Bufr Overflow

In Engineers We Trust (to Get Shit Done)

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 11:41:12 -0700

Hi, I’m Buford, CTO over here at Rentify, and here, the engineering team has only one simple rule: Get Shit Done.

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On San Francisco

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:06:00 -0800

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.

Testis, testis, 1, 2. Phew!

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:50:44 -0800

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.

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 12:43:00 -0700

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!

Air Bulgarian - Language Learning Game and How I Built It

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:15:33 -0700

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!

Don't Use GrexIt

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:57:00 -0700

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

Fixing orientation in Cocos2d with iOS6 when GameCenter is enabled

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 20:48:00 -0700

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

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 18:13:00 -0700

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.

Leave Breadcrumbs

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 14:58:00 -0700

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.

Swift Command Line

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:19:00 -0700

Swiftcommandline is a quick way to edit, go to, or open commonly referenced files or folders

Install

github - swiftcommandline

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

Productive Vim

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 09:59:48 -0700

I’ve been through text editors before, but this one is different. I might put a ring on this one.

Vim is a text editor designed to reduce the amount of keystrokes in order to accomplish the same amount of work. The best part about vim is that your hands never have to leave the keyboard. In this post, I’ll be talking about how I set up my vim to make my work highly efficient for me. We’ll cover plugins, shortcuts, and other neat things.

If you’re new to vim, the best way to get started is to go into vim and type :help. But if you’re into more quizzical learning experiences, I recommend shortcutfoo

NOTE: I typically used Mac OS X’s default Terminal for editing in vim, but in Mountain Lion, something has changed (for me at least) so that native vim in Terminal is slightly slower than a GUI, say iTerm2 . I have since switched to that for vim, and all my command line work. I also recommend setting up tmux on iTerm2, but that’s another topic.

Firstly, vim is great right out of the box. All you need is a decent .vimrc to get you going, but if you want to manage large projects, most modern editors like textmate, sublime text, and xcode provide features that exemplify modern editing, including “open in project,” “find in project,” and others. Vim can do this as well with a few bundles.

The bundle manager I use is pathogen, although vundle has been gaining steam recently.

Plugins (must have)

Ack:

Vim ack is a “find in project” plugin. It will do searching for text in files on whatever your current working directory is. You can search by string, by regular expressions, or by file type. In the example, I can press o to open it in the current window, or go to just preview it and keep my cursor in the ack window, t to open in a new tab, or v for a new vertical window.

Command-T

Command-T is the ‘open in project’ plugin. It will do fuzzy searching for names of files on whatever your current working directory is. In this example, I type ‘chispac’ to locate the /path/to/Chipmunk/src/ccSpace.c and I type Ctrl-j to move down one file. I can press <enter> to open the file, or Ctrl-v to open it in a vertical window, or Ctrl-t to open in a new tab.

BufExplorer

If you’re busy looking through files trying to find the right import or constant, it’s easy to fill your buffer with junk, and it’s a pain to type :bp or :bn several times to get to the file you want again. BufExplorer makes it easy on you when you’ve got a lot open all at one. Just hit <leader>b and conveniently select which file in the buffer you’d like to go to.

NERDCommenter

Comment out code like a champ. Just hit <leader>ci to toggle comments on or off for a line. 4<leader>ci toggles comments for 4 lines.

NERDTree

Don’t know where a file is? Or even what it’s called? But you know it’s somewhere in the Kobold2D directory? NERDTree is your project browser. For me, it’s <leader>t to open it. Press <enter> on any folder to expand, and on any file to open it. s on any file to open a vertical split window. t on any file to open in a new tab. To close, just <leader>t again.

Tagbar

When you’ve got a large file and you want to quickly reference variables, methods, or classes, Tagbar is what you want. It provides a header definition view of your code. Additionally, if you hit the <enter> key over a reference, you’ll jump to that location in the code. For me, it’s <leader>l to toggle.

Plugins (extras)

Supertab

Typing out long variable or method names is not what I want to be doing with my day. There’re lots of ways around this, but I found supertab to be the nicest. Just hit the key and watch it list all possible matches for you. It even lists matches in files open in other buffers. Thanks, autocomplete!

Snipmate

If you find yourself typing the same thing, for example: import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace() If so, snipmate is good for you. Instead of all that, I might set a snippet to be ipdb<tab> and it will type the rest out for me. Also works with multiliners like class definitions and java style code comments.

Good Habits

Tabs

Instead of using buffers as tabs, you could use ‘windows’ as tabs instead. Personally, I’m in favor of doing it this way. I might have a tab dedicated to 3 or 4 python files and then another tab dedicated to a couple template files. It’s a way of visually seperating my code while I’m working.

" ctrl-t makes a new tab
noremap <C-t> <Esc>:tabnew<CR>

" shift T turns a split window into it's own tab
noremap <S-T> <Esc><C-w>T

" ctrl h and l moves left and right between tabs
noremap <C-h> <Esc>gT<CR>
noremap <C-l> <Esc>gt<CR>

For me, it’s Ctrl-t to open a new tab, or Shift-T to turn a split window into it’s own tab. Ctrl-h and Ctrl-l move left and right. <leader>q closes a tab.

