. The surgeon was running late, so I waited for three hours thinking about my decision’s permanent consequences, thinking about freezing my sperm, thinking about changes to my hormonal levels, thinking about running out of the hospital in my purple gown, ass showing in the back.
Finally, the surgeon showed, and my humor was my only defense.
When can I resume sexual activity? I asked. That’s all I really care about.
Anytime, the doctor said, you just can’t use your penis.
In the operating room, they started to administer the I.V. (because the nurse had previously failed to find the vein in my hand an hour before), and when the valium hit my bloodstream, that’s when I knew I was brave enough to go through with the procedure.
I said, All right. Hope you all had your morning coffee. Everyone know what they’re doing? Left hydrocele. Try to stay in that area. I better wake up with a penis. By the way, I’m starving. Do you guys serve food after this?
About that time they put me under. And I woke up in a pain that can only be aptly described as feeling like having your scrotum cut open. Two Percocets quelled my anguish. Hours later, I woke up again to a delightful serving of crackers. Whenever doctors operate anywhere near your genitalia, they force cranberry juice down your throat until they are confident that you can pee, otherwise it’s the catheter. What they don’t tell you is how painful it will be to do anything. The nurse opened up my purple gown, and gave a look down my jock.
Your penis is pointing to the right, she said, much to my joy learning that I had a penis. It may be easier to sit down and aim it out the side.
I crab-walked my way to the bathroom and tried sitting, only to be consumed with pain. Clearly the nurse never had a hydrocelectomy before because her plan wasn’t going to work at all. Instead, I got the job done in a more creative manner, but I’ll spare you the details. I was clear to go home.
It wasn’t until two days later that I was able to take a look at the new me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, a pair of even-sized, albeit swollen, testicles, but there was something that wasn’t right. Above the left testicle was a huge lump. I went in for a checkup.
The Fallout
Yeah, that doesn’t look too good
..are words you never want to hear your testicle doctor say. Upon further examination, another ultrasound, and a nurse that morbidly told me about prosthetic testicle complications causing men to lose their entire genitalia, I was diagnosed with another series of problems: hematoma, a cyst, an infection, and dangerously severe swelling. Furthermore, it was painful. The sutures (dissolvable stitches) inside an inner layer surrounding my testicle had come apart too early, causing blood to leak everywhere, causing the infection. After the antibiotics and needle point extraction that pulled out a goo that looked like grape jelly, I started to feel normal again. I was walking to work again, saw what the inside of a gym looked like, and even found out that my testicles worked properly. ;)
Moral of the story: Don’t hesitate when it comes to your health. Seek a professional, and educate yourself. This story could’ve easily gone the other way.
What started with some asshole kid 15 years ago ends with frozen blueberries. Now all that’s left is to heal:
What I learned from giving my game to a 3 year old.
Itzko is 3. Max is 30.
Itzko
I’m not friends with most 3 year olds. They’re filthy, loud, and usually violent, much like San Francisco’s Mission district. When I had to babysit a 3 year old a few weeks ago, I was desperate not to accidentally let him kill himself, so I did what any strung-out, exhausted adult would do, I gave him my iPhone.
The kid’s name is Itzko. He’s borne of Bulgarian parents but he’s born and raised here in the States. He speaks English, but his parents speak Bulgarian to him, so I loaded up Air Bulgarian and handed it over, seeing if he’ll know what to do with it. Air Bulgarian is a language learning game to learn Bulgarian as an English speaker. I built the game for myself, but I put it out on the App Store as a free game for anyone to play.
The first category Itzko tapped was Animals. петел was the first word to pop up, and he smashed a finger into the picture of a rooster without hesitation.
A ding! of approval sounded, the green checkmark appeared, and four new images replaced the last set of images. This time котка (cat) was the word. Itzko was smiling now. Then слон (elephant), then жираф (giraffe), and when пингвин (he loves penguins), he erupted with giggles. He showed me the picture of the penguin, and told me a story about how he saw a penguin at the zoo in Seattle. The kid has no idea where Seattle was, or that he was in California, but that penguin was important.
I tried to explain about the timer, how if you click the right animal fast, you get more points. He looked at me, said ‘oh,’ and continued to not give a shit about the points. He was busy smashing his short little fingers on pictures of animals.
пчела (bee) showed up, and he didn’t know what it was. He studied the pictures for a while before finally he tapped on the picture of the duck. BZZZZZ! the iPhone said, and Itzko rolled on the ground laughing. When Itzko’s mom got home, there he was, learning Bulgarian.
