Contentment - My Canary in the Coal Mine

There are only two emotions that for extended periods of time signify that something needs to change. The first is indifference and the second is contentment. Indifference is simple and intuitive. I stop caring, therefor I need to find something I do care about. Contentment is much harder. Why should an emotion about feeling happy and peaceful be bad for us?

Life is long, very long. We have so many chances to do so many great and horrible things during our time here. We must stay hungry. We must stay humble. We must continue. Contentment is the lithium to who we could be. It numbs us. It holds us back with a sweet embrace, clouding our thoughts.

How can you push yourself to be more, when you’re content with who you are?

Passionate But Lost

We’re told as children to focus on our passions. With the assumption that being passionate will help us keep moving when hard gets harder. The climax to this line of thought is an overload of passions! Too many things pulling us this way or that. Should I be a writer, a painter, an industrial designer, a chef? I love them all!

I battled the bombardment of passion throughout my high school years and even into the early years of college. When I was 16, I wanted to be a chef, then when I was 17 I knew I wanted to go into business, but finally at 18 I knew it was Engineering. I was passionate about each of these paths (still am!), but it took something elemental, the essence of a thought to feel what I was supposed to do.

Now, after having a few more years of wisdom I know that passion is cheap. Passion is everywhere and can be fleeting. I’ve learned that passion is an abstraction for something much stronger. The seed that blossoms into our passions is what deserves our attention. Our passions are just symptoms of our systemic need for purpose.

When I stripped away the layers of science, math, and art from my passion I discovered I need to build. Build anything, build something, but I must build. I must create. I never thought of myself as a creative individual, but now I know that is who I’ve always been.

Focus

Focus is something that is so ingrained in the DNA of a startup that it easily gets overlooked and forgotten. When a startup is founded, it usually does one thing. It either does that one thing better than anyone else or it’s completely original and it does it only OK. Next, the startup focuses on this one thing and makes it that much better until it’s a great product (or only product out there).

As the months and years go on, as employees are added, new products emerge. Some of these products will be tweaks of the original to be targeted at a different audience, while others will be ecosystem products that build up the main product, and finally there will be products that stand on their own. This can be the most dangerous period for a new successful company. It’s too easy to look at the numbers and think “what if we added X!” when we should really be asking ourselves what makes our product good? Can it be better? Most importantly, what problem are we trying to solve and is our product the best way to solve it?

As time goes on we forget to ask ourselves these simple questions. We get entrenched in the status quo. There’s a reason major companies get disrupted all the time. They became complacent, iterative, and in the most basic sense, forgot what they were really trying to accomplish. Look at Sony, Microsoft (from 2000-2010), Blackberry, Yahoo, Motorola, etc. This is a cycle that will likely never end, but we can help guard ourself and our companies by asking “What do we do?”

Idea Notebook

A few years ago I began documenting my ideas in a small Moleskine notebook to help expand my thoughts. Tonight after reading some amazing forgotten literature on Letters of Note, I was inspired to read from my idea notebook. This is a feat rarely accomplished as my idea notebook is a place to build thoughts, not relive once grand ideas. Here are two excerpts from my readings.

April 5th, 2010 (two days after the first gen iPad is announced)

“Mobile is still a branch of the desktop. A pure mobile company can’t be huge. Margins are too low, market is too small. Small exits may be possible but anything larger is only possibly on the desktop.”

Under Conclusion

“Mobile cannot be ignored or a small part of a new business that wants to be huge. The marriage of a mobile experience and the desktop is the next business explosion.”

January 7th, 2012

“I have found that new ideas are the most priceless possession in this world. I need to be around people that can give me this. I need to be enlightened with ideas.”

25

I’m 25 years old now. I thought this would be a good time to reflect on what I’m thankful for and what I’m looking forward to. Here are 12 of each for my previous 24 years of life.

Thankful for:

1. Not having to care about work, finances, well being.

2 Being born in these amazing circumstances.

3. Having a few close friends that I love.

4. An amazing father that always pushed me to strive for more.

5. A loving mother that was always there when I failed.

6. Summers to find myself.

7. Touring with Turned up Missing as their merch guy.

8. Growing up in Southern Oregon (Ashland!).

9. Believing in myself.

10. Smarter people than myself.

11. Loving few and fully.

12. The crazy awesome randomness that has made my life.

Looking forward to:

1. Traveling the world.

2. Learning to be more “diplomatic”.

3. Following my intuitions.

4. Meeting great people.

5. Loving life.

6. Growing my cherished relationships.

7. Writing more.

8. Learning about everything.

9. Being more outdoorsy.

10. Building something that has never been built.

11. Being a better person.

12. Myself.

Getting Older

In two weeks I will be turning 25, the age at which I can rent a car (for much cheaper) and my car insurance drops (if I had one), woohoo… Getting older is a hell of a thing. Things that excited you just years before seem trite under the weight of your now greater experience. Major life changing events occur which make it hard to relate to your previous self. In all of this, we adapt to our changing consciousness and look forward to what the future will bring.

In my next year of life, I look forward to traveling the world, meeting new friends, expanding my philosophy, and if I’m lucky, starting my next company.

Last Day

Tomorrow is my last day at Involver Inc. Just eight months ago I moved to San Francisco to start at Involver. Since then, I have met some amazing people, been able to build an awesome product (Conversation Suite!), and gone through one of the most transformative times of my life. I will always be grateful for the opportunities that I was given and hope my future will be as good to me as these past eight months. 

I would like to directly thank the following people for being apart of this journey.

Salman Ansari
Christie Sultemeier
Ian Lesperance
Alex Lobascio
Brian Norton
Adam Olsen
Rehan Iftikhar

Thank You!