Marks

Marks are a rarely spoken of gem in vim. Let’s say I’m working on a massive 3000 line file called badfile.py. I could set a mark, mA, to note that I’m working on line 1234, and I want to go add an import to the top of the file, so I gg. Now how do I get back to line 1234 quickly? 'A

noremap <leader>m <Esc>:marks<CR>
let showmarks_include = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

I set <leader>m to show me where all my marks are set. Marks that are lower case [a-z] are local marks within the current file, while upper case marks [A-Z] are marks in any given file, even if it’s not open. So when I go to edit some other file and I want to quickly jump back to badfile.py, I just 'A and I’m there on line 1234.

What was I doing?

If you look at the history in :jumps, you’ll see a long list of things you’ve been doing. To easy jump back and forth in that history, just hit Ctrl-i to go back, and Ctrl-o to go forward.

Other neat things

Disable arrow keys so you learn, damn it

You should never have to touch the arrow keys.

noremap <up> <nop>
noremap <down> <nop>

Actually, you should never need to leave the home row.

Highlight bad whitespace

Whitespace is a horrible thing to the eyes, and if you’re a python coder, it’s a horrible thing to your job security.

autocmd BufReadPost * match BadWhitespace /\s\+$/
autocmd InsertEnter * match BadWhitespace /\s\+\%#\@<!$/
autocmd InsertLeave * match BadWhitespace /\s\+$/
highlight BadWhitespace ctermbg=1
" Remove trailing whitespace on <leader>S
nnoremap <leader>S :%s/\s\+$//<cr>:let @/=''<CR>

Do yourself a favor and make sure you can see bad whitespace so you can promptly eliminate it.

jj

<esc> is too far away to get out of insert mode, and Ctrl-C is too troublesome.

inoremap jj <ESC>

Just hit j twice instead.

Specific filetype behavior

Python zen states 4 spaces as an indent, but if you have other preferences in your rst files, you can always customize.

autocmd FileType python setlocal expandtab shiftwidth=4 tabstop=4 colorcolumn=79
let python_highlight_all=1
let python_highlight_exceptions=0
let python_highlight_builtins=0

Colors!

Don’t forget your color scheme!

colorscheme solarized

If you think this setup might be right for you. Feel free to check out how I did it on github

Ears-a-ringing: How the medical industry keeps me up at night

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:59:00 -0700

There are no medical centers open on Sunday in San Fransisco except the larger institutions like St. Francis Memorial Hospital - AKA the emergency room. On a sunday of last month, I shook with fever, winced from a dull pain in my ear, and miserably wiped the mucus from my reddened nose. After two days of this, I sauntered my way to St. Francis, and with a nasal passage sealed tight, I asked to see a doctor.

This is America, and I’ve had ear infections/nasal infections before. They give you an antibiotic called Amoxicillin, some cough syrup, and they send you on your merry path. If you’re insured, it costs $15 plus what the pharmacy charges for the medication.

Except on Sundays, when it might cost you your hearing, or a good night’s sleep for the rest of your life.

I spoke with a doctor at St. Francis, who took a glance at my right ear, listened to me breathe, and declared that I had a cold. She prescribed Ibuprofen and, with the confidence of her vast medical education, informed me that my ear looked inflammed, that I might want to watch it. I inquired about the possibility of an ear infection, as I was prone to them as a child. She enlightened me with a story about how she moved here from New York and she’s trying more natural remedies, and conforted me with assurance and a toothy grin that my ear doesn’t look that bad.

Total time I spent speaking with the doctor: roughly 5 minutes.
Total time they spent copying my insurance information, verifying my address, and solidifying their chances of collecting a shockingly expensive bill later: 1 hour.
Total time I spent waiting idly in the waiting room: 25 minutes.

Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I had forgotten what an ear infection really felt like. Yet after two more nights of feverish chills and sweats, and copious amounts of Ibuprofen, I pondered the possibility that St. Francis might have led me astray.

It was Tuesday now, and One Medical had an opening. The doctor who saw me took a glance at my right ear, whistled, and judiciously announced that I had one of the worst ear infections she’s seen in a long time. She prescribed an antibotic called Amoxicillin, some cough syrup, and she sent me on my merry path. It cost me $15 plus what the pharmacy charged me for my medication.

Total time I spent speaking with the doctor: 15 minutes.
Total time I spent paying the co-pay and sitting in the waiting room: roughly 10 minutes.

It wasn’t until two days later that I knew something was wrong. My nasal cavity opened for the first time in a week, my fever was pleasantly absent, and my ear proudly heard things without complaint, but during the silent moments, I could hear a high-pitched ringing coming from my ear.

It’ll go away, I thought, but a week later, it remained. I spoke with the doctor (the One Medical doctor), who explained that it was Tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ear. Then, the doctor told me that there is not much that can be done to cure it, but I won’t get too detailed in the discussion of Tinnitus relief here.

Now a month gone by, and for the most part, I can’t hear my Tinnitus. But at night, when my mind dulls and my eyelids weigh heavy, the moment I lay my head upon my pillow, it is a torrential siren piercing into my very soul. Try listening to this sound as you try to sleep - more awakening than an 11PM Red Bull. It’s been a month since I’ve sleep more than 4 hours in a night.

I received the first bill from St. Francis yesterday. It is $337.12 after my insurance deductions. My next bill from the actual physician will arrive thereafter.

I’m not blaming the doctor from St. Francis for her painfully unfortunate misjudgment, but I am questioning the accuracy of the medical system of this country. Is 5 minutes, a back story about natural remedies, and a bad call worth $337.12? Do medical doctors answer the same accountability that others do? If I, as a software engineer, were to glance at a 500 server error, claim that it’s caused by bad CSS, and then charge you $337.12, I would be fired. While we do call medical doctors practitioners, I feel there is a certain degree of competency you should be able to expect when you ask for the professional opinion of any physician in this country, small clinic or large hospital.