Max
Most of my friends are around 30 years old. They’re civilized, and rarely shit their pants. Max knows Cyrillic (from his Russian heritage) but he doesn’t know Bulgarian. He’s also one of the smartest engineers I know, so I forced Air Bulgarian upon him while it was in its alpha period.
I loaded up the Colors category for him, and since Russian colors were relatively similar to Bulgarian ones, I thought he wouldn’t have that much trouble. He looked at it for a while.
What am I supposed to do? he said finally. Tap on a picture, isn’t it obvious? I told him. He said, No, how am I supposed to know what to do? There’s no tutorial, or instructions.
And the ding! of approvals were annoying to him, and so were the BZZZZ! noises. The pictures were too small for his liking, and he wanted full phrases, not just vocabulary (Phrases come later).
Two of these pictures have grey in it, how can I possibly know the right one? he asked.
There’s a big fucking yellow rope in one of the images, I tried to explain.
He said, It’s confusing. No one will understand what you mean.
I might’ve accidentally made a kid’s game.
Want to check out Air Bulgarian for yourself? You can download it on the App Store for free. Thanks!
Sharing is caring -Air Bulgarian - Language Learning Game and How I Built It
Air Bulgarian - Language Learning Game and How I Built It
здрасти! Hi there!
The world is getting smaller. Ten years ago, I didn’t even know that Bulgaria was a country. Today, I’ve been there three times, dozens of my friends and acquaintances are Bulgarian, and I’ve had one wrapped around my finger the last five years (or me around her’s). Luckily, she speaks English, but when I go to visit her family in Bulgaria, I really have a hard time communicating the right Bulgarian vocab for the right situation.
It doesn’t end with Bulgaria though. I’ve also been to Mexico, Spain, France, Turkey, Texas (it counts as a country), and Germany in the last couple of years. In Spain, thankfully I learned enough Spanish in my teenage years to get around. In French, I know: prendre un café avec moi. In Turkish, indirim! In Texan, goddamn somna bitch.
I needed something to help spruce up my vocabulary and remind me of all the lessons that I previously learned but have forgotten, so I built an iOS app to do just that, and I’d like to share it with you all. It’s called Air Bulgarian. It focuses just on Bulgarian at the moment, but it’s built to support anything.
Like all things I do, even if it’s just a hobby, I wanted to do it well. I never launched a language learning app before, but I wanted to do it right. Here’s what I did:
The Research:
Check out the competition. First thing I did was look at the market, eyed the competition, and found what worked for them. I downloaded about 20 apps and went through them all. Bulgarian was not well represented on the market so I felt like there was something there. I wrote down the list of features I wanted in my app, and thought about ways that I could execute and make it better for users. Finally, I added unique features of my own that would fit well with the idea I had formulated.
Understand the current trends. As one might’ve predicted, games are the top apps in the iOS app store. More specifically, free-to-play games. So I thought about ways to make learning the language to be more like a game, complete with earned points, countdown timers, and rewarded stars. If anything, it’ll make learning the language more interesting, and, I daresay, fun.
Find professional help: A few friends of mine are trilingual, quad-lingual, or even sept-lingual. They know how to learn a language, where the tricks are, and how to retain. It’s important to get it straight from the source what works for them, and what’s myth.
The Product:
Focus on one language at a time: Although the code can support multiple languages, and adding a new language is as simple as uploading a strings file to my Parse server, I wanted to make sure I didn’t spread myself too thin. Bulgarian would be considered my MVP.
Simplify the feature set: I set out to build Duolingo when I wrote down all the features I wanted, but as I started estimating time and resources, I settled on a nice trim feature set that I can easily build upon while gathering user feedback.
Focus on quality where it matters: When users want to learn a language, they are mostly interested in hearing a native speaker, seeing the vocabulary written down, and learning essential words first. That’s why I brought in my resident native Bulgarian speaker and had her record all the audio and pick the vocab relevant to Bulgaria.
Make it pretty: Reddit’s /r/gamedev and /r/indiegames led me to Kahlief Steele, a talented artist who excels at making hand drawn images. I was only too happy to pay for his services. Thanks, Reddit!
Add some musical polish: I wanted a nice soothing yet adventurous feel to the background music. Mr Michael Taylor’s Venture seemed perfect for the job.
