the corner office

Ferdy Christant has an article titled Learning Strategies for Developers. A very good read.

Something he touches on which is quite topical for me, is this:

There is so much out there to learn, and only so little time to do it. You will need to make choices. I solved the puzzle as follow. First, I split my learning needs in two parts: professional needs and personal needs. The professional needs I consider the most important. I have bills to pay, if I can't, I cannot continue my way of living. Personal needs I consider important as well, but are mostly targetted towards fun and the expression of creativity.

I'm happy professionally, but I've battled a bit with the personal needs part, mainly because first from accounting to IT, and then from Notes to more mainstream development, I've always had the 'how do I get there?' fear, where everything I did in my own time, when I got to do it, felt like it had to be strictly aimed at gaining skills which would allow me to 'break in' to the kind of career I wanted.

It was only last year, really, realising that I was in a comfortable and fairly future-proof position career-wise, that I started to indulge myself, and tried to get over the idea that working on things that weren't strictly career-focused was wasteful. Sure, you have to put in the hours on technologies and skills that keep you employable, but it shouldn't take up every last minute of your free time. I still battle with the idea that the goal of a personal project can be fun and creativity, nothing more, and that those are worthy goals in their own right.

The question, then, is what to do to satisfy my 'personal needs'. There's just so much, and last year I dabbled in all sorts of things, but made no real progress with any of them. I tinkered with some OpenGL programming, and de-rusted my C++ skills. I played with C. I hacked up a poorly-performing xscreensaver module that bounced a ball around the screen. I did some Linux kernel tutorials and captured interrupts and klogged them (and let's be honest, a SCSI driver isn't far off once you've done that, is it?), I started working my way through some of my Unix programming books and wrote silly little network apps and played with processes and signals and stuff, and for the third year in a row I started to play with Eclipse RCP before getting side-tracked.

Problem is, I had no sense of accomplishment from anything because I didn't go far enough with anything. Studies and moving (and Eve Online) got in the way, but the truth is I lacked focus: everything was interesting, and I couldn't pick one thing and stay with it. So this year, once I'm past the Jan/Feb exam rush, I want to pick one personal project, and set some goals about what I want out of it, and then make it happen. Once I'm done, I'll move on to the next thing.

So, what to choose? I've been mulling over this for a while. As Ferdy goes on to say:

With your personal needs, it is wise to also follow market movements and trends. This way you can combine the fun factor with something useful for the future.

That's very wise, and to an extent I did that first with my blog app and then with my half-baked Eve Online market app, but being sensitive to the frivolity:guilt cycle, there's part of me which is inclined to pick something completely removed from what I do at work. I'm not sure.

Not much of a conclusion to a blog posting, but since exams are just around the corner, there's no rush. My efforts last year were rather schizophrenic at times, and I never blogged about them simply because I knew I was all over the map and had nothing useful to say about them. If you're on to something, it's usually less embarassing to blog at milestones than blabber before doing, in case you don't finish. Maybe the flipside will help me focus: pick a project, and then force myself to jabber about it so that I don't wander off in a million directions.

I haven't used a laptop as my primary machine for years and years. It's taken a while to break away from the desktop PC notion that I can only work at a desk. I've now discovered that I can be quite productive sitting in bed, under the duvet, as I am this morning. Now I just need coffee-making implements on my bedside table, and I'll be rocking.

Into 2007, just like that. Quite a bit has changed since my 2006 New Year entry. Living in another country, married, and expecting our first child. It's been a crazy ride, but I think I can safely say that 2006 has been a Good Year.

For us, 2007 is going to be a year of opportunity and new experiences. In whatever way, I hope yours is the same... Happy New Year!

Well, we've had rather a nice first Christmas in the UK. First 'winter' Christmas. Until this morning I still harboured a secret hope that it'd suddenly start snowing overnight. But hey.

Hope you enjoyed it!

I feel sorry for all the poor souls stuck in airports at the moment, but I don't mind saying that I think this fog is awesome. The worst 'fog' I've ever experienced before was Joburg winter fog, which is basically low cloud which dissipates as soon as the sun comes up. This stuff is just solid and beautiful and it ain't going nowhere.

We stay across the road from a huge park, which we sometimes walk across to get into town. I went out for a walk yesterday, and standing on the path in the middle of the open ground, with nobody else around, and just the faintest of outlines of trees in the distance, was a weird but incredibly uplifting experience.

Not only that, but every single cobweb on every tree and on walls and in corners and crevasses was covered in ice, making little diamond strings all over the show. After initially feeling freaked out at how many spiders must've been around to make them, I was mesmerised: it was one of the prettiest things I've ever seen.

All I can say is thank heavens for central heating, though.

Our ADSL line was switched on today. This is the moment that South African geeks wait for when moving overseas. So far I've racked up over 5 Mb/s on my ethernet modem, without doing any tweaking. Take that, Telkom!

It's not without frustration though - I got the ethernet modem as a freebie, I'd shelled out for a wireless router/modem for normal use. That's being a bit more niggly - slower speeds and constantly up/down. I'll have to fiddle some more to get that sorted, but at least I know what my connection's capable of. Yay!

After nearly 3 months in the dial-up wilderness, I have that weird guilty feeling about being online for extended stretches of time, like I should be disconnecting or something. I'm sure that'll pass soon.

Did I mention... yay!

I finished Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion last week. It's telling that I feel compelled to write about the book but can't quite decide what to say. It's one of those books that'd be well received by most atheists and godless types, is persuasive enough to probably convert some who sit on the fence, and will just further upset those whose faith is absolute.

There are a few themes to the book. It's an anti-religious polemic, it's a detailed rebuttal of arguments in favour of a creator's existence, it dips its toes into the evolutionary origins of our need for religion, argues that morality is an evolved, inherent human trait (that if anything, is subverted by some religious beliefs), it spends some time on the negative social, political and psychological consequences of religion, and it offers a view of what Dawkins refers to as Einsteinian religion: enrichment of our lives by rejecting the notion of a personal, supernatural 'god', and replacing it with simple wonderment at the beauty and complexity of the world around us, made all the more beautiful by an enhanced understanding of it. In this respect, the book is inspiring.

The pro-atheist arguments are, to me, compelling. Good fodder for boozy arguments, but even so, it did challenge my own views. I always describe myself as agnostic, but in truth, that amounts to being a functional atheist who can't be bothered with getting into arguments about whether what I believe or don't believe amounts to 'faith' too. Dawkins confronts the wishy-washiness of agnosticism, and by his own definitions of the terms, I guess I am basically an atheist. I see no evidence of a creator, no matter how appealing the notion is, and on balance, don't think there is one.

Where I don't consider myself to be a committed atheist, is that I don't really care whether there's a creator or not. Even if there is a creator, I still see no tangible evidence of its involvement in our affairs, and if it is involved, don't think it's particularly 'nice' by any normal notions of decency considering how it's allowing the world to unfold, and would have no compulsion to approve of, let alone worship it. So on the whole, I find that neither believing nor disbelieving is the least hassle way of getting on with my life. Dawkins is probably right - I should identify myself as an atheist and be willing to stand up and be counted. Will I in future? I'm not sure.

My only reservation about the book is the polemic aspect. Dawkins is utterly scathing when it comes to religion. I can understand why Dawkins does it, and I have some sympathy for his frustrations, but there is a fine line between blindly respecting a belief (a notion which Dawkins rightfully, imho, deplores), and respecting a person's right to hold that belief. Outright attacks often feel like they cross that line. Furthermore, the attacks get in the way of the potentially more productive messages of the book. Ridicule might get some people to reconsider their beliefs, but on the whole, it won't. In practical terms, it means that people, including myself, would be less likely to recommend the book to believers, because few people are likely to be swayed by a book which appears to insult them.

On the whole, though, definitely a worthwhile and valuable book, if you're open to what it has to say.

Artima has a report-back on a recent talk about eBay's architecture. In addition to the insane load and volume numbers they talk about, there's some interesting detail on how their servlet-based system is put together. eBay also has an interesting approach to scalability and architecture, which I quite like:

The most amazing aspect of this evolution to me is not necessarily the technical brilliance of the solutions at each architecture stage, but the fact that eBay was able to meet the challenges of its growth with subsequent refinements to its system, all the while keeping the site operational.

The reason that's interesting is because it suggests that you can start with almost any architecture—even with Perl or Rails or JSP pages—as long as you know how to migrate to the next step, and have the capability to do so, if and when you need to scale your app. That, in turn, suggests that the key test of scalability is not so much how each architecture stage scales, but how readily a company or an organization can move an application from one architecture step to the next.

This isn't just architectural flexibility, but organisational too:

Recognizing that predicting future workloads is hard, if not impossible, this view would aim at an architecture that handles some near-term scaling goal, and at the same time allows the deployment of features rapidly so that the application's real users can generate a business rationale for supporting future architecture upgrades. Far from considering scaling as an afterthought, however, this view would also aim to develop from the start the organizational, and even business, capabilities to handle architectural changes to the system.

Worth a read.

... buying your groceries fresh from the farmers' market is that you can buy a cauliflower which drops a live slug onto your kitchen floor, leaving you ham-fistedly trying to pick it up with a paper towel while it leaves a snail-trail all over the floor, and frantically rushing into the lounge and fiddling with the safety catch on the window while the thing starts crawling off the edge of the paper, before you finally manage to get the window open and drop it onto the lawn below.

It raises something of personal ethical dilemma. Did I try to save the slug's life because I felt it would be wrong to kill it, or was I just too grossed out at the prospect of squishing a slug?

The Suffolk murders have gripped the country. Scary stuff. The whole affair, as it unfolds, simply reaffirms my cynicism when it comes to mass media. Vapid talking heads doing their best to milk the fsck out of what's happened. You know what their bosses are telling them: talk talk talk and then talk some more, no matter what meaningless drivel you're spouting. Try to sensationalise everything, and if that means obsessing over pointless bloody minutae until something new happens, then do it. Just keep people glued to the TV.

If the inanity isn't enough, there's the constant drive to invent crisis and whip up hostility towards the police. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a reporter climb down a copper's throat because Suffolk's police force is too small, too incompetent, too hesitant to guarantee that nothing bad will happen again. If these people really cared about the killer being caught, then maybe they should leave the cops to do their bloody jobs instead of wasting their time and ours with stupid questions, veiled accusations and piss-poor attempts to whip up outrage.

Dear news people: please just report the news, communicate the facts, then STFU.