Developing Upwards

I'm not a fish flopping around on the boat, struggling to pull through my gills water that isn't there. That's the image Jon Morrow would have you imagine for people like myself: writers who don't get to write. In his very poignant piece , Morrow talks about the nightmares and pain stuck in a life he didn’t really enjoy, until he let go and gave himself to wordcraft. I think anyone with a passion they’ve stifled can sympathize, but I don’t agree with his conclusions of advice to writers-who-could. Contrasted to Morrow’s do-or-die struggles and deep dive to arguable save his life, I’m reminded of the always articulate Matt Gemmell’s announcement at the start of 2014 that he would be shifting to writing full-time and no longer continuing his successful programming career or his seven year self-employed stint in the Apple universe. Look at the different ways these two writers describe their life away from writing. My subconscious was trying to warn me th...

We use the word “diversity” and when we use a word we are packing up some concept as a thing . We can put that thing on a shelf and analyze it, talk about it, and use it like a hammer when we find a nail. Diversity, in this way, is defined as something other than the natural order. That is the result of labelling something: we define it as something that needs pointed out as distinct from the normal assumptions. Not that it is positioned as bad but we conceptualize things as the normal every day we’re used to and then diversify as this extra step we can take. Diversity is an added step. Diversity is optional. You should take this extra step, of course, but it isn’t inherent. But, here is where I’m finding I might disagree with the way we use this language because... Diversity is inherent. We live in a world reaching seven billion people and we are nothing close to  homogenous. The human race is colorful and varied and constantly surprising. You will never meet ev...

Full Disclosure: I’m no longer using Vim as my full-time editor. I’m giving Atom a shot, because I really do like the energy around it and every once and a while I like to mix things up. (I even became an Emacs user for a year, just to see what the other side looked like!) I while back I really enjoyed reading Mike Kozlowski’s piece Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim , and I completely agree with the sentiment 100% (even considering the above disclosure!). Emacs is an editor I have enormous respect for, and not just for what it is but the heritage it serves as for so many editors to come after it. Emacs’ big idea has been thoroughly learned — and how vi’s big idea hasn’t. From TextMate to SublimeText to Atom, modern editors have all adopted the extensibility lesson so much to heart that it is, essentially, a part of the fabric of what it means to be a (decent) text editor. More or less, you’re either notepad or you’re extendable. Thank you, Emacs, and all you stand for, for th...

Now that the year is mostly through, but we still have enough of it left to talk about, I’m going to make a belated statement and an explanation: I will not attend a single conference this year. No PyCon. No Traveling for packed days of community building and education. No lower key conferences in my own home city, even. Not a single conference will list my name as an attendee for the enter year of 2014. And I feel great about it! My decision not to attend any conferences this year was an intentional one and has been both uplifting and life saving. The thing is, I absolutely love conferences. I love going to PyCon more than I love most holidays. I’m enormously excited to live in the area that hosts both NCDevCon and All Things Open. Hell, I love conferences so much I organized my own just because I wanted to attend it so badly. As an enormous supporter of tech conference attendance, I realized that I had no choice but to take a hiatus from attendance. I had something ...

It is the opinion of this developer that HTML Imports, championed by the Polymer Project and already implemented in the Blink fork of WebKit, are utterly and completely useless. Beyond this base uselessness, I believe HTML Imports are actively and wildly harmful. I believe the more they are used, the more problems they’re going to cause. The Case For HTML Imports Giving the new feature their fair shot, I’ll lay out the case in favor of HTML Imports. I was actually pretty excited about them when I first read the details, and even when I first started using them. Unique loading of resources without double loading, such as when two imports each themselves import a shared dependency. is really cool! We’re building pretty complicated JS loading systems to solve what, here, is a built-in feature. The collection of scripts, markup, and styles associated with single units of behavior is really great as a way to conceptualize of how you’re pulling in these web components. It just mak...

Earlier this week I ran across a really fascinating project called Duckling . This isn't the Duckling project that I  work on, but the coincidental name sameness probably caught my attention! Duckling is a date parsing library for Clojure, but it handles date parsing in a fairly unique fashion. From the Duckling website: Duckling is “almost” a  Probabilistic Context Free Grammar . Although I am no NLP expert (it is on my long and growing list of things to study one of these days) , I was able to get the just from the explanation and the examples combined. Just look at some of the strings Duckling is able to successfully parse: “the 1st of march” “last week” “a quarter to noon” “thirty two celsius” “2 inches” “the day before labor day 2020”  These don't even have to be dates. Duckling's approach is generalized in a way that the library itself doesn't require special handling of dates, only that it's training set includes sufficient samplings of date (and oth...

Growth is not something we’re really instilled with when we’re growing up, ironically enough. Flashbacks in movies to the protagonist’s youth tend to show a mini-version of the adult, full of nods to their grown-up selves. Here you can see the people they will grow into already taking shape. Often, the younger versions of characters in a flashback will be almost identical to the older in personality. This is especially true in group flashbacks. Growth, we’re told over and over, is a straight line up. The kind of growth we’re not exposed to is growth that shoots off in directions you never anticipated. We aren’t told to expect and never to embrace changes in yourself that alter you so fundamentally you aren’t even recognizable any longer to your younger self. When growth surprises us, we’re taken off guard. We’re afraid. There is so little left of the boy I was not that long ago. Who I’ve become is so much more than older. The changes in my understanding of the world, in ho...