To monetize or not to monetize: Eventually it would be neat to make some money from all this effort. The app itself is free, but I’ve hooked up in-app purchases and iAd (built in such a way that with a flick of a switch, they will turn on). However, I don’t think I’ll turn on either of the two until I have more information about my users, and how they act, which leads me to:
The Technology:
Flurry is phenomenal for analytics, like funnel tracking, event tracking, session length. I use Flurry to see which vocabulary lessons people buy, how many times they play the same lesson, how many times they mess up, particular words people can’t seem to figure out, and countless other little details. My only complaint with Flurry is that event tracking is a pain in the ass to visualize unless I export the data and ack around. This is also my first solo app in a couple years, and I wanted to try out different things to see what works best, so I added a couple redundant frameworks, like Leanplum and Parse. Integration time: 15 minutes.
Leanplum is relatively new on the scene, and I happened to be lucky enough to be in their private beta. They do the same thing Flurry does with analytics, except they provide a LOT more. They also do a/b experiments, so if I want to check to see how users will react to me turning on iAd vs how users who don’t have iAd enabled, Leanplum is there for me. They can also replace your server side backend, like Parse, but it’s not as query oriented. Integration time: 10 minutes.
Parse: Users of Air Bulgarian can see a list of lessons to learn, click on those lessons to download them, and all of it is real time. If I add a new lesson, or update my localizable strings file, or replace a mumbled piece of audio with a clearer piece, the users of Air Bulgarian get all of that reflected on their phone the moment I push the changes to Parse. Gone are the days I need to spin up an AWS instance and write an API that handles one query in order to serve up static content like audio, images and string files. Parse does all this for me. Integration time: 10 minutes.
GameCenter: I’m sure you’re all aware of GameCenter by now. I wanted to put some spice into the language game, to where users can earn achievements and compete with their friends if they are learning the same language.
Cocos2d is a lightweight iOS framework for games. Handles OpenGL best practices for you. It’s also free and it has a fantastic community behind it.
Best of all, Air Bulgarian is useful to me. I love playing it on the bus or while I’m having my morning coffee. I hope you will too. Download it free on the app store if you’d like to check it out.
Благодаря много! чао!
Sharing is caring -Don’t Use GrexIt
Email is important to me. If you launch a product around email, you cannot make email worse for me. If you do, no deal.
Like many others out there, I struggle with keeping up with the torrent of email I receive daily, so I gave GrexIt a shot, hoping that it might streamline communication and collaboration right from my gmail inbox, but it did the exact opposite.
A few days after granting GrexIt OAuth privileges, I experienced a noticeable delay in my email’s sending and receiving. What is noticeable? Someone might send me an email at 11:34 AM and I wouldn’t receive it until the next day noticeable.
Suddenly, on the third day, the 503s started happening:
Not correlating the installation of GrexIt and my slow email, I assumed that it was because I had over 20 GB of email, so I did the only natural thing was to archive everything and delete a giant chunk of it. A day later, when that was finished, there was no sign of a speed up. It was time to get Google involved. Here’s what they had to say:
Thank you for your message. I understand that [your account] is experiencing message delays and 503 errors.
I have taken a look at this account’s backend and see that these issues are caused by a combination of incorrectly formatted IMAP requests, as well as a high volume of IMAP requests.
To explain the root cause, in order for IMAP to access your account, it will need to put a lock on your backend database. This lock is put in place to ensure no other service attempts a concurrent write on the same piece of data. The reason this user is seeing message delays is due to the IMAP client holding locks on your account, preventing us from delivering mail.
It appears these IMAP requests are originating from the grexit.com application enabled on the affected account. The date on which the app was enabled also aligns with the date the account began experiencing issues. Unfortunately, as grexit.com is a third party application, it is not supported. To resolve this issue, please disable this app. The affected user may do so by revoking Oauth access from the following link, https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.
