Leaving for vacation to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary.
When we got married we thought for our 10th anniversary we’d go to Monaco. After one kid that was scaled back to Montreal. After two kids that was scaled back to a hotel on the river one city over…
I agreed to write a programming book last summer. I’m now almost done with only two chapters remaining. It has turned out to be a lot more work than I thought it would be, and the publisher has been unhelpful, to say the least. I’m now a few days behind schedule for the current chapter, and my editor is giving me a ton of grief. Sorry, I guess I just needed to vent.
Writing a book is freaking hard. I don’t think folks who haven’t done it yet understand what all is involved. There’s code, there’s tweets, there’s essays, there’s long-form content, there’s informative graphics – and writing a book is all of this and more.
Yeah, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. If I had it to do over, I would work out a longer schedule, and I would try to do the work in chunks instead of continuously.
I’ve taken several runs at book-writing, finally finishing my first “real” book last year. I don’t have any words of wisdom. Actually I had to do it the other way – just sit down and keep flailing until I got to the end. Otherwise I would have spent forever bike-shedding. My first couple of tries I finished a book, and it was extremely well-constructed. It just didn’t do what I wanted it to do. That’s because I was focusing on chunks instead of themes.
There’s one thing I heard that rings true, for what it’s worth: every book writer has to grow and evolve their own system. The more you follow a recipe the less creative you might be. I have no idea if that’s true. It seems right – and I know that once I gave up reading advice and trying to be perfect and instead just tried to be cogent and consistent? It worked better for me that way.
Having said that, I was writing about how to think about creating tech that people want – an immensely fuzzy topic that I had struggled with for years. If I were doing a language reference? I’d probably do chunks.
Keep it up! Starting is the hardest part (along with finishing, and the middle, which are also both quite difficult). Do you have a publisher, or are you self publishing?
Feel free to drop me an email if you want to commiserate together (or provide encouragement).
I’m plugging along when I can alongside regular work. No publisher, haven’t even looked as of yet and it’s for a pretty specific context around using basic programming and OSS tools and command-line tools to do collection, cleaning and analysis of data. It’s aimed at humanitarian staff so I might put it up free in the end. Especially as it’s my first go at writing anything more than a technical spec or architecture doc… have to curb my enthusiasm for turning everything into UML diagrams…
The snow melted and it’s 60F. I’m going to be outside as much as possible. Bike ride, yard work, building something in my garage workshop with the garage door open, etc.
The usual - fixes for the house, minor woodworking projects that I play around with, crackpot inventions that won’t ever work. The last thing I made was an electric shoe sole brush that actuated when you stepped on it - it manages to clean the shoe and in the process spray debris everywhere :). That was the prototype and was too large to be practical (if that’s even possible). I’m going to try and make a smaller one tomorrow.
That’s a really cool idea. Care to share a photo with us? At least in my imagination you could probably contain the spray of debris with some partial enclosure.
I just built a desktop machine, my first in 9 years. Going to finish setting up my Ubuntu install and then see if I can make use of this expensive GPU and train a GAN to do something neat. Any ideas?
The way I’ve been going, probably spend it neck-deep in Rust data mining and database stuff, and running a hackerspace.
Said database nearly has enough stuff in it to be non-trivially useful, so there might be a website launch soon, if some odd bugs get fixed. I don’t know how anyone survives SQL; surely there must be some relational database system out there that’s actually helpful?
The hackerspace is already non-trivially useful; turns out being on the board of it mostly means wrangling paperwork and giving people someone to complain to. Then you just nod sagely, agree that what they’re saying is true, and suggest they bring it up at the next members meeting.
I’ll probably keep plugging away at my research to try to finish up my PhD, and I’ll continue to work on the documentation for a project I’ve worked on for a few months. I’ve been waiting to release it until there was some decent documentation, but it’s obviously not the most exciting task. I told myself I couldn’t start a new project (which I’ve been itching to do) until I finished the current one, so I’m using that as motivation to get the current project out the door.
I highly advice you to use the 4.0 one. It’s installation is enormously easier to deploy than the 3.11 release. I went to a redhat course and the teacher said the 4.0 release will free up 1.5day on a 5day course.
