Blind Not Dumb (Posts about life)

Hacking the Wetware

cpatti — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 02:32:00 GMT

Working for Amazon has been a revelation to me in ways large and small.

One of the biggest by far has been coming to the understanding that career growth was not in fact laying in wait around the next corner if only I could master the latest technology trend. There are baseline skills that can either accelerate or retard your growth in profound ways, and many of them reduce down to changing the way you think in or react to various situations. Let's walk through a few of them.

Taking Ownership

You are well and truly the captain of your own ship. Your performance is your responsibility. While these statements may seem blindingly self evident, in fact there are some subtle traps for the unwary who may not even realize they are rationalizing about failure by abdicating responsibility for their own success.

This can take the form of seemingly innocuous behaviors like not wanting to burn bridges or be the bad guy, but when push comes to shove everybody loves a winner and nobody respects a human door mat. Find ways to constructively deal with conflict head on and ultimately attain your goals. The inherent tension of conflict pales in comparison to the confidence you will gain by standing your ground.

Learning How to Learn Effectively

What do you do when presented with a new problem that you find daunting or confusing? Most of the time this happens to me it's because there's something I'm unfamiliar with, that lies outside my current wheelhouse.

It's very easy to feel utterly overwhelmed by the sheer scope of a problem or by the fact that the problem seems to be so foreign as to not offer any foot holds or surfaces within reach.

I have found that keeping a very simple check list in mind can keep me from feeling overwhelmed and help avoid "analysis paralysis".

Just try something. Doing literally anything can help un-stick your brain and get past a roadblock.
Write an outline, create a very rough draft.
- Write "throw away" code / prose fully intending to not save any of it. This can be very liberating when you're stuck!
- Turn to novel sources of action oriented inspiration, I have found Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck helpful at times like this.
Narrow or broaden your focus. Are you actually concentrating on the key thing you need to accomplish? Does what you're working on create value for your stake holders?
- Is your problem well defined? Flesh out the problem statement. Even if you're working on something creative, limitations can be incredibly inspirational! (There's a pithy quote about this I can't bring to mind right now :)
- Break off the tiniest piece of the problem. Whatever you're comfortable with. Write the introductory paragraph or a few lines of code, even if it's just the header! Sometimes the simple act of getting started can create a momentum of its own.
- Use tools like outliners or mind maps to work out the general shape of a problem. I've often written an outline and literally cut & pasted that outline into the document or code I need to write as a starting point.
Practice! The process of building a skill is universal across virtually every discipline. In Peak: Secrete from the New Science of Expertise, Robert Pool introduces us to the idea of "deliberate practice". More than just doing a thing over and over, deliberate practice involves being taught by an expert and applying those lessons to the process of practice. While Pool specifically dresses fields like athletics or piano playing, we can apply this idea to all kinds of disciplines. One great example of applying deliberate practice in my field is Katrina Owen's superb exercism.io which poses carefully crafted problems to students and then lets experts critique them and suggest better, more elegant or concise ways of solving them.

Emotional Maturity

I used to pride myself on being a passionate practitioner of my craft. Lately I've been feeling like that's less of an advantage and more of a liability. Avid Grtimm's excellent blog post on this topic had a great deal to do with changing my mind, and I suggest you run out and read it and other posts he's made along those lines post haste. They're worth it.

In point of fact I feel as though I should strive for dispassionate responses to problems and situations, especially those that are emotionally charged.

Give yourself that fraction of a second to take a breath, look at the response that's on the tip of your tongue or keyboard. Ask yourself "Is this really what I want to say? Am I being fair to the person I'm interacting with? Am I really acting in the best interests of both myself and my team?"

This can be incredibly difficult in the heat of the moment. It's a skill I am working very hard on cultivating, and I have achieved some modicum of success here, but my personal evolution in this area is far from complete.

Healthy in Body and Mind

There was a time when the stereotypes about people working in technology were more true than not. Many of us didn't take care of ourselves all that well. Obesity and even poor sanitary habits were not at all uncommon.

Thankfully, I've been a member of the once a day shower club my entire adult life, but my diet and exercise regimen were pretty atrocious for quite a long time.

I'm still not quite as disciplined as I'd like to be where diet is concerned, but I work out every day and have been losing some weight recently. I just can't say enough about how much this one simple change has benefited my mental well being both in terms of mental acuity but also in terms of being able to handle stressful situations in a more productive and professional way.

I've found my Apple Watch to be incredibly helpful in this regard. It tracks many different kinds of work-outs, in addition to tracking my heart rate and calories burned through the day. Its "Activity Rings" display tracks the amount of time I stand as well as how much exercise I get, and I'm a total sucker for gamification, so its achievements system keeps me motivated, pathetic though that may be :)

Exercising regularly is the only way to go. Full stop.

I still have a long way to go before I'm at my ideal weight, but I feel like I'm well and truly on the path to getting there. I start every day mentally refreshed and ready to conquer whatever challenges come my way. A big improvement over falling asleep at my desk :)

Another often overlooked aspect of living a healthy life is getting enough sleep. A lot has been written about how getting enough sleep can be critical in maintaining willpower, self discipline, and self control. I definitely struggle with this, as after getting up early to work out and working a long day it can be tempting to goof off for a while rather than getting to bed.

Something I've found rather helpful in this regard is an app called Autosleep. It uses the data on pulse rate and movement collected from my Apple Watch to give me a really rich report on not just how many hours I slept, but also the quality of sleep and periods during the night when I was awake, whether or not I was aware of it. Those old cheeky after school special slogans had some truth to them - "Because knowing is half the battle!".

Discipline

Personal discipline is at the heart of good decision making and the bedrock of any successful career.

The most effective and productive members of my field utterly regiment their days. What goes where is of less importance than the fact that they do the same thing pretty much every day. Code reviews in the morning, followed by whatever meetings are required for the day, and then another burst of focused productivity before heading home.

To be honest, I have yet to attain this kind of self regimentation, but it's good to have goals to work towards :)

Closing

These are just a few of the things that have been on my mind of late. I wrote them down in the hope that someone else may find them useful. If I have learned anything over the last few years it is that "common sense" is anything but common.

"disce semper quasi victurus vive quasi cras moriturus" - Learn as if you're always going to live; Live as if tomorrow you will die.

I Pushed the "Easy" Button :)

cpatti — Sun, 19 Feb 2017 07:38:00 GMT

A couple of years back, frustrated by the challenges of running my own Wordpress site, I decided to give Pelican a try.

It's what is know as a "static blogging" tool. This means that you treat your blog just like any other code - you write your articles using a text editor, run a command and the article is produced in its final form ready for consumption by web browsers. Maybe run another command, and your article gets uploaded to wherever your blog is actually served.

There are lots of advantages to this model. For one thing, it's simple "static" HTML. That means that the only thing your site has to do is server that content. Unlike tools like Wordpress, which require a fair bit of supporting infrastructure like a database.

Another huge benefit is that you have the ultimate in control. You can modify the results to your heart's content, unconstrained by anyone else's idea of how it should look or work.

However, I'm not a web developer. I can create web pages, but they're ugly, and while I possess more than enough know how to run all of the needed infrastructure and keep it safely locked down, that's not how I choose to spend my very limited free time.

So, I've switched my blog back to Wordpress, but this time I'm letting someone else do the hard work of keeping my site happy and secure. There is this tendency in my industry to build everything we use just because we can. There was a time I felt the same way, but not any more.

These days I'm married and have a social life. My burning enthusiasm for technology hasn't waned a single iota, but now I realize that there's more to living than technology.

Balance is a good thing, as is knowing what's actually important and where to spend your time and energy in the service of adding the most value.

Avdi Grimm, a technologist whose work I admire, wrote a great piece about the buy versus build dilemma recently. After substantial time and effort, he ended up using the same package I'm using to host this blog.

There are other aspects to my choice that feed into my personal situation. I don't have a lot of time to blog these days. I'm not complaining, I have a job I love, a Masonic lodge I'm proud to be a member of, and a marriage that leaves me happier and more fulfilled than I have been my entire life.

So when I post, it's in the "in between" times. I started this post on the subway on my phone, picked it up later on my iPad, and am now finishing it relaxing in our living room with my lovely wife on our Macbook Pro while she reads. Wordpress makes this a breeze. It has a super slick authoring interface that lets me compose right in the browser. It does grammar and spell checking by default, and automatically saves drafts so I don't have to worry about losing my work if my laptop dies or I have to stop for a real life intrusion.

This is not in any way an indictment of Pelican. As a matter of fact, Pelican was a real delight. From a software perspective, its code is clean, readable, and incredibly easy to bend to my own nefarious purposes. When I'd decided it was time to admit that it wasn't working for me, I decided I wanted to build a converter to mirror the posts from my old blog over here on wordpress.com. It was a great side project and I enjoyed building it quite a bit. In addition to the stellar code base, the Pelican community was incredibly helpful, answering all my questions and taking an interest in why their tool wasn't working for me.

Ultimately, my decision came down to recognizing the way I like to work, and where I wanted to put my effort. It's not about Pelican, it's about me.

Face, meet Mr. Concrete wall.

cpatti — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:36:00 GMT

As I mentioned here previously, my last big job search after I got laid off from MIT was decidedly Not Fun...

