Category Archives: Pals

Week 3012

Pals, , ,

Hell of a week, friends.

Work

I’m writing from midway through a trip to Hyderabad to meet my work colleagues and help out with a DR drill. It’s been great. I’ve been able to get to know some great folks  better, eating amazing food and checking out how they get work done.  The DR test went off much much better than the last one, so our preparation paid off.

Trying to remote into a NY machine from Hyd to do work was way too laggy, so I went full local. An unforeseen benefit of my jumpstart script – I ran it and had all my tools and environment ready to go!

I’ve had a chance to go out for meals and meet people in our cafeteria – breaking naan with someone is a great way to get to know them. The cafeteria here is very impressive, but I’ve also gotten to enjoy a diner like Chutney’s and the crazy spicy food at Sahib Sindh Sultan‘s train car restaurant.

I also got to go out to see Niraval play at Tabula Rasa. Krishnan, the keyboardist, made sure I had a table down front for a bit – until the dancing started. Show was great, I drank and danced and had tons of fun until 4 AM out with the band afterward.

Got to go out and experience Hyd a bit even though mostly I’m just shuttling between the hotel and the office. The city, the traffic, everything is pleasantly nuts. Every single person I’ve met has been kind and helpful and really giving of their time. If anything, it seems like I get irritated at being overpampered.  People want to do everything for you, so it keeps you from just getting what you want. For instance, I want to have some coffee – but I have to ask someone to get it for me and it turns into a 3 person operation where in the end someone also adds milk to my coffee for me. On the other hand, here you can hire a  motorcycle to drive you right through the middle of traffic on a whim. Still haven’t gotten into a tuk-tuk yet, but the motorcycle ride is sweet!

Books

On the plane I finished An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon which was brilliant. The hero is a neuroatypical woman of color trapped aboard a titanic interstellar steampunk ship that’s racially stratified and she’s unraveling a mystery of death and power guided by the journals of her missing mother. Everything about this book was awesome and I was sucked in totally. I completely recommend this one.

Just recently I finished River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey which I wanted to like so much more than I actually did. It’s a western style adventure set in an America where the government seeded the Mississippi river with hippopotamuses. It’s got adventure, intrigue, a non-binary love affair, all sorts of things that sound interesting, but… I just never really loved anyone in the book. They all seemed like they showed up in a bad action movie where a narrator has to hastily explain their unusual quirks, background and skills. Like, there’s a demo expert, a knife fighter and a french master of disguise. And that’s mostly all they are.

Family

I miss them immensely. Every day I get a half hour glimpse back home with a google hangout video chat. Things aren’t going great – it’s been a hell of a week of hell for Sam. She’s  doing her best, but first Max got sick, then Z got sick. Max is also having problems at school. The teachers seem exasperated with him, like they are giving up on him to focus on the other kids because he needs much more individual attention. We really don’t want him to feel like school is a place that isn’t good for him, we want him to get a love of learning – but 2 teachers for 23 kids isn’t working well. We aren’t getting much feedback about how he’s doing or what we need to work on other than a brief conversation at the end of the day.

One of the reasons for weeknotes is to be able to look back on what’s been happening – how things shifted over time. It’s been a hell of a week. We’re creeping right up on the midterm elections and it doesn’t look good.

This week we saw the MAGABomber caught attempting to assassinate leadership of the Democratic party, a white gunman attempt to get into a black church then go kill 2 black people in a grocery store, a gunman kill 8 people in a synagogue and there are no consequences. The republican machine is calling the bombs fake or a false-flag, the synagogue was told by the president they should have had better security, and it’s all insane. The republican machine is proclaiming that only they can save your healthcare and the wave of Democrats needed to paralyze the government from doing more harm seems unlikely to happen. I’m volunteering and donating to the Great Slate, but I hope more people do as well.

I’m terrified that people aren’t taking this seriously enough. That if they aren’t directly confronted with something that impacts their lives, they won’t do something.