Friend is hosting a call of cthulu party. Keep working on a flask-based blog (actually working on using ansible to provision an aws server to do development + have ansible on it to provision the real server on a lambda). Yeah yeah use a static blog I want to play with stuff and have the possibility to innovate, plus plug comments that aren’t Disqus.
Despite being middle aged, I recently bought a Rubik’s Cube (speed cube version) for myself. I had an old school one a very long time ago which I found cumbersome to play with. This new one is soooooo much nicer.
I plan to spend time making patterns and memorizing how to solve it again. Yes. This is my plan. :-D
Kicking around some code-gen and machine readable definitions for the W3C WebDriver bindings. When that’s working I can start on examples and bloggenating about property-based state machine testing for web interfaces. Seems like a wicked fun kernel of an idea, will be interesting to see what falls out.
I’m importing UK company data into https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/. Currently, the site holds data on a little over two million companies registered from April 1st, 2015. After today, it should hold all active UK companies. Local testing shows my database should grow to around five million records.
I’m using the Haskell library conduit to stream data from a big CSV file, do some processing, and insert it into Postgres.
I’m also hiring people to do things for me. Other than finding Haskell programmers to work with me on my funded startup (not NBM), I’m trying to find someone to properly setup nginx and fail2ban with NixOps. I set up a minimal working example of a small Yesod app which can be deployed to an EC2 machine for this purpose.
We’re taking the kiddo to the zoo today. I’ll probably keep working on my speed reading plugin, stutter (https://github.com/jamestomasino/stutter) for a bit, and keep reading the many, many books in my queue.
I’m trying to finish my first real woodworking project, a cantilevered table with the same height as our kitchen bench to serve as an extra working surface. With hand tools so I’m exercising some rip cuts, some mortising and tenoning, some gluing, some rasp chamfering, etc. I might finish tomorrow or probably on Sunday because I don’t have enough clamps to glue several parts simultaneously.
Learning maths with Khan Academy as recommended by someone from here, and after shabbos putting aside my own projects to do some unpaid overtime for work :^)
I’ll be doing a lot of reading. At my startup, our main focus largely reduces to “knowledge management.” And over the past few months I’ve been pointedly going back and reading (or re-reading in some cases) a lot of the books that I consider the “canon” of KM, looking to either solidify my understanding of certain things, mine ideas for messaging from a sales and marketing viewpoint, mine ideas for new product features (or even whole new products), etc.
Right now I’m working on The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. Once I finish that, I’ll probably move on to The Living Company by Arie de Geus.
If I take a break from all that, it will probably be to go to the gym and lift, or maybe get out and do some bicycle riding if the weather is nice.
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about this for a while, but haven’t gotten to it yet. But briefly, a few of the books that I consider “the canon of KM” would include:
Wellsprings of Knowledge
If Only We Knew What We Know
Working Knowledge
Common Knowledge
Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race
The Fifth Discipline
Business @ The Speed of Thought
The Living Company
If I had to pick one book that gets the key ideas across, I’d probably start with Wellsprings of Knowledge.
Interesting. I’m finding at my company that we have a… deep need for improvement with regards to knowledge management (not a subject I know a lot about, unfortunately.) It seems like most efforts for improvement are rapidly lost in the background noise and “what actually happens” ends up fairly random.
Writing a front-end for my ETH Paris hackathon project, which was a smart contract which commits funds to an RSA public key, to be released on receipt of an appropriate RSA signature. This allows you to send ETH to anyone with an RSA key (most github users, SSL-protected websites) without any other setup on their end. They do have to get an ETH address to claim the funds, though.
Heeey, hi fellow unicyclist! :) I’m a simple recreational flatland/city one, though at my place it’s still somewhat too cold for me to take it out for some quick fun :) have a good time! :)
Wrapping up some code I’ve been working on for fantasy baseball valuations. For years I’ve been writing little scrapers and scripts that have made me thousands of dollars just in my own games, but over 2019 I want to take some of my more innovative tools and productize them for the 2020 season. There are some really great sites and tools out there already, but they all have a few blind spots, and that’s where I’ve gotten my edge over the years.
