Monthly Archives: September 2018

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.