Week 3011

Pals, , , , , ,

Getting ready for my first trip to Hyderabad!

Health

Been working on dragon flags and handstand pushups at the gym. Only 3 biking days this week :(. On the other hand, they were all good days. It’s cold enough now to break out the gloves here in NYC, so I’m looking forward to warmer days in Hyd for the next few weeks. I wonder if I can rent a bike there easily?

Family

One of the reasons for that: I got to take Max Lazer to go see Tinga Tinga. He got to see it, I just got to be part of the parental escort through the subways to Times Square. He handled it great, but it was amazing to see the way the teachers handle 22 kindergartners getting through the subway system.

Z is teething and it’s so tough on her. I hope it ends soon. On the other hand, I managed to get both kids to sleep in the same room at the same time on Wednesday and Thursday we got Z to sleep the whole night through!

My Kobo broke and I sent it off to be replaced, but I must have an e-reader for the trip so I am now the owner of a Kindle Paperwhite as well. As someone who’s now owned and used a Nook, Kobo and Kindle, I’ll write up my take on it. Should have some time on the 16 hours or so of flight time!

Code

Been helping folks at work learn some more advanced Python. I get excited every time I talk about list or dictionary comprehensions because they were a real light when I was learning python in the beginning.

You often need to transform data structures and the first way is usually to just iterate a list, construct new instances of something else, then pop them into a list of new things.

Say you have a list of cool coders you want to talk about.

 


from collections import namedtuple
Coder = namedtuple('Person', 'name login url')
cool_coders = [Coder(name="Grace Hopper", login="ghopper", url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper"),
Coder(name="Ada Lovelace", login="ladyada", url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace"),
Coder(name="Jenn Schiffer", login="jennmoney", url="https://jennmoney.biz/"),
Coder(name="Nina Zharenko", login="nnja", url="https://www.nnja.io/"),
]

intro = "Here's a list of some cool coders and more you can learn about them: "

Maybe you want to produce a markdown sentence listing them.

coder_markup = []
for programmer in cool_coders:
    coder_markup.append( "[{}]({})".format(programmer.name, programmer.url) )
markup = intro + ", ".join(coder_markup)

Sure, that could be more complicated and have more changes or filtering that needs to be done. But what’s nice about a comprehension is that it helps cut down boilerplate and it makes things clearer.

coder_markup2 = ["[{}]({})".format(coder.name, coder.url) for coder in cool_coders]
markup = intro + ", ".join(coder_markup2)

And of course, if we were on python 3.6 we could make that even smaller by just using fstrings.

I’ve been using tmux pretty heavily, but now I get annoyed that on reboot I have to rebuild all of my workspaces. So now I’ve installed tmuxinator. It should be useful for setting up project/workspaces and then firing them up after a reboot.

Of course – I don’t just install tmuxinator. I set it so that it can auto-install on any account I’ve got with my jumpstart script.  If you know any cool tricks or experiences you want to share about either, I’m eager to learn.

 

Week 3010

Music, Pals, Video, , ,

Another combo because I’m late!

Here’s the The Owl from I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness

It’s rainy and dark and suddenly fall.

More riding in the rain.  Had to skip a day because I felt horrrrrible after the happy hour Wednesday night.

Sleeping poorly is the rule in our house as we struggle to figure out how to get Max Lazer and Queen Z to bed in the same room at a reasonable hour. It takes forever.  We think some of Max’s trouble in kindergarten is that he just can’t get good sleep at home anymore. So he goes in tired and can’t be his best.

I’ve got my visa for the Hyderabad Trip coming up and while I’m excited to go visit India I think my first trip will be almost entirely business – there’s a DR test that weekend so I’ll probably spend the whole trip in just the one city.

Going to our building’s yearly meeting for the first time in a while as NOT a board member. WOO!