This industry can do much better. They can start by having a clinic open on Sundays, staffed with a physician with capabilities to recognize an ear infection.

Culture Fact - A Case Study of Eventbrite

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 09:34:00 -0700

Disclaimer: I’ve been a software engineer for Eventbrite for over three years - from the days where we were 10 people sharing an office with four other companies, to the 200ish person company taking up two floors of our giant office. These views in no way represent Eventbrite’s official stance on anything.

A few days ago, I read the Culture Myth, and while a lot of the things Brandon spoke of made sense, I felt like there were missing pieces.

The Early Days

One of my first memories at Eventbrite is Max Gutman (fellow engineer) messaging me:

Max: Wanna get a coffee?

Me: Yeah, 5 min. Just need to finish this.

…15 minutes go by

Me: Ready?

Max: Yeah 1 sec

….10 more minutes

Max: I’ll be ready after I push my changes to production

Me: k, can it wait 15 min? I want to get something in. Do you know if …

….and so on and so forth, completely forgetting about taking a break for coffee. It happened often. We barely stopped for coffee. Shit, we barely stopped for lunch. I wouldn’t say it was ‘awesome culture’ simply because we were heads down pouring our hearts out trying to push a product. It was an awesome culture because of the perfect storm of belief in the product, conviction, and the team members’ individual personalities.

In those days, our head of finance would play one of our marketing managers in pool (we had a table in our office) every day when we pulled in $10000 ticket sales. Some days it might be 7PM, others 8. But the hour began to shrink. 5PM. 3PM. Earlier and earlier. And the team would take notice if they were playing at noon. Before long, they would have to play first thing in the morning when they both got in.

In those days, the whole company would sit around a table, and we’d Skype our remote workers in, and we’d listen to Kevin and Julia Hartz (founder and CEO, founder and President) talk about strategy. Eventbrite was as transparent as bottled water. They’d answer any question, talk about dollars in (or not in) the bank, pain points, hopes, disappointments. We all had relevant topics to discuss, and the rest of us were sponges.

It’s because of these things that the Eventbrite culture started in a positive light, solidifying the foundation of the structure we were all trying to build.

But Eventbrite had another advantage: events.

Eventbrite’s Secret Sauce

Events are beneficial for two reasons:

1. They’re social.

The Eventbrite team members frequent events, building bonds and even friendships between each other. How else will you ever -

find out that a certain team member gets a little frisky when Nine Inch Nail’s Closer plays
ride in the trunk with your CEO to go to an event
dance all night long dressed in an elf costume (wearing tights)
personally use your own iOS app as you check-in 10k people into an event
discover that you work with someone who can make your knees weak as she sings, or someone who tells the funniest (albeit dirtiest) jokes you’ve ever heard, or someone who can make some mean pancakes

Eventbrite bonds during the day in the work hours, and we bond even more during events. Because of this, it’s easy to find common ground with literally everyone on the team.

Jim and Brian and Theo all like the same beer as me. Jason is into some great music. Kristina loves travel. Hahn wants to build cool things. Renaud… well, Renaud is French so it’s tough.

2. They’re monumental.

I remember a particular New Year’s Eve texting Julie Thompson, our VP of Product, every 5 seconds to find out how the new version of the iOS check-in app was holding up. She was stationed in our San Francisco office monitoring the check-ins and device statuses, watching all of the Eventbrite events simultaneously while Eventbrite team members were at the actual events managing the door entries. Engineers, sales people, support people, even the CEO was checking people in. There were no roles, just a team, working to get the job done.

At one point there was a technical difficulty, but when I was finally able to respond to Julie’s text about the issue, I got this reply:

All set thanks to my mad python skills.

The whole team rejoiced the next week, not a single person felt left out.

Much later, when we found out that we were to be the ticketing platform for the Black Eyed Peas concert in Central Park, we knew we didn’t have the right tools in place for an event of that caliber, but again, the team pulled together, and some amazing new things came out of it: our new queuing system, an offline entry management solution, some great caching and optimization (I’m only speaking about engineering achievements because Eventbrite was already too large to keep track of the entire company at that point, which I’ll talk about next).

These monumental moments continue to happen, and they continue to bring us together.

Growing up

…is hard. When you’re a small company, there’s only one direction to go and that’s up. When you’re a large company, you’ve already figured out what processes work, what kind of people work for the culture you’ve built, and what drives production. But when you’re a medium-sized company, shit hits so many fans it feels like it’s raining diarrhea.

Things go wrong, things feel different. Suddenly, you’ve got more than one boss. Suddenly, there’s a new process you’re not used to yet. Suddenly, we have an HR department.

That’s when all of the culture you’ve built up, all the glue that you have squished between yourself and your co-workers, comes into play. When you’re adding in 100 people in a year, and there are several new processes you have to follow, you need all you can get just to stay afloat, but that’s the easy part.

How do you make each newcomer a true believer in Eventbrite? How do you keep the more tenured team members from losing their grip on things as we grow so fast?

Growing up is not about preserving culture; it’s about evolving it into something better than it was before. You can’t fit 200 people into a 10 person office, therefore you can’t make a 200 person culture be the same as the 10 person culture.