Sincerely, Zack Google Enterprise Support
Conclusion: If you’re looking to streamline your email, don’t use GrexIt
Sharing is caring -Fixing orientation in Cocos2d with iOS6 when GameCenter is enabled
Fixing device orientation for Cocos2d in iOS6
iOS6 has caused a ruckus for Cocos2d developers with games that are only in landscape mode that have Game Center enabled. Either this happens:
or this happens:
Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'UIApplicationInvalidInterfaceOrientation', reason: 'Supported orientations has no common orientation with the application, and shouldAutorotate is returning YES
In a nutshell, the cause is because someone at Apple thought that the Game Center sign in screen should ONLY be available in portrait mode, so whenever GameCenter is prompted for the user, it crashes. If you search Apple’s developer forum, you’ll find this post as Apple’s suggested method of fixing the bug, and you’ll find that it doesn’t work with Cocos2d apps. In order to remedy the bug for cocos2d, you’ll need to do two things:
Allow portrait
Add this to your RootViewController
-(NSUInteger)supportedInterfaceOrientations {
return UIInterfaceOrientationMaskAllButUpsideDown;
}
-(BOOL)shouldAutorotate {
return [[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation] != UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait;
}
Now it should work as expected:
Effort - This Changes Everything
Early 2004, I was unemployed, without transportation (in a city with no public transportation), in debt, partying like a poor college student except I wasn’t in college, going through stretches of homelessness. My life was not going as planned, until I discovered effort.
The first time I traveled outside of the country, I was 26. Hell, the first time I traveled outside Oklahoma, I was 23. Growing up, I barely left my room. Much of that was due to that I didn’t have any money (and neither did my parents), but the rest was that I had no drive to do anything.
Don’t misunderstand. I had dreams, lots of them. I wanted to see the world, party like a rock star, really love what I do for a living, reside in a high rise building overlooking a major city. I wanted to be proud of what I did and who I was, but when you’re poor and lazy, every day looks worse than the day before.
After a little growing up and a lot of unhappy days, in mid 2004, I started working 16 hours a day, if anything just to get my mind off how much I didn’t like my life. The side-effects were what some might call The American Dream.
At the beginning of 2008, I was a full-time employee at Denny’s (I had a job!), part-time web developer for a medical company, about to finish my Bachelor’s degree, intern at a radio station, freelance writer, and gym enthusiast. Upon graduation, my computer science degree helped me land a job as a web dev for a startup in Oklahoma, which led me to the Federal Aviation Administration as a software engineer, during which I kept my part-time work. About that time, I dropped the radio thing and the writing thing and went full throttle towards programming, which led me to a San Francisco startup, which led me to Eventbrite.
Besides helping change the online event registration industry, I am surrounded by brilliant people, people who passively push me to better my career (because I like to learn from people who are good at what they do). I am in the epicenter of where the world’s software is created, and it’s even more intoxicating than I could’ve imagined.
None of this was easy. I’m never happy with the amount of work I get done, or the quality of code that I write, and, therefore, I am in a state of perpetual motion, always trying to improve, and learn more, and do better.
My weekdays have looked like this for the last 8 1/2 years (s/programming/studying/g for my college years):
- Wake up feeling depressed because my face still looks the way it does
- Coffee and news
- Coffee and programming
- Programming
- Programming and social interactions
- Social interactions and beer
- Go home and programming
- Take a break to learn something new, like product research, or different kinds of programming
- Late night programming
- Fall asleep thinking I’m getting better looking every day
Those 16 hours a day didn’t stop when I landed a job that I loved. If anything, those hours were even more justified.
The side-effects of so much effort are missing out on what some might call chewing the fat with friends. Truth be told, I never liked chatting, small talk, or gossip. Don’t misunderstand. I still do that, but only long enough not to be rude, because my passion lies elsewhere. My best friends are the ones who complement my ardor for success, as it matches closely with their own ambitions.
I’m writing this blog from my high rise apartment overlooking San Francisco from Twin Peaks to the Bay, thinking about which country I want to visit next (because I’ve already taken care of all the countries I really wanted to see), sniggering at the memories in Vegas I had with my coworkers as we partied like rock stars. I don’t dream much about goals these days. I’m too busy doing them.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m a little behind on programming for the day.
Sharing is caring -Leave Breadcrumbs
Jane and Jim are in the prime of their careers. They both work hard and are successful. But only one of them leaves breadcrumbs.
Jane
Jane writes code. She’s been writing ruby the last 8 months, and she has joined Coursera, Codecademy, and RailsTutors to help her further her knowledge of ruby/rails while broadening her horizons to the world of backbone.js, a deeper grasp of jQuery, and even dipping her toes in iOS work. She blazes through lessons, and even though she has no particular use for them right now, she will in the future.
Jane meditates every night, and in the mornings she does yoga. She prides herself on her superb health, and has a strict regime she created for her body style. Her collection of teas, herbs, and natural spices are formidible to anyone who might enter her kitchen unawares. Others ask how she maintains her beautiful womanly figure while working in a seditary lifestyle, and when she answers, she often forgets some of her major points.