I currently live outside the US, so I can’t play daily fantasy any more (where I first made more than $1k in a season). I’m restricted to just playing season-long leagues that require a fair bit of hands-on management for each league individually. That makes it more scalable to sell a product rather than try to play 100 leagues myself.
I’m not familiar with fantasy baseball, or indeed fantasy just about anything. Is the money also fantasy? Or are you making real money scripting a game?
I’m switching from a 2013 MBA to a 2018 X1 Carbon. So mostly wondering why full disk encryption is such a herculean task on Arch. Admitably my ambition is making it significantly more difficult than has to be.
Aside from that, I’m helping a friend build an undefined box and hoping that I don’t find myself in it, buried in the back yard.
I’ve got some lambda code I want to get running on AWS as part of a serverless app. I’ve been getting into AWS in a big way over the past two months and little sample projects are the only way for me to stay interested.
Decided to rewrite a blog post in a different tense: third-person…as I was getting nowhere with first-person singular. It seems incredibly vain, but might produce a better reading experience?
Otherwise, taking my dog to a dog park, reading all I can, drinking coffee, and much much more!
Son turned three this last week so we’re having a big party for him this weekend. Prepping all day today for roughly 2-3 hours of kids going nuts in a bouncy castle and eating cake tomorrow… Also going to try the TIS-100 game which was recommended to me on another posts comments.
I used to be a mac user since MacOS 8.x then couple years ago I jumped ship to a Surface and Windows 10 and I was happy. I love the Surface form factor. Now, got a new gig that requires me to use a mac, so it is time to set everything again…
Well sundays are my day of so I try to do nothing mentally taxing or working. Today that is expressed by learning about LISP.
Yesterday I was working on input prediction based on ngrams that doesn’t occur on a word basis but rather on a symbol level. This adds a lot to memory requirements, but I feel that it can add some benefits. To exemplify it’s usefulness consider dialects of language and changed words due to puns. In general I’d say that doing the statistics on a symbol basis leads to a more beutiful and generalized interpretation of language. Also it get’s rid of the issue of thinking about which delimiters should be used.
In the end I’ll probably end up with some kind of hybrid giving weighted input from several engines.
We moved to our new house last week, so it’s unpacking and cleaning the detritus. The kids at least love the new place, so that’s one fewer thing to worry about. Due to a bug in the moving dependency graph, we sold our bed before having the new one delivered, so the wife and I are sleeping on an air mattress.
Just going through all the archives of data/pictures/old projects that I have tucked away, and cleaning them out.
Sort of an early data spring cleaning.
I’m going to see an improv comedy show, but other than that I don’t actually have a lot planned yet. Maybe some reading and much-needed relaxation. I might also sneak in a little bit of CHICKEN coding.
First sprint of gambe.ro, the italian version of lobste.rs. I’m working with the guys to translate everything and set-up the instance for the closed testing.
Leaving for vacation to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary.
When we got married we thought for our 10th anniversary we’d go to Monaco. After one kid that was scaled back to Montreal. After two kids that was scaled back to a hotel on the river one city over…
and to think that people used to have 7 kids
Traveling down to Portland to run Fennel Conf 2019!
https://conf.fennel-lang.org/2019
It’s a pretty small low-key conference, but it should be a lot of fun.
I agreed to write a programming book last summer. I’m now almost done with only two chapters remaining. It has turned out to be a lot more work than I thought it would be, and the publisher has been unhelpful, to say the least. I’m now a few days behind schedule for the current chapter, and my editor is giving me a ton of grief. Sorry, I guess I just needed to vent.
What am I doing this weekend? Writing.
Any demo content we could see?
Sorry, I’m not allowed to release any of the writing independently of my publisher, but you can check out the code at: https://github.com/codeplea/Hands-On-Network-Programming-with-C
Writing a book is freaking hard. I don’t think folks who haven’t done it yet understand what all is involved. There’s code, there’s tweets, there’s essays, there’s long-form content, there’s informative graphics – and writing a book is all of this and more.
Kudos on almost making it! You’ve got this.
Yeah, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. If I had it to do over, I would work out a longer schedule, and I would try to do the work in chunks instead of continuously.