But what you can do is take 10 people of those 200 people and let them have their own 10 person microculture, which is exactly what Eventbrite does. You’ve got your cross-team ping pong tournaments. You’ve got your beer-thirty by the keg. You’ve got your hackers working the weekend to get new shit out for iOS6. You’ve got knitting, and storytelling, and coffee fanatics.

And then something interesting happens when these microcultures find their ground. Suddenly, we’re speaking at Pycon, or giving a talk on Selenium or Hadoop. Suddenly, we’re open sourcing some of our libraries. Suddenly, we’re nominated for a Crunchie, or we’ve been invited to talk at a mobile open source event. At that point, it’s no longer microculture. It’s just culture.

Protecting culture isn’t done by hiring people who fit in. No one fits in at first. Each person needs to feel like they belong. Each person needs to be involved. Over time, the Eventbrite culture will seep into them and their personality will leak out onto Eventbrite.

The microcultures work well for the day to day, but there is still Eventbrite as a whole that needs to maintain itself, and that is done by the same convictions as before.

Kevin and Julia Hartz may not be available every day to sit around and chew the fat, but they do make every effort to keep transparency high. It’s a little difficult for the entire company to sit at a table and talk strategy, but we still do it (although that table is now couches with a finite amount of questions for time’s sake).

It trickles down. My boss exercises that same respect with me, imploring me to challenge him with whatever troubles, or ideas, or suggestions I have.

It’s common to feel lost or left out if one doesn’t know the goals, or the direction of the company. It’s also common to feel the positive energy depleting whenever one is simply working on their project with no sense of where it’s going. I’m frequently asked if an upcoming project sounds interesting to work on, and I frequently ask about the evolving roadmap.

I wouldn’t call it a culture triangle of vision, trust and feedback, although all three are invaluable. It’s simpler than that. It’s leading by example. It’s being the change you want to see.

It’s not company culture. It’s individual culture.

Imagine a crowd of people watching something funny happen. One person may laugh hard, fall to his knees, blow coffee out of his nose. Another might not think it’s funny at all. Others might tell their friends, their family, but no one will tell the story the same. To each person, it’s different. To each person, Eventbrite is what they make it.

Convenience Kills

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 07:41:00 -0700

I haven’t relaxed since I was in work/school 90 hours a week. When I don’t finish the things I want, I can’t relax.

I just spent a month in Europe on vacation and I felt like I didn’t get anything done. I didn’t open source my previous meme game. I didn’t finish my language learning app, or finish the Stanford machine learning course, or workout as much as I wanted, hang out with friends as much as I wanted, or even do nothing as much as I wanted.

Don’t get me wrong. I did a lot of things (met some amazing people in some amazing places and learned interesting things about culture and myself), but nothing that I had planned. My Lonely Planet app had a huge list of things to do. WWDC happened. Hacker News was conveniently on my iPad. I simply accomplished distraction after distraction.

In college, I took 5-6 classes a semester, worked full time, went out with friends, worked out every day, and had a girlfriend. Besides those, I also learned how to program and did freelance web work. I had far less time then than I do now, and I did far more. I am more ambitious now and I get less done. What gives?

I didn’t have an iPhone in college. I didn’t have a TV. I didn’t even have a laptop. If I wanted Internet, I was stuck in front of my CRT for hours.

Now I’ve got convenience…

When I’m in Spain, “Siri, find me a good tapas place with seafood paella (which is every where).” Or when I’m in an elevator, I can play Words With Friends. Or as I’m waking up in the morning, I browse Reddit. Or just as I’m falling asleep, the familiar vibration of the iPhone notifying me that I have a new email makes me stay up that much longer. On the toilet, I’m playing A Bard’s Tale. On the bus, I’m reading A Song of Ice and Fire. While I’m walking, I’ve got Spotify going, sporadically checking Facebook and Twitter while I wait for the light. If I’m visiting a new bar, I should check in to Foursquare. If I’m in Union Square, I might get a notification from Highlight that my friend Max is nearby. Please, Instagram and Pinterest and Tumblr, just leave me alone.

I’ve got an assigned task for every moment of the day, always something that needs my attention. What if I don’t want to deal with all those things all the time? I don’t even like Max all that much. Motherfucker beats me in ping pong.

In college, I got the things I wanted done because I had no conveniences. This much convenience can only give me distractions. Sometimes, I don’t want the world at my fingertips, let alone another email telling me about a release of a new iPhone app that records what food I eat. Email is my enemy. Distractions are the devil.

Convenience is an addiction, and just like any addiction, it’s hard to break. Do I need to checkin to Foursquare, or share my meal with fellow foodies on Foodspotting? No. Are these fond memories that I need to keep close to me forever? Probably not.

Humans need a moment to breathe, to let those fingers stop typing and put them to good use drinking a mimosa, plucking a guitar, shuffling cards, or folding behind their head as they lie in a grassy field staring up at the sky. Otherwise their brains are stuffed with mental to-do tasks, most of which don’t need to be done. A tweet isn’t an opportunity when your brain is already overloaded with other meaningless opportunities.

When I’m on my deathbed, I don’t want my Facebook timeline full of Farmville updates. I want it to be full of news articles written about my accomplishments throughout the years.

Put down the device and step away from the convenience. Put down the device and get more done.