Got to work on competitor pricing and take friends out to lunch to discuss. Also got to spend time with our R&D project plans for 2019.

 

 

Week 3009

Pals

VERY interested in trying to make a MagicMirror.

But I want to see if I can simulate it first before I buy a bunch of stuff to have around the house. So I’m trying to figure out how to emulate a  raspberry pi on Ubuntu and its a bit of a nightmare.

On the other hand I finally figured out how to remote into work on my linux laptop. Just for future reference:

  • downgrade to Citrix Receiver 13.8 – this gets you at least to a point where you just get a certificate error.
  • cd  /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore
  • sudo mv cacerts cacerts.old
  • sudo ln –s /etc/ssl/certs cacerts

This is very stupid, but hey. At least I can remote in now!

I only got in 4 days of biking because I needed to go to a conference with Max Lazer’s teachers. They are working hard to find the best ways to help him.

So this was Thursday’s office:

Week 3008

Music, Pals, Python, Software, , ,

Welp, I’m getting this in a bit late, so I’ll also put in some Music Monday.

But since the world is a pit, you get Cotton Eye Joe Gregorian Chant Nightcore Hardcore Dubstep remix. Do better this week, world! The Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh were a reminder of how little women’s pain matters. The guy is also clearly lying.

Code

My team won one of the 2nd place slots in the Hackathon as “Most Complete Hack”! We are talking about bringing it through to complete prod deployment.

Read up on Conflict Free Replicated Data Types which are a really interesting way to do mergable data structures. Underlies lots of interesting stuff like Redis.

Experimented with Mozilla’s Configman – the docs are NOT good enough, because they actually have a great drop in replacement for the standard ArgumentParser in there.

Bike

Got in all but 1 day last week. Rode in the rain 2 days! The first convinced me that I need to either own rainproof pants or just plan on riding in shorts in the rain. I bought a pair of Showers Pass transit pants and they worked great on Friday. Also got to randomly ride in with my buddy Lance again and reminded how nice that is.

Family

Zeebus is really smart and understands a lot of what we say! She picks things up and puts them where you ask, she understands that we need sleep, she’s got a lot going on upstairs.

She puts on Max’s bike helmet to let us know she wants to go riding!

When she slapped Sam hard in the face she realized she had hurt her- then Z gave her a big hug and patted her. That’s what Max does when he plays too rough with her!

Max and I did a really good hike together. We went a little crazy and climbed up next to a little waterfall and did some semi-safe bouldering nearby.  Max and I actually climbed way up a small cliff and got to the top. We also found a cool Puffball mushroom. But we didn’t eat it because we didn’t know how to tell if it was poisonous or not. (now we know and we’ll eat it next time!)

Week 3007

Pals, , , ,

I’m writing this one bushed after 24 hours at the company hackathon. Most of our developers are in HYD, so our hackathon starts at 10:30pm Friday and ends 10:30pm Saturday.

Right now we are all done with our deck, the app is finished, we’ve polished everything we can and we don’t want to touch anything in case we break it. So it’s a strange calm.

Another 60 miles on the bike this week and feeling fine. In the gym, we’re working on handstands. Zelda is growing smarter every day, Max suddenly started saying his “R”s like an American instead of a Brit.

I gave Sam a day to travel to Coney Island with Jeremy Fox on friday while I watched Z. Only fair because I’m spending 24 hours away from them.

Speaking of Jeremy, we got to go out and drink and play nerd games and it was SO MUCH FUN. Got to introduce him to another friend who’s out in LA, Dewitt. Hope they actually meet up and hit it off.

Week 3006

Pals, Python, , , , , , ,

Work

We are  having a hackathon! I’m excited.  Its my first since Music Hack Day NYC. We’re going to try out Amazon Lex, Lambda, and some containers.

Some folks are already using my code for working with ELK, so that’s nice.