I’ve taken several runs at book-writing, finally finishing my first “real” book last year. I don’t have any words of wisdom. Actually I had to do it the other way – just sit down and keep flailing until I got to the end. Otherwise I would have spent forever bike-shedding. My first couple of tries I finished a book, and it was extremely well-constructed. It just didn’t do what I wanted it to do. That’s because I was focusing on chunks instead of themes.
There’s one thing I heard that rings true, for what it’s worth: every book writer has to grow and evolve their own system. The more you follow a recipe the less creative you might be. I have no idea if that’s true. It seems right – and I know that once I gave up reading advice and trying to be perfect and instead just tried to be cogent and consistent? It worked better for me that way.
Having said that, I was writing about how to think about creating tech that people want – an immensely fuzzy topic that I had struggled with for years. If I were doing a language reference? I’d probably do chunks.
I’m about 2 chapters into writing (after weeks of scaffolding out and research) a beginners book, and man, writing is tough, so props to you…
Keep it up! Starting is the hardest part (along with finishing, and the middle, which are also both quite difficult). Do you have a publisher, or are you self publishing?
Feel free to drop me an email if you want to commiserate together (or provide encouragement).
I’m plugging along when I can alongside regular work. No publisher, haven’t even looked as of yet and it’s for a pretty specific context around using basic programming and OSS tools and command-line tools to do collection, cleaning and analysis of data. It’s aimed at humanitarian staff so I might put it up free in the end. Especially as it’s my first go at writing anything more than a technical spec or architecture doc… have to curb my enthusiasm for turning everything into UML diagrams…
Attempting to run 12 miles at an average pace of 8 minutes per mile.
The snow melted and it’s 60F. I’m going to be outside as much as possible. Bike ride, yard work, building something in my garage workshop with the garage door open, etc.
With the door open? Living the life!
Indeed!
What kind of stuff do you build in your workshop? :)
The usual - fixes for the house, minor woodworking projects that I play around with, crackpot inventions that won’t ever work. The last thing I made was an electric shoe sole brush that actuated when you stepped on it - it manages to clean the shoe and in the process spray debris everywhere :). That was the prototype and was too large to be practical (if that’s even possible). I’m going to try and make a smaller one tomorrow.
That’s a really cool idea. Care to share a photo with us? At least in my imagination you could probably contain the spray of debris with some partial enclosure.
I just built a desktop machine, my first in 9 years. Going to finish setting up my Ubuntu install and then see if I can make use of this expensive GPU and train a GAN to do something neat. Any ideas?
Perhaps thislobsterspostdoesnotexist.com along the lines of https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ ?
I know nothing about GANs, would it be easier to create random real-looking comments?
Or for extra terror, this HR Giger painting does not exist?
One of these waifus is not like the others.
The way I’ve been going, probably spend it neck-deep in Rust data mining and database stuff, and running a hackerspace.
Said database nearly has enough stuff in it to be non-trivially useful, so there might be a website launch soon, if some odd bugs get fixed. I don’t know how anyone survives SQL; surely there must be some relational database system out there that’s actually helpful?
The hackerspace is already non-trivially useful; turns out being on the board of it mostly means wrangling paperwork and giving people someone to complain to. Then you just nod sagely, agree that what they’re saying is true, and suggest they bring it up at the next members meeting.
This weekend, I’m continuing working with Rust and Actix-web. I’m going to attempt to write a url service like bit.ly with Actix and Diesel
Squats for sure!
I’ll probably keep plugging away at my research to try to finish up my PhD, and I’ll continue to work on the documentation for a project I’ve worked on for a few months. I’ve been waiting to release it until there was some decent documentation, but it’s obviously not the most exciting task. I told myself I couldn’t start a new project (which I’ve been itching to do) until I finished the current one, so I’m using that as motivation to get the current project out the door.
Moving to Cincinnati
Welcome to the midwest neighbor. It is very flat.
Southern Ohio is quite hilly.
Also northeastern ohio, especially in the cuyahoga valley national park.
haha I moved from Akron, OH, Cinci isn’t too bad.
Starting the course that teaches me to be a beekeeper.
Looking into OpenShift, maybe even set up a master just to play around. We’ll see how that goes.