Best Medicine for Burnout: Vacation

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:38:03 -0700

I was sitting at a computer 16 hours a day. I was gaining weight, losing my charm, my sense of humor, who I am. I had developed an ulcer, and fierce pessimism. At the office, I was spending a lot of time away from my co-workers. My side projects waned and sputtered. I worked on them, but they seemed to go nowhere. When my friends invited me out to deflate, I seldom went. The idea of programming made me sick. I typed, but my work of emotionless, and the bugs came in greater numbers than usual.

Then I went to the airport.

When you get on a plane to Sofia, Bulgaria, they herd you into a small shuttle bus from the airport gate to the actual plane. While you’re standing in line, you’ll notice that Bulgarians have no understanding of what a line is. They push each other, step around those who are occupied, wave heavy backpacks perilously above strollers with toddlers, and all for what? To get on a plane first. A plane, where we all have to take the same 3 hour flight, where we all sit in the same metal tube, breathing the same recycled air.

While one woman cut me in line, she swung her huge purse filled with rocks and iron into my side. She looked back to see what she had hit and when she noticed it was me, she looked me right in the eyes, and turned back around. No “excuse me.” Nothing.

When the plane landed, and the mass exodus of the plan was underway, the same woman with the iron purse was struggling to pull it down from the overhead compartments and after a few passengers shuffled their way passed her, she looked around for help. I made sure I looked right into her eyes as I pulled down the heavy purse and handed it to her, then gave her a smile as I waited for her to go ahead.

A cab driver refused to give me change when the bill was 4 Leva and I only had a 20 Leva note. He told me that he doesn’t have the change, and in my best Bulgarian, I responded that I don’t mind at all, I can wait in his cab until he gets the change. After that, he suddenly found the change.

The government owned Bulgarian TV syndicate only paid the Bulgarian national soccer league a fraction of what they owed, and now is being sued, and this is the third year in a row. Several teams have had to close their doors.

A teacher friend of mine was laid off, and now she babysits.

An elevator repairman friend of mine tells me that he stopped receiving regular paychecks and he’s working double the hours.

Another friend of mine argued for 20 minutes over a few Leva about the price of cheese.

It occurred to me that I am very fortunate to be in technology. It occurred to me that Bulgarians screw each other today without looking ahead to tomorrow. It occurred to me that not everyone is as entrepreneurial as the good residents of Silicon Valley.

And then I went to Istanbul. I took a bus from Sofia, which took 8 hours. I was the only American on the bus and I was questioned as to why I was entering Turkey. ”To spend my money and eat kufte,” I replied. Then he charged me 40 Lyra for a tourist visa.

There are restaurant menus in Istanbul that aren’t written in Turkish. They have English, German, French, Bulgarian, Arabic. It’s quite helpful. Except the words ‘cover charge: 20 Lyra’ and ‘tax not included’ are written in Turkish, and you don’t find out until the bill comes. In that light, I ordered more beer and watched the soccer game on TV for another hour.

Five Lyra for a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice, the street vendor told me. I told him I’d give him 2. He said to get out of his sight and not to waste his time. Fun fact: there are 2 million tourists in Istanbul. I polished my negotiation skills a bit and we settled for 3 Lyra.

I asked the bathroom attendant to let me use the piss hole (there was no real toilet) for free. He told me it was 1 Lyra, or else I need to go somewhere else. So I went around to the side of the building and pissed on his wall.

Most vendors in the Grand Bizarre are skilled professional con artists. They will sell you Turkish lokum at five times the price you can get it in the Asian part of Istanbul. At a moment’s sight, they spoke to me in English, and they spoke to my Bulgarian friend in Bulgarian, simply by how we looked. It was fun traveling to Asia just for lokum.

I like adventure to a certain extent, so I went for Airbnb in Istanbul, despite that I don’t speak a word of Turkish. When I arrived, I found that my room was not where the the map said it was. It was at the bottom of a San Francisco style hill, and the nearest public transportation was at the top. And at the bottom of that hill were people laying about in the streets either passed out or dressed in rags. We must’ve looked like we fit right in with our Rayban sunglasses, big rollable luggages, cameras, and cell phones. The men in the neighborhood eye-raped my two slender, big-breasted female companions, who I’m sure felt very safe in their sun dresses.

After Turkey, I gave our Airbnb host a good review, but highlighted that the address was incorrect. Looking at the trip positively, no one was raped, nothing stolen. I lost weight walking up the hill. I saw Istanbul the way a local would, watching people playing street soccer, backgammon, smoking hookah. The Hodja was loud and clear in the neighborhood and workers sewed well into the night, trying to prepare their wares for the next day.

And I was reminded of my growing up in Oklahoma. No opportunities, endless nights with friends, religion religion religion.

And then there was Spain, where the lady on Airbnb split a bottle of wine with us, talked about the state of Spain’s economy and all the good local spots in Barcelona.

In Barcelona, they speak Spanish, but you won’t find any Spanish written anywhere in the city. It’s all in Cataluyan.

The paella filled my stomach more meals than one. And flamenco made my heart race as I sipped a glass of rioja. Along Barcelona’s beaches, a hundred bare breasted women lounged, and huge men lifted weights and jogged. Beer and ice cream everywhere. I talked about my idea for a language learning game as I walked along the beach.

The siestas are a brilliant notion. Businesses closed down at 2PM and market places boomed with life and laughter. Work began again at 5PM and worked until 8 or 9, when the hottest parts of the day already passed.