I’ve been focusing around automating my testing and such, and I really am centering around just learning to write better makefiles. Make is installed everywhere, like vim and other things I like. It just works. And makefiles do almost everything you want. The downside is that it is an ugly syntax. The upside is that if you learn one ugly syntax, you don’t need to learn everything about Rake, Yarn, etc.

Around the web

Best Practices for Staging Environments – this article by the excellent Alice Goldfuss came up at work as we wrestle with big calcs and datasets for our clients.

Why you hate Contemporary Architecture – This is grrrreat. One little note for the computer nerds. If you’ve heard of the Gang of 4 Design Patterns book, read the article and come back. The Design Patterns book was based in part on Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” which is a great guide to things that seem to work in architecture.

I discovered two things that similar to a POC I was working on (voracious-etl)

  • Datasette provides a readonly JSON api for any SQLite DB.
  • Dataset provides an ORM for any CSV or JSON file

The plugin system at the core of pytest is a library: Pluggy. I like that and I might use it earlier.

A good podcast: Flash Forward. Explores a new future every week. The most recent focuses on fungal enslavement, which I love. If you like that one, I highly recommend the mindblowing Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer or Sensation by Nick Mamatas

 

 

Politics

None of the big progressive candidates made it in the democratic primaries. Cuomo still won. Tish won, which is OK. However, I see that  some progressive candidates made it through.

I hope they can do some real work and win in November. I’ll be calling and doing work to support them.  I long for a day when I can start moaning about free speech vs hate speech and trying to reign in some liberal excesses. However, right now, the work has to get done.

I also note that children are still in cages and parents are getting deported without hearings, but it isn’t in the headlines anymore. I’m still pissed about it. I’m still pissed that the probable governor of NY seems to only work for progressive issues when pushed and won’t use his clemency powers.

Exercise

I biked around 37 miles this week! Had to take off Monday and Tuesday due to rain and being pretty sick. But otherwise, I rode in. Got to stop on Christie street and help a guy who’d been knocked down by a cab.

Worked to a slightly lower pistol squat and my butt hurts sooo bad. Also, my dragon flag work is getting better. I can kind of hold it.

I started doing partial handstand pushups against the wall and they feel pretty good. I can do 5 at a time part way down and up. Next I’ll try lower and lower, then try freestanding ones.

 

Week 3005

Pals,

Family

First day of Kindergarten for Max Lazer! It didn’t go great.

Even though we had sent over emails with his IEP, the teachers hadn’t read the documentation for the first day of school. They are very nice, but it was a tough transition day for him. After you drop off kids, all the parents get herded out to the auditorium to get welcomed to the school. I saw his teacher later coming down the aisle to talk to an assistant principal and I knew it was going to be for us. It was. I ended up working from the hallway after calming things down in the classroom. By the end of the day, everything was fine, but what a start. Second and third days were better. I don’t see him participating much yet, so I’m worried that he won’t be getting what he needs.

A young iggy peck makes buildings

These are great buildings – but the rest of the kids are writing things.

I believe he is learning and exploring and thinking, but I’m also worried that he’s dominating the teachers. Do they have the bandwidth to deal with his will and the other children?

Bike

Not much biking! Not because I got hit by a car last week, because it was the first day of kindergarten for Max and there was labor day off of work. Only 24 miles this week.

Z-Ray is now trying to teach herself to ride a scooter. SLOW DOWN GIRL. You just learned how to walk!

Work

Still adjusting from my default setting of an internal technology advocate for clients to a relationship manager. My job isn’t just to make clients happy, it’s to help them understand and prioritize what they want. I’m a few months in and still navigating where is support vs building.  It’s a lot different from being an internal technology team and I often have to adjust my headspace.

Also, I internally released a little tool for working with ELK searches directly in Python. I’ll work on seeing if we can accelerate our open source program so that I can release it out in the world.

I’m also now part of the group leading some changes in how we handle our python stack and our api libraries, a subject very dear to my nerdy heart.