I highly advice you to use the 4.0 one. It’s installation is enormously easier to deploy than the 3.11 release. I went to a redhat course and the teacher said the 4.0 release will free up 1.5day on a 5day course.
I have to rely on OKD as requested by my employer so no 4.0 for me I guess…
Trying https://github.com/ThomasTJdev/nim_homeassistant and contributing to it.
Friend is hosting a call of cthulu party. Keep working on a flask-based blog (actually working on using ansible to provision an aws server to do development + have ansible on it to provision the real server on a lambda). Yeah yeah use a static blog I want to play with stuff and have the possibility to innovate, plus plug comments that aren’t Disqus.
Despite being middle aged, I recently bought a Rubik’s Cube (speed cube version) for myself. I had an old school one a very long time ago which I found cumbersome to play with. This new one is soooooo much nicer.
I plan to spend time making patterns and memorizing how to solve it again. Yes. This is my plan. :-D
Kicking around some code-gen and machine readable definitions for the W3C WebDriver bindings. When that’s working I can start on examples and bloggenating about property-based state machine testing for web interfaces. Seems like a wicked fun kernel of an idea, will be interesting to see what falls out.
I’m importing UK company data into https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/. Currently, the site holds data on a little over two million companies registered from April 1st, 2015. After today, it should hold all active UK companies. Local testing shows my database should grow to around five million records.
I’m using the Haskell library conduit to stream data from a big CSV file, do some processing, and insert it into Postgres.
I’m also hiring people to do things for me. Other than finding Haskell programmers to work with me on my funded startup (not NBM), I’m trying to find someone to properly setup nginx and fail2ban with NixOps. I set up a minimal working example of a small Yesod app which can be deployed to an EC2 machine for this purpose.
We’re taking the kiddo to the zoo today. I’ll probably keep working on my speed reading plugin, stutter (https://github.com/jamestomasino/stutter) for a bit, and keep reading the many, many books in my queue.
I’m trying to finish my first real woodworking project, a cantilevered table with the same height as our kitchen bench to serve as an extra working surface. With hand tools so I’m exercising some rip cuts, some mortising and tenoning, some gluing, some rasp chamfering, etc. I might finish tomorrow or probably on Sunday because I don’t have enough clamps to glue several parts simultaneously.
I’m going to a metal show with a friend this weekend.
Learning maths with Khan Academy as recommended by someone from here, and after shabbos putting aside my own projects to do some unpaid overtime for work :^)
I’ll be doing a lot of reading. At my startup, our main focus largely reduces to “knowledge management.” And over the past few months I’ve been pointedly going back and reading (or re-reading in some cases) a lot of the books that I consider the “canon” of KM, looking to either solidify my understanding of certain things, mine ideas for messaging from a sales and marketing viewpoint, mine ideas for new product features (or even whole new products), etc.
Right now I’m working on The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. Once I finish that, I’ll probably move on to The Living Company by Arie de Geus.
If I take a break from all that, it will probably be to go to the gym and lift, or maybe get out and do some bicycle riding if the weather is nice.
What are the others? And if only one, which should someone buy to learn the most important concepts?
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about this for a while, but haven’t gotten to it yet. But briefly, a few of the books that I consider “the canon of KM” would include:
Wellsprings of Knowledge
If Only We Knew What We Know
Working Knowledge
Common Knowledge
Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race
The Fifth Discipline
Business @ The Speed of Thought
The Living Company
If I had to pick one book that gets the key ideas across, I’d probably start with Wellsprings of Knowledge.
Interesting. I’m finding at my company that we have a… deep need for improvement with regards to knowledge management (not a subject I know a lot about, unfortunately.) It seems like most efforts for improvement are rapidly lost in the background noise and “what actually happens” ends up fairly random.
Writing a front-end for my ETH Paris hackathon project, which was a smart contract which commits funds to an RSA public key, to be released on receipt of an appropriate RSA signature. This allows you to send ETH to anyone with an RSA key (most github users, SSL-protected websites) without any other setup on their end. They do have to get an ETH address to claim the funds, though.
I’m playing with inotify and text user interfaces in Haskell.
Also getting back on my mountain unicycle for the first time in awhile!