Four in the morning, Raval square has beer cans scattered on the ground. Some of the more artistic partiers arranged the cans in huge mosaics that resemble a peace sign or a giant heart. They offer you marijuana as they grin at you. As you pass deeper into the old city, the drugs they offer are more serious, E, heroine, cocaine. The music gets louder, the people get happier.

At 6 AM, we passed a couple having sex in an alley way. Two minutes later, a topless woman giving a blowjob in a hallway.

What a wonderful life it must be to spend your time drugged up, sexed out, and dancing. The people of Spain are in an economic depression, but they are the happiest I’ve ever met.

The next morning I sat on the walls of castle Montjuic for hours, peering out over the city. I want my own castle one day.

Then we took the Renfe to Madrid. We stayed in a hostel for 18 Euro a night. In between the parks and the museums and the breath of the city, I never felt so at home.

Now I’m back in Bulgaria, amongst some of the most ambitious people a country can offer, who happen to be terrible as conducting business, catching up on what I missed on the Internet, watching WWDC, reading tech blogs. I’ve been in front of the computer now for a few hours, blazing through content and loving every moment of it.

And I realized, with a quirky smile on my face as I opened up github to read the source of a new vim plugin, that I missed San Francisco, but most of all I missed programming.

What Happens When You Piss Off the Internet

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 03:51:00 -0700

I like open source. When I sought out on the endeavor to create a mobile tower defense game, I announced that the game would be open source, and it would be free. The game is called Meme Defense. As one might guess, it’s about Internet memes. Not exactly an original concept, but I was more concerned about the engineering aspects of the game rather than the skin. Tower defense games, to date, are an over saturated genre consisting of very little evolution. Therefore, I spent most of my time worrying about innovation, making the game fresh and addicting to play. In fact, I had no concerns at all about the memes.

Clearly, I should’ve been more concerned.

Last month, I launched a kickstarter project for Meme Defense with a $5k goal. The money would go into the $7k it would take to hire an art studio, and the $2.5k it would cost to hire a musician. The money would’ve been nice, but mostly the campaign was to feel the pulse of the community, and see how they might receive the game, or how they feel about playing a game featuring the memes they helped to create (Sadly, it probably won’t be funded).

And they responded in the way they know best.

To date, the video has over 35,000 views, 1,000+ comments, and 3,000+ likes. It was launched yesterday.

And then came the hate spam:

Sirildo ”You are the scum of the Earth.
You are the cancer.”
JulesBondTF2 “PLEAAAAAAASE DONT MAKE YOUR SHITTY FUCKING TOWER DEFENS EGAMES MEMESD XDD LELELE XDD Just kill yourself, man.”
HolanderSSF “you piece of shit”
TheBigDeniz “You are a horrible person, just wanted to tell.”
TheOldFatDuckGamer “You’re human shit.
AltF4Games “die”
MmmCouchPotato “you’re a fucking cancer to the internet. die.”
bl00dpk145 “Support for your epic meme project!!!! please read!!!!
No just kidding, kill yourself.”
OddlyOriginal “Hey cunt,
fuck you and your game you ugly fucking piece of shit. ”
Gerard De Vries
- I hope you die, you are the cancer of the world

And this was before I got out of bed this morning.

I’m building a mobile tower defense game which includes Internet memes, and I’m the ‘cancer of the world’ for it? It appeared as if I was caught up in a flame war between 4chan and Reddit. I went for my morning tea (decaf), still chuckling at how funny the video was, and decided to look up the creator.

His name is Ken Ashcorp, pretty talented guy from the UK. Sings, plays instruments, draws, makes Internet videos, enjoys World Wrestling Entertainment. You name it.

But something seemed familiar from the YouTube description he put on his video. It seemed familiar because I wrote it (except the parts in CAPS) and I had only sent that draft out to Gizmodo (and one other publisher but I can’t fucking for the life of me remember!). So clearly, someone from Gizmodo (or other) forwarded the email.

Out of curiosity, I tweeted him. Here’s how it went:

I said: “@KenAshcorp Hilarious video. Even though I was the butt of your jokes, you’ve done the Internet proud.”
He said: “@_buf hahaha oh shit. I was going to say, I respect your making it free and your ability to code but come on bro :(“
I said: “@KenAshcorp Guess I should’ve used something other than memes. Could’ve saved myself a lot of shit. How did you get that email I sent out?”
He said: “@_buf I can’t reveal my sources on that, but I can understand why you picked memes and the market appeal that they hold ): Hope you do good”

Hmm, well at least his 9 minute video wasn’t personal, right? By this time, I’m casually deleting hate emails until I see that Whynne, the creator of the famous trollface, has sent me a personal audio recording:

Just before this recording, he threatened to send a C&D. Btw, he’s the same guy who issued this letter to Reddit last year for using trollface.

I think I’ve learned a lesson in all of this. Most of what Internet communities like 4chan, Reddit, and 9gag produce are highly-regarded garbage. If you try to harness that garbage to make something out of it, you will be put in the center of an unending war of whose garbage is better (or made first). And that is a dangerous place to be.

The point that I’m trying to make is if you’re going to spent months of your time and thousands of your dollars drafting a concept, hiring a team, and building a free and completely open source video game as a hobby, you better use zombies as your theme.

Inside A Live Kickstarter Campaign: Part 1

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 11:48:00 -0800

With 15 days to go, Meme Defense has raised 36% of it’s campaign goal and it has 398 likes on Facebook. Most of the campaign money has come from Twitter at 22%.

Feb 10th - Feb 14th: Most all of the pledges were from people I knew. I received a few pledges from Kickstarter’s Discovery and one from Kickstarter’s Search. At this point, I did very little marketing except tweeting. I announced music producer K-Murdock and gaming company Retro Style Games will be on the project.
Feb 15th-16th: I started marketing Meme Defense on indie game forums. I put an ad out on Reddit. Zero pledges came from either site those days. I launched the alpha gameplay video here.
Feb 17th-21st: Started marketing on Facebook and humor based forums geared towards memes. There was little to no response in the campaign, but Meme Defense got it’s first press
Feb 22nd-now: Went to college forums and spread the word there. Announced the Android version. The pledges start to trickle in. More press
Today: Announced that Meme Defense will be free. Even more press

An interesting aside resulting from the Kickstarter campaign, I’ve been approached by several interested parties in helping to market the game once it is live. I will keep you informed if anything comes out of those.

Stay tuned for part 2.

Facebook Likes are cheap for Kickstarter campaigns

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:19:00 -0800

I’m making a game (Meme Defense) about Internet memes, so it’s easy to believe that once Facebook got word of the idea, things started to spread without much force. However, the results were not what I was expecting.

To date, Meme Defense has 39 backers, mostly from friends that I’ve shown the game to and either their excitement or their need for a t-shirt got them to pledge some money.

Six of those backers were from Facebook. I know all six of them personally.

However, when you look on the project homepage of Kickstarter, you see 199 likes, which indicates that people are much more willing to ‘like’ something than to spend 2 dollars.

Despite nearly 200 likes, the campaign received exactly zero pledge money from it (save my six direct facebook friends who pressed like as well). It makes Facebook likes cheaper than I suspected.

What’s worse (or fitting?) is that Kickstarter doesn’t seem to count likes at all in their popularity ratings. Meme Defense is currently ranked 13th as most popular video game project, but a few of the projects above have less than half the Facebook likes, and in some cases less than a fourth. I suspect Kickstarter only takes into account purchases over time.

I’d be curious to hear about your results with Kickstarter and Facebook likes.

This article is submitted to Hacker News.

Join the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3615559

Efficiently Managing Two Jobs (AKA working 16 hours a day)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:25:17 -0800

When I saw this post in November about Jack Dorsey, I was taken aback at the skepticism the article received, but I had nothing to say to the contrary…until now.

Listen, working 16 hours a day is nuts, and probably not cut out for many people at all, but I do it, and I love it.

Qualifications:

I’m a software engineer for a San Francisco startup called Eventbrite. I spend 8-11 hours daily here.
I’m an independent video game developer for a company I’ve started, and we’re building an iOS game called Meme Defense. I spent 5-8 hours here daily.

Skills you’ll need:

If you’re seriously looking to spend two-thirds of your time working, the number one thing you’ll need is to like what you’re doing. If I felt Eventbrite wasn’t a rich, worthwhile endeavor or if I wasn’t laughing my ass off building a video game about memes, I would drop one of them. It’s that simple. I think it was Steve Jobs that said something along the lines of, “If you’re not thrilled about what you’re doing too many days in a row, something has got to change.”
Friends who understand (or no friends). I used to go out every night, meet new people, drink wine, play yahtzee. I still do that, but not as often.
Be in touch with your body. Working two jobs is tough, and breaking down is easy. Make sure you get some exercise in and eat healthy. You should know when to take a vacation, and when to sleep.
Iron fucking willpower. You’re going to be tired. Some days, you’re going to be pissed at a co-worker, or you’ll lose faith in your side project. If you have days like this, see point 3. If not, ship it!
Know how to eliminate distractions. TV, Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook. All of these are production’s worst enemy. In the morning, I open up Hacker News with a coffee and I pick 2 or 3 articles. I read those articles and regardless of what branches I could follow based on the article’s content, I make sure I put it down, edit my /etc/hosts file to block all distraction sites, and I get shit done.

Separation of Passions:

It’s important that the two jobs you do are different from one another, otherwise you’re copying and pasting.

At Eventbrite, I work in Python in a web-based world. It’s mostly feature work with some generation of some technical specs, writing docs, coding, coding, coding.

On Meme Defense, I work in Objective-C (mostly) on a mobile device. Aside from the engineering work, I also manage everything from the other employee/contractors to the product direction. Additionally, I negotiate contracts with an art studio for the visual assets and a musician to get a proper soundtrack (almost got something in the works with the people who make this!), legal work, finance, determine a marketing plan, set up campaigns like the one on Kickstarter.

Two completely different products, and two sets of skills. The great part about it is that the learning curve is still steep for both, and man, it is rewarding.

Something Jack Dorsey’s article failed to mention is the importance of separating the two jobs. I never work on Meme Defense while I’m at the Eventbrite office. Even when I’m finished for the day and the office is perfectly acceptable to, I’ll still go home/to a coffee shop and work (Of course the opposite doesn’t hold true. If Eventbrite needs me while I’m working on Meme Defense in my off hours, I drop Meme Defense for Eventbrite).

Typical Week Day:

Wake up 6 hours after I go to sleep, every day, no exceptions. I might write some emails in the morning about Meme Defense while I’m still at home or I’ll finish the piece of code from last night, otherwise I go directly to Eventbrite.
Code all day. Lunch is brought in, and I always bring it back to my desk.
Around 6:30 PM, there is always a series of epic fucking ping pong battles.
Depending on where I am with Eventbrite tasks, I might stay another hour or so, otherwise I go home.
Quick dinner with no electronics nearby, and quick shower (because of the ping pong).
By 8 or 9 every night, I’m onto Meme Defense.
I go to sleep the moment I get tired and without hesitating. When I am tired, I’m useless, so I know it’s better to write down what I’m doing and pick it up again tomorrow.

Weekend:

I really splurge. In the last month and a half, I’ve been to Reno, Tahoe, New York, Las Vegas, and Seattle. And I have a trip to Mexico approaching pretty quickly.

Of course, there are weekends when I have to write some code, or think about work, but mostly I want to take two full days to sit back, disconnect, and really take in all the things I’ve accomplished over the week. It is an awesome feeling to have done so much.

The End:

Meme Defense is just a passion project, and soon enough, I will launch it and it will be less hectic than it is now. Based on feedback and market response, I might make an extra stage or two, but it certainly won’t be 5-8 hours a day anymore, and I won’t be working 16 hours a day. I started Meme Defense at the end of October last year, and although difficult to maintain, it’s been one of the most rewarding undertakings I’ve ever done. When it ends, it’ll be bittersweet.

Working 16 hours a day is nuts….but I recommend you give it a shot, just for a little while.

You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends.

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:11:00 -0700

I won’t name names, so we’ll call her Jane.

Jane’s five closest friends are two engineers at Google, an engineer at Eventbrite, an architect, and her father (which is so cute), who is the president of a national soccer team in Jane’s home country.

Jane graduated with a degree in Business Administration. That was a mistake. BizAdmin in San Francisco basically means she takes other people’s work and tries to find a use for it.

When Jane moved to California, it was 2008. The economy wasn’t on her side. What little she chance she had at getting a job as a recent grad was thwarted by the flood of mid to higher range vets coming into the job market. So Jane did what she had to in order to make ends meet; she got a job at CVS working as a pharmacy technician.

Jane spent the next year applying for jobs in her field. In 2009, she got a customer support role at Genentech, and hated every moment of it. Job satisfaction was not in her vocabulary. And she talked about vacations. And she talked about what new movies were coming out. Worse, she talked about celebrities. Jane was simply existing.

In late 2010, Jane noticed the happiness and satisfaction her friend had with Google. He talked about Google, a lot. She asked how he was so happy. The answer was simple: The tools he built helped change an industry, even the world. The stuff he did mattered.

Some light inside Jane turned on around that time; she had a new mission. She would work in technology, and she would do it as a QA engineer. She sat down with her friends and they all helped determine the right path to get her where she wanted, if she was up to the challenge.

Keep in mind, this was late 2010. She had never written a single line of code in her life. She didn’t know what a command line was. She had trouble understanding her smart phone.

One of her friends at Google was studying for his master’s after work.

Jane followed suit and enrolled herself in the O’Reilly School of Technology for some crash courses on HTML/CSS/Javascript. Struggling every step of the way, she poured her after work hours into learning the way of front end development and basic web page manipulation. A few months into it, she was applying for a new job as a QA engineer.

Maybe it was bold determination or simple insanity that made her apply for roles she was incredibly under-qualified for, but she was thriving on the pain of failure. With every failed interview, she went home and studied every question that was asked to her, thoroughly ripped apart computer science topics that she never fathomed she would need to know. As she studied, she felt that all this hard work was making her lucky.

That luck came as a black box tester for the Quipster app, an iPhone app that would soon come out. She got the $50 gig, and - much like her architect friend does - immediately slapped that project on her resume. But she was hungry for more.

Her confidence was bursting as she dove into Python as an after work snack, just to hold her over while she applied for more jobs.

In early 2011, she landed a position as a full-time QA Tester for a 20 person startup in San Francisco. It was official; she was living in the tech field now. But she wasn’t coding. She wasn’t necessarily changing an industry.

At least Jane had a foot in the door. Now she could take a break. Now she could float along and see where the company would take her. Right?

Wrong. Her Eventbrite friend is what one might call a brogrammer. Besides being a douche, he attends events and tries to marry engineering and his social life together in harmony. Jane decided that was a good idea. Ruby was the language of choice for QA automation in her company, so she took on the endeavor to learn Ruby and apply it to Watir (tool of choice). She started going to automation meetups for Selenium and Watir. Soon those meetups multiplied into women’s Rubyist meetups, weekly study groups, and hackathons.

Six months later, she was confident that she was ready to execute her master plan. She applied for a company called PocketGems, and simply knocked them dead on the interview, but she didn’t necessarily want to leave her startup for PocketGems. She just wanted to make a real difference.

With just a little guidance from her friends (she still needs to work on her negotiation skills), she leveraged the offer at PG to promote her to full QA Automation Engineer at her current company. She finally got what she wanted.

Today, Jane doesn’t know what the celebrity gossip is. The neural pathways that closed down during her tenure as customer support were bulldozed and paved as super highways.

In 9 months, she went from never writing code in her life, to writing code every day. She tripled her salary. She has job satisfaction. The tools she solidifies helps change an industry for the better. Jane does things that matter.

PS - Jane also learned how to speak Chinese during these 9 months.

Bottom line: If the main topic of conversation you have with your friends is not how you can better yourself, you need to get new friends.

(This post is submitted to Hacker News. If you would like to discuss, please find the comments section here.)