Miscellaneous

Writing software is an outlet for artistic expression to many people, myself included. For me, solving problems involves a good deal of creativity not only in the actual solution but also in the manipulating several moving parts in order to fit the solution into an existing code-base. Combining this creative outlet with a beautiful language, such as Python results in some developers writing code that holds an masterpiece-level of beauty to them, to the untrained eye one might look at a class and think nothing of it, but to the author of that code, it might represent a substantial amount of work and personal investment.

Like art, sometimes the beauty is entirely subjective. there has been times where I've been immensely pleased with one of my creations, only to turn to wholly unimpressed Dave. Managing or working with any team of highly motivated, passionate and creative developers presents this problem, as a group: how can you objectively judge code while preserving the sense of ownership by the author?

A few weekends ago ET and I had some engagement photos taken, I'm told this is normal, by the husband-and-wife team from Tibidabo Photography, Bob and Becky. The duo met us at one of my favorite spots in San Francisco: Duboce Ave and Buena Vista Ave East after which we ran around in Buena Vista Park taking a few shots, then down to Baker Beach. As much as I hate having my picture taken, they did a wonderful job and grabbed some really stellar shots.

And it's taken an eternity to graduate from "adorable peach fuzz" to "smudge of dirt" status, so leave me alone.

I figure by the time it grows long enough to where I stop getting carded for alcohol, my hair will be gray, thus defeating the purpose.

My New Year's resolution this year was incredibly generic insofar that I merely wanted to "write more." No qualifications for what kind of writing that entailed, I simply want to become a better writer (or blogger), with technical subjects in particular I'd like to get better at writing in a fashion that is interesting, parse-able by novices and has sufficient "depth" to interest more technical readers. I'm not sure if I can define what being a "better writer" will entail or how I'll know when I'm there, so for now I'm just trying to write good content. Considering my last post didn't even pretend to ride the fence between opinionated-article and full-on rant, I think it's safe to say that in order to accomplish my goal I need more venues for writing and more topics to write about.

One of those venues, which I've linked to before is the Apture Blog; I have written for the company blog already this year and chances are I will have another few posts go up as we tackle some of the technical challenges we're currently facing (you can view my posts here). Unfortunately there's only so many articles I can write for the Apture Blog without giving away any confidential information or turning it completely into a technical blog (hint: it's not).

Looking around at a few of the open source communities that I'm involved in, two groups stick out: Eventlet and Hudson. Eventlet already has a blog and I'm certain my usage of Eventlet is not steady enough to warrant any kind of authoritative posts on the subject. The other, Hudson, is something I've used on a daily basis for almost a year and a half. Not only that, I run the @hudsonci twitter account and founded the #Hudson channel on Freenode, I've also tried my hand at developing some plugins for Hudson (which is written in Java). Suffice to say, I'm quite the little Hudson cheerleader.

When I floated the idea of an "official" blog for Hudson, which I would help drive, to Kohsuke and some other "core" developers of Hudson, the idea was well received and I set off getting Drupal configured, writing some preliminary content and getting ready for a launch of Continuous Blog. While my writing contributions thus far to Continuous Blog have been sparse, I've gotten to play the delightful role of Editor which is an entirely different experience unto itself.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops, I might end up writing for a few other blogs depending on interest and time, but for now my shenanigans can be found on:

• unethical blogger (duh)
• Continuous Blog
• The Apture Blog

One of my most favorite sites on the internet, reddit, took some downtime this evening while doing some infrastructure (both hardware and software) upgrades. On their down-page, the reddit team invited everybody to join the #redditdowntime channel on the Freenode network, ostensibly to help users pass the time waiting for their pics and IAMAs to come back online.

Shortly after reddit started their scheduled outage, I joined the channel to pass the time while I debated what I should do with my evening. Within minutes the channel was flooded with a number of users, varying between spouting reddit memes in caps. link-spamming or engaging in casual chit-chat. I complained to one of the ops and fairly well-known-to-redditors employee: jedberg about the lack of moderation and he nearly instantly gave me +o (ops) in the channel. Not one to take my ops duty lightly, I started kicking spammers, warning habitual caps-lock users and tried to keep things generally civil through the deluge of messages consuming the channel.

Towards the end of the scheduled outage, some automated link-spamming started to appear and once it started it triggered more and more link-spamming. Clearly whatever was behind the bit.ly link was responsible for the self-propagating nature of the spamming. While the other moderators and myself tried to keep up with banning people I used wget to fetch the destination of the clearly malicious bit.ly URL to determine what we were dealing with.

Yesterday I was pointed to this post on ReadWriteWeb, suggesting that Facebook should acquire Apture next. Being an Apture employee, I would like to take some time to fuel the rumormill with these COMPLETELY TRUE (read: false) rumors:

Unsubstantiated Rumor #1:

A shadowy figure in a black Northface jacket has been spotted lingering around 539 Bryant St in San Francisco

Unsubstantiated Rumor #2:

Apture's CTO is seen regularly in Palo Alto

Unsubstantiated Rumor #3:

Apture employees were issued company Adidas sandals last December

Unsubstantiated Rumor #4:

Mark Zuckerberg and Tristan Harris talk regularly at meetings of the Bay Area Strip-Parcheesi Club in Redwood City

Unsubstantiated Rumor #5:

Apture is hiring aggressively in order to bump up their acquisition price