Category: ravings

regretting technology choices

i just read this post by grant ammons about refactoring some code in discourse, a really neat new piece of forum software. the post is very smart and thoughtful in a way that i am not often enough about code, but it also underlines to me a big challenge of php: rails code looks more beautiful.

now i want to scrap some code i’m working on and go down a rails path, even though i know that is a mistake for a number of reasons. i need to remember to just plow through and get this shit together and running as soon as possible. i got 2 months, i can do this. i can’t spend time, even for a second, thinking about starting over.

teaser (for the no one reading this):

sopa / pipa

it’s january 18th, and a bunch of sites are blacked out because of sopa and pipa.  and they are right.  go read about it on google or wikipedia and come back.

the thing is the us government already signed a much worse law in to effect earlier this year.  the ndaa made it possible for the us government to arrest and indefinitely imprison american citizens without a trial.

how, how, how, how is this ok?  how did this not get giant, massive protests on the internet?

and how is gitmo still open?

and how are we, as in america, still torturing people?

sopa and pipa are bad, but holy shit there are all these things right now that are terrifyingly bad.  where are the adults?  the legacy of 9/11 is looking more and more like the cowardly response americans had to terrorism.  grow the fuck up and be adults.

anyway, sopa and pipa are terrible laws by terrible children who don’t understand what the fuck they are doing other than accepting checks from hollywood.  contact these children and tell them to grow up.  this is at least a start.

spotify’s desktop client sucks

a big reason why i went with spotify is because of its desktop client. it seemed like a more complete replacement for itunes than anything else out there. i have been looking to replace itunes since the first day i used it because its playback tools are significantly worse than winamp had back 8 years ago. and somehow, spotify has even worse usability than itunes when it comes to playback.

basically, do this in spotify: search for a song you want to hear. double click it. then look at your queue. you’ll see everything from your search results. ok, that kinda sucks – you just wanted to hear one song. so, try removing everything else from the queue. oh wait, you can’t.

that’s right, everything in the search results just stays there forever. i’m not sure if there’s anything more to say about it. it’s fucking maddening. spotify’s entire raison d’etre is to let you play a song you WANT to hear, but then it throws a bunch of other shit at you without giving you any option to get rid of it?

i’m actually getting madder by the second just thinking about how fucking stupid it is. c’mon spotify, you guys are better than this.

p.s. i live in dc now and jen and i broke up and i hate everything and yay 2012.

new york is frustrating

i’ve been in new york for over a month now, and i’ve gone on countless interviews. i still have no job, and i’ve received a nice range of responses:

  • not a good cultural fit
  • we like you, but we can’t proceed because of { other applicants , no reason given }
  • hiring freeze!
  • no response (which i guess is kind of a response)

the response i haven’t received, one that i think would help me out the most, would be one that indicated why i was being passed on – we liked you but we thought you lacked X. to be fair, one company, art.sy, did give that kind of feedback, though unfortunately it was of the “you don’t have enough experience” variety, which is a bit harder for me to remedy in the short-term. at least it was a response.

what i’m finding, in general, is that new york tech startups seem to be pretty snobby in what they want from a candidate. or maybe snobby isn’t the right word – specific, maybe? where i’m sitting, i know php and i know python lightly and i’ve worked with mvc frameworks and i’ve built interesting things – i have no concerns that i’d be able to pick up django or rails or whatever, and there’s no question that i’d be value-add to these companies. however, i think my lack of professional experience with rails/django/whatever the newest technology is leading to a lot of places passing on me without having the balls to at least say “well we wish you had 3 years of django experience” because that’s kind of a stupid, bullshit reason to not hire me (or at least from my biased perspective it is).

when i ask for specific feedback, i usually get silence. so i have no choice but to keep looking, but i’m getting pretty annoyed and tired of this whole process and i don’t know what to do about it. listen, rails doesn’t scale, assholes. django is fine, but really, half of you chose django at random. mvc is great, and i get that, so test me on mvc principles if you think i don’t ‘get’ django.