I ended up taking a job I would normally never take, because I felt utterly backed up against a wall by the economy, increasing competition in the tech sector, and the big skeleton rattling around in my closet - the lack of a degree.

I got turned down by 2 or 3 prospective employers because of this, which is something that hasn't happened to me for a very long time.

So, when I took said job, I steeled myself for the worst and called my old school, Worcester State College.

The result was not at all what I was expecting. I still only need two courses to get my bachelors degree!

I got all the paperwork filled out, jumped through all the necessary hoops and found out that I (still) need a science, and a science with a lab in order to graduate.

That information in hand, I went casting around for a science course I could take. Not easy, many of them required calculus, and those that didn't hab lab periods smack dab in the middle of my work day.

I found one course, Astronomy, that only claimed to require College Algebra and was taught Tuesday and Thursday evenings. So, I leapt.

BIG mistake.

The course started a week and a half ago. Since that time, I have poured ~30 hours and a number of sleepless nights into it, and unfortunately I have to admit that there is eactly zero chance of my passing this course. No amount of effort, lack of sleep, or heroics short of quitting my job (Freaking unlikely since I'm INCREDIBLY happy where I am now. I escaped from Windows enterprise hell and am working for an amazing company, Blue State Digital.) will save me.

I had been expecting the math to kick my ass, but in the end analyais, I could handle that just fine! There wasn't a single bit of algebraic manipulation I couldn't get past with a little work and some Google thrown in for good measure.

It was the formulas! Crazy, INSANE formulas crawling across the page and eating my poor addled brain like some kind of scene out of Dawn of the Dead.

F_ev / F_em = ( G M_v M_e / R_ev² ) / ( G M_m M_e / R_em²)

I have to withdraw from the battlefiend this time - I've lost the skirmish, but I am bound and determined to win the war!

I'll take some time to recover, take a fresh look at the problem, and talk to my academic advisor to see if I can apply some 'life credit' or something, or at the very least not bludgeon myself senseless over my lack of higher math, so I can finish up the silly degree and get on with my life!

So, I landed in China Town!

cpatti — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:15:00 GMT

It has been forever and a day since I posted here. I apologize for the fade, my 4 or 5 readers must be thinking I'd joined the silent masses of bloggers who can't overcome the inertia and fail to post ever again...

As I described in my last post, January was not the best of months for me, and neither was February for that matter. After the layoff, I launched into the job search with zeal and quickly remembered (It's like riding the bike :) the familiar rhythms of the horse and pony show that is any job search.

There was definitely work to be had out there, but much of it was well outside the city, only barely accessible via a bus line that dropped me into the middle of a very pedestrian unfriendly industrial park. Eek. I interviewed a lot, and even had a close call at MIT but in the end analysis they had further cuts and couldn't hire for the job for another month or so which put me out of the running - I have a hungry mortgage to feed after all :)

In the end, a recruiter from a company I'd never heard of before - The Trizetto Group called and said they were very interested.

They're a Windows shop, which initially made me shy away from the idea, but they do a LOT of Perl for their core process automation stuff which I'm reasonably fluent in, and it would be an opportunity for a total technology reboot - not something one gets a lot of chances to do in one's career. So I interviewed there a couple of times and it worked out.

In a lot of ways, it's been really great. They're right across from the Chinatown gate in the picture above, so I can just hop on the bus outside my door for a short ride to Sullivan Station T, then another reasonably short subway ride to the Chinatown stop on the Orange Line. I've been enjoying the chance to explore Chinatown more fully. Where else can you stop off at the market next door before work and grab a can of white fungus drink, or some dried cuttlefish snack? (Why you would want to is a different matter altogether, though I do enjoy the cuttlefish :)

The work has been exciting and challenging as well. I was really, REALLY out of touch with the modern Windows environment. My last real experience working in depth with it was back in the Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 era and it has come a long, LONG way since then.

The hours have been long at times (I joined toward the end of a release cycle and it's a major crunch) but I've been learning a ton about Installshield, .Net, ASP.Net, Powershell, the registry, and in general the vagaries of working in the Windows environment.

I'm not suggesting that everyone should ditch the comfort of their Linux or Mac environments. Heck, if I had my druthers I'd be hacking on one of those for a living.

In my opinion, many geeks (and I was very much guilty of this) have institutionalized the hatred of all things Microsoft, and in so doing have had their heads in the sand for so long that they've failed to notice a truly powerful environment evolving out of the muck.

I'll get off my soapbox now. I guess that's about it - life is generally pretty good. There are times when I wish I could be spending time with my lovely wife or my friends, but I'd rather deal with that than the alternative!

Hopefully I'll have something of substance to say again soon. Stay tuned!