Jane recently went to Spain, which was to her delight because she can speak Spanish fluently. She was able to haggle shopkeepers, and find her way around, quenching her thirst for an exploratory vacation. All those nights of studying Spanish paid off. But her knowledge of languages doesn’t end there, as Jane can speak 7 languages, and 5 of those fluently. Jane loves travel because it makes her feel accomplished. It makes her feel like her love for studying languages is worth her while.
Kind of an expensive way to feel accomplished.
Jim
Jim has worked in a startup the last four years. It is the single most gratifying thing he’s done in his whole life. The last four years have been coding, coding, and more coding. He loves it, but it’s hard. While he pushes himself to learn more every day, it is easy to forget what else life has to offer, but Jim had the foresight to leave breadcrumbs.
A photograph can capture a moment, and while Jim doesn’t have the time to always go through his photos, he certainly took the time to set up photosharing between all his devices, and sometimes his iPad will show him a photo that he has forgotten, and for an infinitesimal moment, Jim pulls his eyes away from work and takes the photo in, faint smile on his lips.
Jim has 58 GB of music on his playlists, which he tends to listen to on shuffle. Last week, an audio file played that Jim hadn’t heard in 7 years. It was when Jim was working for a popular radio station in his home city as a radio personality (before he became an engineer and moved to San Francisco). He hadn’t practiced his radio voice in years as it wasn’t a great passion of his, but Jim was truly pleased to hear how talented he was.
Last Christmas, Jim’s hard drive failed, and in the midst of going through his backups, he stumbled upon a 1000 page manuscript he wrote 10 years ago. His jaw dropped. A lot of life can happen in ten years, and while reading those 1000 pages of swords, sorcery, monsters, and heroes, Jim cried, and Jim laughed, and Jim leaned back in his chair, eyes dazed and lost in emotion. Jim learned a lot about himself, about how much he had changed. That breadcrumb captured his thoughts, his emotions, who he was.
Jim knows how important it is to have reminders of previous accomplishments, big or small. When he goes hiking, or snowboarding, or vacation, he takes his camera. He might even take a picture of a really good cup of coffee. When he writes a snippet of code that he thinks is neat, he puts it on github. When he learns something, he writes it in his today_i_learned.md document. Laugh-out-loud moments go in funny_shit.md. When he wants to share something about life, or himself, he blogs about it, and leaves breadcrumbs.
Jane
Two weeks ago, Jane quit her job as a QA automation engineer to focus on the final leap on becoming a full-fledged developer, and while blocked on a particularly difficult engineering task, she became disheartened, and questioned if all this work was worth it. Worst, she questioned herself. Where were her accomplishments? Hours of sorrowful emotions later, after having to be reminded by her five closest friends all the goals they have seen her acheive, she was motivated again enough to complete the task. But what about the goals she reached that her friends had not seen? It’s difficult for her to remember all her accomplishments when she doesn’t leave breadcrumbs.
Jim
And sometimes, usually around the holidays, he likes to take a breather and take a look at his life in retrospect, more importantly his accomplishments. There they are, easy to find.
Sharing is caring -Swift Command Line
Swiftcommandline is a quick way to edit, go to, or open commonly referenced files or folders
Install
- git clone git://github.com/bufordtaylor/swiftcommandline.git
- make install
- source ~/.local/bin/swiftcommandline.sh from within your ~.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc file
Shell Commands
s <reference_name> <file> - Saves the path to the file as "reference_name"
s <reference_name> - Saves the path as "reference_name"
g <reference_name> - Jump to referenced path
e <reference_name> - Open reference file in vim
o <reference_name> - Open reference file in default program
p <reference_name> - Prints the file associated with "reference_name"
d <reference_name> - Deletes the reference
l - Lists all available references
Example 1
$ s notes ~/Code/notes.txt
$ cd ~ (or anywhere)
$ e n<TAB COMPLETE>
or
$ e notes
Now we are editing notes.txt in vim
Example 2
$ cd /Volumes/Terra/Dropbox/todo/
$ s todo
$ cd ~/some/other/dir
$ g t<TAB COMPLETE>
or
$ g todo
Now we are in /Volumes/Terra/Dropbox/todo/
Example 3
$ s prettypicture ~/Art/pretty_picture.psd
$ o p<TAB COMPLETE>
or
$ o prettypicture
Now we have opened pretty_picture.psd in Photoshop
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