Heeey, hi fellow unicyclist! :) I’m a simple recreational flatland/city one, though at my place it’s still somewhat too cold for me to take it out for some quick fun :) have a good time! :)
If you get a muni, weather is less of a problem. I used to take mine out on the gulf of Bothnia when it was frozen over.
Wrapping up some code I’ve been working on for fantasy baseball valuations. For years I’ve been writing little scrapers and scripts that have made me thousands of dollars just in my own games, but over 2019 I want to take some of my more innovative tools and productize them for the 2020 season. There are some really great sites and tools out there already, but they all have a few blind spots, and that’s where I’ve gotten my edge over the years.
you expect to make more selling it as a product than by doing more of the same at a larger scale?
I currently live outside the US, so I can’t play daily fantasy any more (where I first made more than $1k in a season). I’m restricted to just playing season-long leagues that require a fair bit of hands-on management for each league individually. That makes it more scalable to sell a product rather than try to play 100 leagues myself.
I’m not familiar with fantasy baseball, or indeed fantasy just about anything. Is the money also fantasy? Or are you making real money scripting a game?
https://nhooyr.io/ws
An improvement over the gorilla/websocket and gobwas/ws WebSocket libraries for Go.
I’m switching from a 2013 MBA to a 2018 X1 Carbon. So mostly wondering why full disk encryption is such a herculean task on Arch. Admitably my ambition is making it significantly more difficult than has to be.
Aside from that, I’m helping a friend build an undefined box and hoping that I don’t find myself in it, buried in the back yard.
Also germinating.
I’m planning to finish Sun and Steel and On the Existence of Digital Objects. Might start Storm of Steel (the 1929 translation) as well.
I’ve got some lambda code I want to get running on AWS as part of a serverless app. I’ve been getting into AWS in a big way over the past two months and little sample projects are the only way for me to stay interested.
Decided to rewrite a blog post in a different tense: third-person…as I was getting nowhere with first-person singular. It seems incredibly vain, but might produce a better reading experience?
Otherwise, taking my dog to a dog park, reading all I can, drinking coffee, and much much more!
Son turned three this last week so we’re having a big party for him this weekend. Prepping all day today for roughly 2-3 hours of kids going nuts in a bouncy castle and eating cake tomorrow… Also going to try the TIS-100 game which was recommended to me on another posts comments.
setting up a new mac… argh.
I used to be a mac user since MacOS 8.x then couple years ago I jumped ship to a Surface and Windows 10 and I was happy. I love the Surface form factor. Now, got a new gig that requires me to use a mac, so it is time to set everything again…
Working on presentation slides for the next formal methods meetup.
Well sundays are my day of so I try to do nothing mentally taxing or working. Today that is expressed by learning about LISP.
Yesterday I was working on input prediction based on ngrams that doesn’t occur on a word basis but rather on a symbol level. This adds a lot to memory requirements, but I feel that it can add some benefits. To exemplify it’s usefulness consider dialects of language and changed words due to puns. In general I’d say that doing the statistics on a symbol basis leads to a more beutiful and generalized interpretation of language. Also it get’s rid of the issue of thinking about which delimiters should be used.
In the end I’ll probably end up with some kind of hybrid giving weighted input from several engines.
We moved to our new house last week, so it’s unpacking and cleaning the detritus. The kids at least love the new place, so that’s one fewer thing to worry about. Due to a bug in the moving dependency graph, we sold our bed before having the new one delivered, so the wife and I are sleeping on an air mattress.
Hopefully studying observability in k8s and continuing to build out my own k8s cluster, now with my own services.
Playing a ton of Elder Scrolls Online and getting trashed at a block party in San Francisco. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
hopefully: get some decent progress on a “pet-project” app; sourdough loaf; hit the gym
Just going through all the archives of data/pictures/old projects that I have tucked away, and cleaning them out. Sort of an early data spring cleaning.
I’m going to see an improv comedy show, but other than that I don’t actually have a lot planned yet. Maybe some reading and much-needed relaxation. I might also sneak in a little bit of CHICKEN coding.
First sprint of gambe.ro, the italian version of lobste.rs. I’m working with the guys to translate everything and set-up the instance for the closed testing.
[Comment removed by author]