Now I start a much needed vacation before my next great challenge.

Backbone.js - I Would Like a Little Model with That Event Please

I really love Backbone.js. It adds a nice structure to a team’s JavaScript development, but gets out of your way when you need to modify something or abstract the responsibility of concern into a new object. What I don’t like is how DOM events have no idea what model they’re associated with.

Here’s a common pattern

https://gist.github.com/2699259

You start by marking each DOM node with the correlating cid of the model so when the event fires, you can load up the model by looking it up from the eventTarget’s data-cid attribute. This annoys me greatly! Why should I have to duplicate the same collection get from eventTarget cid every time I want to have a handler that loads it’s associated model?!

Wouldn’t the following be much better?

https://gist.github.com/2699316

I wrote the following to fix this problem :)

https://gist.github.com/2699186

Now you can programmatically have your event handler functions be called with the associated model and not just the event!

Ok, I Finally Drank the Coffee(Script)

I love JavaScript, like really, really, love JavaScript. I love it’s crazy functional scoping, its split personality when it comes to inheritance, and of course its async nature. JavaScript in many ways is a language that should make no sense at all, but for some unknown reason deep down in my psyche it makes perfect sense. No other language makes me feel as if it has a soul like JavaScript. So when CoffeeScript came out I immediately dismissed it as an attempt to fix something that was already perfect.Many months have passed since CoffeeScript was introduced but I remained a sideline hater. I had many reasons for not liking CoffeeScript, but most were born out of ignorance. Today I decided to leave the comfort of my ignorance and finally give CoffeeScript a chance. I decided porting one of my JavaScript modules over to CoffeeScript would give me the best objective comparison of readability, code quality, and ease of debugging.

Here are the final git repos of my infiniScroll module written in JavaScript and now CoffeeScriptJavaScript: https://github.com/joneath/infiniScroll.js
CoffeeScript: https://github.com/joneath/infiniScroll.coffee

Here’s the short list of issues I had while working on the CoffeeScript version.

1. I felt like I was having to fight CoffeeScript to provide private variable support in my objects closure. Writing a bunch of myvar = undefined, myvar2 = undefine, etc. at the top of my module just so I could get the private scoping correct felt like I was trying to jam my JavaScript patterns into CoffeeScript. I inevitably decided to just attach everything to “this” or “@” and make everything public :(

2. Ruby style automatic returns are awesome but I found that most of my functions do not need to return anything. This left me with a bunch of weirdly compiled code with return statements being abused. I tried forcing a return of undefined to clean up the compiled code but then my I CoffeeScript code had needless return statements everywhere :(

https://gist.github.com/2617303

Gist showing crazy returns in compiled code if empty return statements are left our of CoffeeScript.

https://gist.github.com/2617423

Gist showing crazy empty return statements in CoffeeScript to remove unneeded returns in compiled code.

3. Executing a typeof in a ternary resulted in horribly insane compiled code.

https://gist.github.com/2618020

4. Debugging code sucks! My Jasmine tests tells me error at line #134 so I have to look at the compiled JS file to get context of where that is in my CoffeeScript. This constant loop of Jasmine to JavaScript to CoffeeScript gets old fast! Thankfully this will be fixed soonish with the support for Source Maps in Chrome

Overall, my initial experience with CoffeeScript was positive. The few issues I did run into hopefully arose from my basic understand of CoffeeScript best practices. The only remaining concern I have is for the soul of CoffeeScript. I love JavaScript for its wacky personality and nonsensical quirks. I only hope that in CoffeeScript’s efforts to subdue some of these idiosyncrasies, the soul of JavaScript is not lost.

P.S. Please let me know how wrong I am. I would love to know CoffeeScript best practices!

Technology’s Progress and What it Means for Software Engineering

As engineers, we look forward to every new version of software, and each new iteration of hardware that will run our code that much faster, but what about paradigm shifts? What happens when the world we knew and maybe even grew up with is now the past? We are human, so maybe we can adapt to the changes but how can we compete with a generation that has grown up in this new world?This is not a unique phenomenon, but it certainly occurs faster (and increasingly so!) in the field of Software Engineering. Most Software Engineers currently coming out of school grew up with a PC that was connected to the internet, whereas a decade earlier new grads grew up in a time where the internet was reserved for universities. Look around the field of Web Development and try and spot anyone over 30 who is still an engineer; there are few and far between.

This is caused mostly by the fact that to be competitive as a professional in Web Development, it requires years of compounded experience. The generation of engineers that is currently thriving grew up with the internet, we are the internet generation. We know about HTTP, AJAX, caching, blink tags, and so many other things that build up the foundation of our knowledge. For an outsider to join our ranks, it requires a massive effort and an intuitive sense that the world is changing before it ever does.The most recent shift was the rise of mobile and touch driven interface. Many Web Developers jumped ship as it was proclaimed that mobile would be the next wave of innovation. This is still being argued and will be for some time to come, but this does not interest me. What I do find interesting is the ever increasing barrier to learn mobile development and what it will mean in the future.

In a decade from now, the engineers coming out of school will have grown up with mobile, touch driven devices. They will have been using these devices since their childhoods and will naturally understand them. While we, the internet generation, will always have a warped view about what a interface looks like, or how an app functions. Things that will require us to be consciously mindful, will be woven into the thought processes of our future selves.Of course people can change and some of us will be able to adapt, but will we ever be able to compete outright with our counterparts? This is the plight of being human, but nowhere is it more intensified than for a Software Engineer at the forefront of technology. I look forward to see what the future brings to our industry and how things play out.

At the very least, I will be ready for you future engineers of the world.