godfuckingdammit would someone interview me in a way that actually seems like they want to see if i know anything rather than fucking comparing my resume and what i say against some invisible checklist?

maybe there’s an opportunity here.

thirty days live

thirty days ago on february 14, 2011, ottoneu.fangraphs.com went live. it’s been an up and down thirty days, but overall i would have to say it has been a successful launch. first, some basic stats

  • over 500 paid users
  • 120k pageviews
  • 2 to 3 server meltdowns
  • thousands of completed auctions

i guess the best way to discuss my experience is to go through a typical day as the solo employee at a startup with this much visibility (the fangraphs partnership has resulted in hundreds of thousands of unique impressions on my banner ad). my work day tends to start between 8:30am and 9:30am, whenever i roll out of bed. west coast living! every day, i think “i’ll just check my email real quick and then go get ready” – this never happens. the reality is that i wake up, open up Mail, go through my 3 ottoneu-related email addresses, and respond to every email i have unread. if i don’t have a quick response, i flag the email to get back to in a second pass. then i go ahead and complete my second pass through the emails and see if any of the flagged emails require code changes.

i’ll save the suspense – they often do.

the next thing i know, it’s 11:30am and jen is asking me what my plan is for the day. pre-launch, i didn’t have these emails to go through, so i was able to get up, get to the shared office space i have, and start coding. now that i have semi-urgent tasks, i’m going to need to start waking up at 7am to get to the office by 10:30 i think. anyway, i get through those bugs enhancements and then usually shower before lunch. usually.

the afternoon depends on what the main tasks of the day are. sometimes there are larger enhancements requested or that i have thought of that really deserve my time and attention. emails continue to come in, and sometimes i need to help out a user or three. and sometimes a post i have on fangraphs requires responding to comments, both good and bad.

if i remember, around 6:30 or 7pm, i’ll get dinner. if i’m lucky, someone will want to meet up for a beer or to shoot the shit. or for dinner.

the night ends with, as you might guess, Mail.app. double check twitter and my inbox to make sure nothing is broken and people are generally satisfied. if i’m not coded out from the day, i’ll add a couple more features or tweak something that has been bothering me – after all, i am not only the coder, i use the damn site daily. and finally, i’ll take a break and play some video games or read or whatever.

nothing pushes one to exercise more than this life choice, and the one main improvement i could make in my day would be to not check my email when i roll out of bed, but to go for a run and shower before doing anything else. once the email tap is opened up for the day, it’s really hard for me to shut it off and go do something else.

another good improvement would be to not get into the coding mindset before getting out of the apartment. getting in the zone is, as everyone know, a fickle and important thing that you don’t want to break. getting into the zone in my boxers and a tshirt about 10 minutes after waking up can’t be good for me, and staying in that zone for 3+ hours only leads to me missing two meals and breaking out of the zone when i realize something smells awful and it is me. which is basically what happened to me two days ago.

it’d be good to institute some no-computer time in the evening before bed, but maybe that’s something that can wait until things stabilize a bit, like after the season starts and i get through the inevitable start-of-season bugs.

anyway, it has been a fun thirty days, without a doubt. i have a great set of users who are patient, understanding, and really sharp. i have a pretty good, if perennially smelly boss. and look – i work on something that i both own and love every single day. not a lot of people can say that.

life is fun, chicago edition

i just got to chicago to visit chad for a day. haven’t seen him since… i’m going to guess 2007. way, way too long for one of my best friends.

anyway, it is really fucking cold here.

SCENE: starbucks on w division st. niv with his macbook pro, checking emails, decides to take a break to tweet about the weather (HOW THRILLING):

me (tweet) : dear winter in the midwest, i will not miss you when i am back in california. you suck. yours, niv

@yodaism responds: @nivshah A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

END SCENE

dusty rhodes’s road trip

our hero
this debonair motherfucker is dusty rhodes. last tuesday i worked from san francisco for the beginning of 21st amendment‘s and magnolia‘s strong beer month. i worked all day at a coffee shop, stayed out at 21A with some friends until pretty late, and didn’t leave the house again until friday, 3 days later. when i opened my bag friday morning to put my laptop in it, i saw his shit-eating grin staring back at me. everyone i was with and even some people i wasn’t with all denied having any knowledge of how i came into possession of (what we discovered to be) an $11 limited-edition action figure. it is truly one of my life’s mysteries, but i have chosen to embrace this particular mystery and turn dusty rhodes into a ridiculous, fat, polka-dotted mascot, of sorts.

so monday morning, the same people who talked me into drinking the tuesday prior talked me into taking the day off and going up to russian river brewery in downtown santa rosa to experience pliny the younger, one of the more celebrated california ipas (and beers) in existence. pliny the younger is a limited edition release that is only around for a couple of weeks, so we only had a small window to pounce.

an aside: yes, my last post was about how i quit my job and started my own start up. 3 months later, it might seem like i have given up on life and started drinking heavily, but i can assure that is not the case. ottoneu-related writing will commence shortly, and i will only give up on life and start drinking heavily if the next month and a half are a complete disaster.

so anyway, russian river, pliny the younger, and a wrestler mascot. like any good bay area burgeoning wanna-be hipster with a dslr, i decided to make a photo essay of our road trip from the perspective of our (my?) mascot. with that in mind, i present to you dusty rhodes’s road trip, a flickr set.

the luckiest i’ve been in vegas

i’ll write about #5 above soon, but first, i might as well share a story from my most recent trip to vegas (got back this past sunday).

i got to the airport pretty early for my 9:30pm departure – around 7:30 or so. normally i wouldn’t get to the airport that early, but that’s just how this trip went. i checked in and went to the relatively-short security line. i was in line behind a couple who, to me, seemed german or something – really unfamiliar with security, required multiple attempts to get through the metal detector, etc. the guy didn’t even pull his laptop out of his backpack when putting it through the x-ray, which required a second trip through the x-ray machine just before my bag and laptop and shoes went in. all in all, pretty freaking annoying.

i got through security and i was sitting at my gate reading work emails and thinking about how i should do a little work, but just resisting with all my might. i noticed the couple that was ahead of me in security walking by – for whatever reason i noticed them going towards one of the dead-ends in mccarran’s b terminal. i didn’t give it a second thought.

10-20 minutes passed and i decided, yes, it was time to do some work. i unzip my bag and reach in to get my work laptop. i thought briefly that the computer seemed a bit light to me, but only once i opened it up did i realize the problem. “don’t forget to call the food bank” was written on a post-it note in the bottom left corner
what fucking food bank?
oh shit
what have i done

that’s right, i swapped laptops with the guy who was in front of me in security. i took his 13″ mbp, he took my 15″. adrenaline and butterflies took over my body in a wave, starting directly from my lower intestine. i somehow processed that yes, he and his wife and a second couple had walked down the hallway to my right. i ran down there.

now you’re in an open space. there are 6 gates in a circle in front of you. each gate has people boarding and each gate has lots of people sitting around. there are slot machines in the middle. what the hell do you do?

i ran from gate to gate looking for a sign of the people i had seen earlier. thank fucking god the wife (i presume) had a very distinctive light blue jacket on, because i found her and her friend sitting at gate 24, waiting for their flight to edmonton. it took the longest 45 seconds of my life. i explained the situation and had no issues swapping laptops with the (apparently) canadians.

“that would have sucked for everyone” her friend said. “a lot” i agreed.

and that is how you have good luck in vegas. while this story might seem anti-climactic, anything less than this ending would have sucked for everyone a lot.

thank you, consumer reports

via rhodg (link):

“In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers,” the nonprofit organization wrote. “We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.”

It continued: “Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that ‘mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.’ The tests also indicate that AT&T’s network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4’s much-reported signal woes.”