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Open Data Hackathon

Today, I participated in the Ann Arbor Open Data Hackathon. It is part of a global event.

We are webifying some interesting local government data, and will need one or two more sessions to get it production-ready. Thanks to Greg Grossmeier for organizing the event!

Giving a Talk About Gearman Tonight

I will be talking about Gearman and Gearman::XS at tonight's Ann Arbor Perl Mongers. Gearman is a very flexible job processing framework that I've been using lately. It will be a very short talk, followed by open, perlish banter.

A2PM: Gearman Talk by Jamie Pitts
10/27/2010 @ 7:00 PM
118 S. Main Street, Ann Arbor
Workantile Exchange conference room (http://workantileexchange.com/)

What Is the Motive?

When I studied, wrote, and performed in stage plays in high school, I learned that every character's action should have a driver. Often this driver would be a direct reaction to an event in the near or distant past, sort of a chip on every character's shoulder that made it all make sense to the audience. One of my acting teachers even once told us: "I'll take one reactor over two actors," which had a big impact on my work at the time.

So watching the The Social Network movie was interesting because I understood a lot about what the entertainment people - the writers, actors, director - were thinking when they produced the move, and I also understood a lot about the phenomenon they were trying to depict. In the mid-90s I actually helped start a college-centric web site with several of my friends, which was when I first started learning html. I saw a lot of parallels between the movie and the experiences I had "back in the day."

But the main thing that struck me as incorrect was the primary motives of the main character. If he was in fact motivated by social acceptance, why did the movie depict him coding while girls were partying all around him?

I think that Mark Zuckerberg actually hit it on the head in this interview clip:

Mr. Zuckerberg said that they "can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things." Actually, people in the entertainment industry can, because they are all about building things themselves (and not just for the power, sex, fame, money, etc).

Perhaps they just don't think that this "build to build" motive would appeal to an audience ostensibly driven by more base urges.

A Plate of Warm Evercookies, Mmmmmmmmm

Samy has done it again, knocking us out of our complacency by way of cleverly evil software.

Installed on a web site, evercookie is like a manic, live-in girlfriend that most guys can't get away from. She latches onto your identity and employs eight different tactics to stick around. Half of her recipes are HTML5, and one spun my head around: "Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out".

Samy is doing us all a service by revealing what is wrong with browsers. I imagine that the browser developers are now going to have to do a lot more more work on identity protection.

Arbcamp 2010 Was Awesome

A2's tech scene is as enthusiastic as it is diverse, and this could be seen at this year's Arbcamp. I met a lot of cool people and increased my intellectual range!

Some of the mini-talks were deeply technical, others were frivolous, and still others were as hippy-dippy as what you'd find at any given barcamp in Berkeley. Much like the teach-ins at the dawn of the internet age, barcamps are about conveying knowledge over open channels.

I can appreciate this because I recently finished John Markoff's What the Doormouse Said. Doormouse is an account of the fruitful collision between tech and social forces in the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Out from all of that energy and confusion emerged what so many of us rely on and enjoy every day: personal computers, the internet, and cyber culture.

Palm's WebOS, The Dark Unicorn

Every time I review this platform I smile at its webby cleverness. And 2.0 will now include the ultra-hot node.js server.

Let Go of Your Advantages

Age-related discrimination is real and it is rampant in the tech industry. While many people get hurt by this sort of discrimination, it is simply the mundane outcome of rational, productivity-maximizing hiring and project assignment decisions in tech teams across the industry. Incentives drive the underlying behavior, and these incentives intersect with the natural short-sightedness, ruthlessness, and selfishness that exists in each of us.

Some of the decision-makers are aware of their discriminatory behavior, others are in denial. Often it is the nature of many engineers (who may find themselves in a leadership position) to also have a somewhat diminished sense of empathy, and this adds to the potential for all sorts of discrimination to occur.

Whatever its origin, this nasty environmental factor is not going to away without some serious social engineering. We can exploit it, or cope with it, depending on where we are in life. We can also try to kill it. And we should, because we are only getting older. If enough people change what they do, we can all collectively benefit.

Sort of like planting trees in our neighborhood.

Ridiculously, I first felt age-related discrimination when I was only 25. More recently, I watched one partner in a rapidly expanding tech company tell an unemployed 55 year old developer (who was asking about what kinds of people the company is looking for) that the company was looking to hire young grads from the university. While this was at an informal gathering of developers, the insensitivity of it was palpable.

But sensitivity does not help a tech company survive. The young programmer possesses a naivete and a drive to learn that is prized, and at a low price. The old programmer possesses an equally valuable experience level, but at a high price. The advantages and disadvantages of each are clear, but short-term answers to cost contraints rule over the long-term benefit of experience.

This is because experience can be learned, and naivete cannot. Usually.

If you are an aging programmer, get into the habit of unlearning. Stop being good at something old, and start being bad at something new. Take on what seems to be a stupid, newfangled technology that does not appear to be a better solution than the older solution (that you happen to know inside and out).

Let go of your advantages. And plant a tree or two.

The Short of It: What Is Modern Perl?

I just used this term in an email and then looked it up. I was hoping to quickly find something brief but found a lot of references to chromatic's book (excellent as it is) and longer presentations. So here is IMHO the best, short description of what modern perl is: